WHAT’S THE POINT?
I’ve known the truth of that statement for years. But I had a poignant view of its truth this past week.
I was in court on a family law matter. Courtrooms are great barometers of where we as a society are coming from, and to a lesser degree, where we are headed. The family courts however, are the reality people are living. They are harsh snapshots of what our society is really like.
Family court deals with the masses, the “great unwashed” as some would call them. In seeking to bring order to lives that are wildly out of control, trying to give maturity to the immature, and a sense of responsibility to the careless, the courts are faced with the tremendously difficult task of providing direction to people, but not controlling their lives.
Sitting in court watching as a 15-year-old girl fights with her 20-year-old ex-boyfriend over their 18-month-old child, I had many thoughts. Why wasn’t he arrested for statutory rape? Where were her parents? How can that child raise a child? How common is this?
In this case, the father — who lived with his mother, was working a job and going to school to become a dental hygienist — wanted to continue his primary custody of the baby. The baby’s mother, who has to attend summer school because she missed too many classes during the year, wanted to know when she would be allowed to borrow the baby.
Yes, I wrote that correctly, she wanted to borrow her own child. At 15, she was too young to understand what her legal rights were, yet she was old enough to take on a lifetime of responsibility. She was too ignorant at 15 to see the heavy burden she had taken upon herself, but then again she was only in seventh grade, with a falling attendance rate.
The judge in the matter was patient, kind, and doing her best to direct this young woman towards school. But even under the best of circumstances, she would be an adult before she could graduate high school, which didn’t look likely.
The obvious question is where was her mother in all of this? She was busy with her own children, the youngest of which was younger than the 18-month-old baby of the 15-year-old. She had no time to give to this new mother. No parenting skills to pass on, no focused love and attention. She was trying to survive herself in an overwhelming life.
This cycle of poverty and babies will continue in that family for at least another generation, if not two or three. There are those who might say they are rich in their love for each other. “Family is all that matters,” is a common refrain, particularly among those who are running for office.
Playing to the family is a politician’s safe harbor. No candidate wants to be the one who gets up on a podium and says, “We need fewer people, so stop having babies” or “we need a better educated workforce so focus your efforts on one or two children, not six or eight.” Kissing babies is a rite of passage for politicians. Or least it used to be. These days, between the paranoia about germs, and child sexual abuse, maybe kissing them is out, but the emotional appeal to children and family is still a useful card.
Kids make for cute pictures, and in rare families, happy times. Most of the time they are a financial drag on the individual parents. They are an anchor that weighs down careers, educations and advancement.
That is the unspoken reason that organizations such as the Mormon and Catholic churches, and politicians like to take stands against contraception and abortion, and in favor of “life.” The masses are easily controlled when they are tired, poor and uneducated.
There is a reason the Catholic church has historically kept its priests single and seemingly childless. It frees them up to work for the church, putting in long hours raising money and building churches to get larger groups of people to donate more money. What are they donating money for? To help the poor, of which there is a constantly renewing source so long as children are born.
Why do politicians like large families? Voters are easily controlled when they are trying to make ends meet. They don’t have the time to learn what really is being written into law. They can’t focus on the fact that their rights are being quickly stripped away.
Ask any family with a couple of kids how busy they are. If they are middle class there is a constant stream of birthday parties, soccer practices, plays, and scouting events which keep mom and dad frantic, let alone just keeping a roof over their heads. If they are lower class, odds are that dad has left them, and mom is working two jobs to keep food on the table and she doesn’t have the time, and probably not the education, nor the inclination to read a 50-page voter pamphlet after a hard day of work.
The war on poverty is a mirage. If we really wanted to end poverty, we’d be in favor of contraception. The bogus argument on abstinence is a waste of time for a teenag-er, and we have the underage birth rate to prove it. To break the poverty cycle, we’d teach classes, starting at age 10, on sex education, family planning, building a career and how to avoid the poverty trap.
But that is not in the interests of the churches, the government or big corporate America. They need a willing populace, ready to do what they are told, so they can get it over with, and then get to their kids’recital.
Or to court, to hear who will raise their grandchildren. (David Pisarra is a lawyer in the Santa Monica firm of Pisarra & Grist. He welcomes your questions and comments. He or (310) 664-9969.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 16, 2006. Read the original PDF.