IT'S NOT EASY BEING GREEN... ESPECIALLY IF YOU HAVE KIDS!

I have often written on this blog about all of the irrational and erroneous reasons that people, totally unqualified to be parents, have children. I have written even more often about the damage done to children by said unqualified parents. Well, here's another angle to the issue that I've thought about, but never written about, articulated in a very thoughtful blog piece by a mother, one Toni Nagy, entitled: "The Hypocrisy of Being Green and Making Babies."

Here's Toni:

"Now that I have a baby, I realize that every choice I make is a potential environmental catastrophe. How do I reconcile the fact that I am glad she is alive, but that every life is a budding threat to the health of the earth? I don't want to live in denial, but feeling the guilt of creation rather than its beauty is exceedingly stressful."

Bravo to Toni for being so brave. It is a paradox of sorts, a dilemma, to simultaneously feel love and devotion for a human being, one's own flesh and blood offspring, and yet know that it may have been personally and socially dysfunctional to have born that child.

But a genuinely responsible adult doesn't shy away from looking at themselves and acknowledging their motives and "mistakes." Many, if not most, children are born into less than optimal situations to less than self-actualized adults. The real disastrous consequences of such actions for all involved, including the planet, come moreso from the adults' denial of that reality than from the actions themselves. Facing up to one's actions, without guilt or shame, but simply with self-reflective self-responsibility, can lead to corrective action that will benefit all the children born under these circumstances, and therefore benefit all.