Family Size

When I couldn’t sleep at night as a kid, I’d count aunts and uncles rather than sheep. My mother’s Italian family (shown above) was large enough so that I was rarely awake long enough to countdown my father’s sparser Irish crew. At the death of my grandmother Pace (pronounced Pa-che) at the age of 69 in 1957, she left 29 grandchildren. Now when I can’t sleep, I count cousins.
We had a reunion of many of the surviving cousins last week and though big families have fallen far out of fashion these days, the general consensus at the reunion was that we were all happy to have grown up as part of such an extensive brood. At least no one was heard to say aloud, I wish there were fewer of us. Everyone seemed pleased to have memories of big family gatherings, filled with homemade music and food…and like the reunion itself, homemade noise. We were, are, and always will be a very loud group. That comes from trying to get your voice heard over so many others. I confess to hearing only about 30% of what long-lost relatives had to say to me at the reunion. If anyone had said, “You know, I always really hated your guts,” I most likely would’ve just nodded and smiled out of pure ignorance. No matter. The coming together was about sheer nostalgia for a shared past with noisy joy at being together once more to say hello rather than goodbye to family members.  
With all that warm and fuzzy for big family percolating inside me when I got home, I wasn't the best audience for Bill Maher’s interview with Alan Weisman, author of Countdown, a book about the threat of unchecked population growth on human existence. In the brief clip below, Weisman responds to Maher's question as to whether he found any countries among the 20 he visited in researching his book that were going against the global grain and actually treating population control effectively. For me, the answer was shocking.


Iran and Italy! Go figure. I won't even touch Iran...too much about that place is beyond my comprehension. But I do know more than a little about Italy...and to suddenly learn, as Weisman puts it, that Italy has “one of the lowest birth rates on the planet” is a little like waking up to find that Chinese drivers have taken over NASCAR. Talk about killing a stereotype. Families full of children is as Italian as pasta e fagiole…yet now it's not. And not only is the fact itself amazing, but the fact behind the fact is just as amazing. The Italians didn't get here by way of some Mussolini-like dictate that all the trains run on time...or in this case all the menstrual cycles. They got here because Italian women are among the most educated in the world, and educated women are less likely to have multiples of children.
Although, as Weisman and Maher mention, the US does not make the honor roll of countries doing something positive about population explosion, in The New York Times Nicholas Kristoff points out a silver lining:

Teenage birthrates have plunged by 52 percent since 1991 — one of America’s great social policy successes, coming even as inequality and family breakdown have worsened. The steady drop in teenage births accelerated greatly beginning in 2009, when MTV began airing “16 and Pregnant.”

How exceptional. While Iranians and Italians are eliminating unwanted births by educating their women, we in the US are doing it through television. Whatever works, I guess…and in a manner of speaking one could call "16 and Pregnant" an educational program for teenage women, and because it doesn’t cost taxpayers a dime no one from the Tea Party has taken to the streets to stop it…yet. I say yet, because you don’t have to dig too deep into the modern conservative mind before you hit utter darkness. Writing on the writing on population explosion in The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert dons a miner's helmet to probe the upside-down thinking of one Jonathan Last from The Weekly Standard, that jingle jangle journal of jingoism that helped bring on the Iraq War. Of the justly named Last, Kolbert writes:  

Among the problems he attributes to low fertility rates is that they tend to make countries reluctant to fight wars. Among the solutions he advocates is cutting back on higher education, thereby reducing its depressing influence on American fertility.

That’s right. The American rightwing fears that more education will make women less inclined to give birth to new recruits for foreign policy adventures. As appalling as I find this, it does clear up a mystery that’s been plaguing me for years. That is, why are conservatives so opposed to birth control when it could serve their racial fantasies of maintaining a white majority? I’ve long felt that the way Planned Parenthood can get Republicans off its back is by changing its name to Planned Voter Suppression. What Republican wouldn’t support contributing millions to an organization that could promise to lower future numbers of black and brown voters?
Now I know the answer. Though birth control would be a pretty good boost to the American Right’s wet dream of curtailing non-white population growth, the heavy thinkers among the Right realize two disturbing outcomes. The first is that the spread of birth control among America’s lower classes would seriously deplete the nation’s cannon fodder reserve. The second is that the spread of birth control would affect the white population at least as proportionally as it affects minorities. Thus, it’s a wash.
Of those nine uncles of mine in that picture up top, seven served in the US military during World War II and/or Korea. As civilians, all nine bought homes, raised families, worked hard…as did their sisters and their families. I can’t imagine growing up in a family where my grandparents subscribed to the "replace yourself” strategy of family planning and there were only two of them. But we were all lucky back then. There was room and food and opportunity for all. That’s not so any longer…and is becoming dramatically less so with every passing year.

"One of Countdown’s central points is that if human beings don’t reduce the global fertility rate, Mother Nature will impose her own solution. And it won’t be pretty. 'The reason why I ultimately focused on population was that this is the one thing that we already know how to do,' Weisman says. 'We’re not very good at suddenly replacing all of our carbon-based energy with zero-emission energy.'” --Charlie Smith

I love that family picture…have so all my life and will love it till the day I die. But pictures like that should become like cave drawings…artifacts of an ancient time. Precious artifacts, to be sure, but artifacts nonetheless.