Yesterday’s post reminded me of a conversation I had with a young lady in my high school classes my second year of teaching (at a local Christian school). She declared that she didn’t ever want to have children because it would keep her from becoming who she really was. I wrote this poem after that conversation. It’s obviously not about people who can’t have children — that’s from God — but about those who can but refuse, for selfish reasons.

Of Her Who Desired No Children

Before my years could multiply,
I chose to make their center me;
I saw I might be hindered by
My own fertility.

I felt the rise within me and
I knew I was a spring, and yet
I wished to feel no demand
From what I might beget.

I stopped the flow; I’d be a spring
Without it. Now I weep because
I didn’t know I killed the thing
That made me what I was.

I cannot, now my years have fled,
Say without tears, to any man,
That I have been a riverbed|
Where water never ran.

A fountain, lying deep in dust;
A channel by no current laved;
A ground that gives no harvest, just
The barrenness I’d craved.

For years I kept me blind, nor knew
What I had missed, or (what was worse)
That I had fallen victim to
My own eternal curse.

–Wes Callihan
May 1986

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=495495&in_page_id=1879

http://www.scholatutorials.org/thanksgivingamerica.html

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

My guess is that it has a great deal to do with the difference with countries where there is a greater degree of Christian residue, and also with the difference between the degree of statism or socialism (government reliance) in countries. Look up the statistics sometime on the difference between the rates of charity giving in Democrats vs Republicans, blue states vs red states. Political liberals of the modern stripe who holler about how apathetic conservatives are toward the poor, etc. themselves give FAR less than conservatives. Some of the very poorest but politically conservative states in our Union, like Mississippi, have far higher rates of charitable donation than some of the richest and most liberal states like Massachussetts.

I think all that suggests a possible answer to why Americans are willing to donate more for a Radiohead album than Europeans. They have lost more of the sense of individual responsibility and are far more willing to just take what they can get without a corresponding willingness to see the responsibility they owe to the source of the blessings they receive.

What is the cultural significance of the fact that 40% of Americans who downloaded Radiohead’s latest album paid for it, averaging about $8, whereas 36% of non-Americans who downloaded it paid, but averaging only about $4? A statistical margin of error might account for the different in percentage of pay-ers, but not the difference in price.

I think I can guess.