P. A. Ritzer, Volume 24
In light of Elon Musk throwing his highly influential weight into exposing the Underpopulation crisis, after decades of the Overpopulation propaganda, I thought, in early 2024, that I might republish here my article, “The War on Women and Population Control,” from my P. A. Ritzer blog of 10 January 2013. But this introduction to that re-publication has grown, over the ensuing months, into its own substantial article, “The Big Lie of Overpopulation and the Fear that Drives It.” This is the first of several parts of that article available to all. The entire article is available here for those with paid subscriptions. The republication of “The War on Women and Population Control” instead preceded all of it and can be found here.
Overpopulation propaganda was essential to the social-political atmosphere in which I grew up in the 1960s and 70s. It was a given. And yet I grew up in a family of nine, mother and father and seven children. Large families were not unusual in the time and place in which I grew up, and so I felt a certain tension between the way in which I was being raised and the popular attitude among the elite, and all those who would control and those influenced by them, concerning population growth, large families, contraception, and the culture of death in general. A few memories illustrate that tension.
I remember my father showing us at the dinner table, around which our family gathered nightly, a picture of a postage stamp that was supposed to depict the ideal American family with a mother and a father and a daughter and a son. And my dad pointed out to us—in accordance with his well-informed prescience—that there were people who thought that families should only have two children, and that there were some people who wanted to make it against the law to have more than two children. Then he asked us to look around and imagine trying to choose which five of us should not be there. In less than a decade, the Chinese Communist Party would inflict the One-Child Policy—which included arresting pregnant women and forcibly aborting their babies and sterilizing the mothers—on the people of China. (Even Democrats today might object to such atrocities because these were “wanted” babies and therefore considered by them to be worthy to live.) And there were far too many people in the West who saw merit in that barbarity.
And my father impressed on us that we had a responsibility to represent the family well. Of course, as sinners we all failed in that regard to one degree or another. One time in particular we did so en masse. We were on vacation “up north” at a cabin at a resort and had gone into town for Mass. Afterward Mom and Dad had to run some errand. I do not remember if they took my youngest sister with them or not. But that would have left six or seven of us, the oldest of whom would have been ten or eleven or so, in the car. Well, pandemonium ensued. Of course there was no excuse, but I think someone got a nosebleed, which set off someone else, then some argued, and then a joker started to yell or sing over the commotion. Needless to say, there was no air conditioning in the car, so windows were open. The result was that, on our first day at the cabin, the younger kids had to sit on chairs for fifteen minutes, and we older kids had to sit on chairs for one hour. In our sentencing, Dad made it very clear that many people were opposed to large families and that we had a responsibility to represent large families well or it just fed and justified their bigotry.
“Yes, seven kids, and at least you won’t have to worry about one of our kids stabbing you in a dark alley.”
Another time, on another vacation in a distant state, we stopped at a restaurant (a rare occasion) for breakfast. On our way out of the restaurant, a woman was pointing at each of us in turn as she counted. My middle sister, thirteen years old or so, said to her without any attempt to hide her disgust at the woman’s blatant rudeness, “Seven, count them, seven.” I believe it was on an earlier trip east, when Dad was in the office of the campground where we were going to pitch camp, that the woman in the office was carrying on enough about the size of our family that my father finally said, “Yes, seven kids, and at least you won’t have to worry about one of our kids stabbing you in a dark alley.” As my older sister pointed out, Dad had driven all day and still had to set up a tent and camp. She concluded, “The man was a saint.”
Both my parents were saints through it all in a way that children cannot appreciate until they themselves don the mantle of parenthood. On what basis can such a claim be made? Well—with the caveat that in this life one cannot, except by “special revelation,” be certain of being in a state of grace—on no less than the words of Jesus throughout the gospels. In Matthew 25, in particular, Jesus explicitly states criteria by which people will enter into eternal life: those who feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, visit the sick, and visit prisoners. Parents like mine fulfilled those requirements, in one way or another, regularly. Add the spiritual works of mercy of counseling the doubtful, instructing the ignorant, admonishing the sinner, comforting the sorrowful, forgiving injuries, bearing wrongs patiently, and praying for the living and the dead, and parenting emerges as one of the great opportunities to fulfill the Christian obligations of sainthood.
Those saints had determined that as a family we were going to take vacations and travel and see our country. We could not manage our first vacation until I was eight or nine years old. For a few years we took a week at a cabin up north. Then my folks decided that we would venture farther, and the one way we could do so was to camp. Thus did we take local trips here and there, and now and then a longer trip, like the time we traveled around Lake Superior from east to west. In the established routine, we would arrive at the campground, secure a campsite, buy firewood, unload the car, set up the screen tent over the picnic table so my mother could immediately begin cooking our supper (Dinty Moore beef stew being a favorite) over the gas stove, while the rest of us set up the tent and laid out the sleeping bags. After supper, we would sit around the campfire and roast marshmallows and visit.
And all of this travel was accomplished in a station wagon with a box on top that my father had masterfully designed and constructed, as was his custom, to hold the camping equipment and baggage. My own sons were made familiar with the travel conditions of those days when they complained to me on one of our trips, “Dad, he’s on my side.” You may have anticipated that my response failed to convey the sympathy they believed warranted. “Guys,” said I, “imagine a kid between you, three behind you, and one up here with Mom and me. That’s how we used to travel. So don’t tell me about sides.” And after a pause, I could add, “And your mother’s family had four more than we did. Imagine that.”
Meals are pregnant affairs for large families where and when all gather together to share in the sustenance provided by God and the work of human hands and then share themselves in conversation with each other.
On the most memorable camping trip in the early 1970s, we set out for Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, with each of us picking a place we would like to visit on the way. I was at that time maybe twelve years old or so and enamored of the Green Bay Packers, so the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio was my choice. Still, I remember being most impressed by Washington, D. C. Besides these choices, there were Philadelphia, the Cumberland Gap, Cape Hatteras, and others now forgotten. For this trip we had splurged and reserved an above-ground, fold-out camper trailer that was supposed to sleep eight but would accommodate our nine. When the rental company rented our reserved camper to someone else and sent my dad home with a six-sleeper, my mother’s understandable indignation was not to be contained. In the telephone call to the camper rental she uttered words ever since cemented in family lore and passed down through family tradition to the present day, “I am just livid, livid with justifiable anger.” (Drawing on that lore a few years later, one of my sisters, in a rather warm exchange with my mother during the teenage years, rejoined, “Are you vivid, Mom? Are you vivid?”) And there lingers some vague memory of my dad recognizing providence, as was his wont, in the questionable substitution, pointing out some way in which the six-sleeper might have even had an advantage over the eight-sleeper, though he probably did so out of earshot of my mother. My mother, for her part, as mothers of large families inevitably do, ended up soldiering on and making the most of it.
Recalling above our breakfast in the restaurant and our camp suppers brings to mind how we kids just took food for granted. I marvel now, as a parent, how our parents provided so much food, good food, three times a day. And it was true for all large families I knew. We all ate, and ate well, even though none of our families was wealthy. My mother produced a seemingly endless variety of presentations of beef, pork, turkey, chicken, fish, potatoes, and vegetables. (It did not hurt that we grew up in the remarkably rich farm country of the upper Midwest.) And I remember how word would spread among families about newly discovered ways to make that large provision of food more economical including discount outlets, deals at the grocery store, day-old bread at the bakery, frozen pizzas in bulk, and boxes of frozen pasties that we could heat up at will. And peanut butter: what would we have done without peanut butter? And milk. At one point, with more of us reaching our teenage years, my father took out the rack in an old soda-pop vending machine (from the old family business) that he had stored in the basement, so that my mother could use the pop machine to keep cold the five gallons of milk that she bought every two days. Years later my mother reminisced about reaching the stage in the family’s development when all the kids were old enough to make it through a meal without someone spilling a glass of milk.
And, of course, so much of that food was consumed at meals. Meals are pregnant affairs for large families where and when all gather together to share in the sustenance provided by God and the work of human hands and then share themselves in conversation with each other. In our family we would not only begin meals with a prayer of blessing, but we would end meals with a prayer of thanks, so that when supper was ended we did not ask if we could be excused but if we could pray. Also in our family at the dinner table only one person was allowed to speak at a time, whether it was my mother or father or any one of us right down to my youngest sister. Whoever was talking had the floor. I have feasted with other large families where participants carry on several conversations at the same time, and though that is not the way I was brought up, I recognize the value in that approach too.
One meal in particular stands out. It was Thanksgiving, and we had sat down to table at perhaps two or o’clock or so, and my middle sister brought to the meal her new boyfriend. After a while they left, and when they came back that evening, we were still at the table to the great surprise of the boyfriend (who has been that sister’s husband for almost forty years). We did not bring an end to the meal until around nine o’clock. The conversation had flowed, along with the wine, and the food had been passed in cycles, and there had been no reason that anyone would want to leave. Christmas that year was much the same.
Still, what large families offer most of all, with all their good and bad, is fullness. They are just plain full. And that fullness is a wondrous thing.
Memorable Christmases centered around midnight Mass, after which we would walk home through the clear biting air, snowflakes floating down in the light of the street lamps on our way. At home we would indulge in my older sister’s cinnamon rolls (made from scratch) and coffee before drifting off to bed to let old St. Nick do his work. My parents would have got each of us a gift or two, and each would receive a thoughtful gift from the person who had drawn his or her name, and there would be smaller gifts in the stockings, but the gift giving was but a light seasoning to the feast of our being together—especially after we had gone off to college and other pursuits—and sharing our stories and partaking of food and drink in the meal. One year my sister made a movie of our Christmas gathering, and when her friend (who was an only child from a difficult family) saw it, she wept and said that she did not know people really had Christmases like that.
Nevertheless, as indicated above, eating out as a family was a rare and limited event. Trips home from visiting family in Minnesota included a stop at a drive-in restaurant so that, as the car rolled along, we could each partake of one hamburger, one order of French fries, and one shake that we relished until we could enjoy such fare on our next trip north a year in the future. My brother-in-law, one of five children, recounted something familiar to many from large families, his wonder at the way other children could buy food, drink, and ice cream with abandon at fairs or other family attractions, while his family tramped off to the car to partake of bologna sandwiches and Kool-Aid. And I can still recount clearly these many decades later, my uncle, a father of seven, in animated fashion that nonetheless betrayed his natural good humor, saying to my parents about those rare occasions when their family would go out to eat, “And the kids would order juice, and it would come in these little glasses and cost 95¢! So, whenever we would go out, I would tell the kids, whatever you do, don’t order juice!”
On another occasion that same uncle marveled to my parents about how children growing up in a large family experienced all the emotions in a day: they would laugh, they would cry, they would hope, they would fear, they would fight, they would reconcile, they would hold a grudge, they would forgive. This should make it clear that large families are no more flawless than any other families. Large families like all families are full of sinners. Thus, in addition to the virtues, there are the vices, measured out in assorted portions to all members, which lead to the inevitable misunderstandings, bickerings, arguments, and fights.
And there is the messiness (which is not to be confused with dirtiness). Large families are just plain messy, messy enough to drive any delusions of control from the most committed control freaks, which can happen in families of any size provided they are open to life and the refining effects of love. Still, large families are messy in ways unique and common to them all. For years they have babies, in succession, which means there are years of diapers and bathroom trips for the little ones; there is the sloppiness of feeding; there are, especially among boys, the proclivities for dirt, mud, water, bugs, and reptiles. And there are the wide-ranging emotions in quantity that can result in laughing, crying, yelling, and fighting, but that can also result in countless acts of kindness and generosity, as sharing, in one way or another, is a given in a large family. Still, what large families offer most of all, with all their good and bad, is fullness. They are just plain full. And that fullness is a wondrous thing.
Thank you,
P. A. Ritzer
Part Two of this series will follow shortly.
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Again, thanks.
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