EDITOR'S NOTE - This column, as the author says, is not meant to disparage those who cannot have children, or even those who choose not to have children. The author's point is those who intentionally forgo the chance to have a child, only to obtain power over others, creates a situation where those people have power over others, without the requisite empathy having a child, or wanting a child but not being able to have one, creates.
It's an argument worth revisiting. One of the current nominees for president has no children, the other has five--and ten grandchildren. The latter is generationally, tacitly, and in the farsighted gaze of legacy, genetically intertwined with the future and its prospects.
The former? Kamala is the very last model year of the Boomer, living for no one but herself.
"When you ain't got nothing," the poet said, "you got nothing to lose." That's the stark truth. This isn't to disparage the barren, or to judge those who choose not to procreate. To choose children is a metaphysically personal matter. That said, there are plenty of other careers outside of politics for the childless.
Yes, one could argue that Harris has a daughter in Ella Emhoff. "Momala!" the mainstream media pleaded. (One could also argue she has a husband, and not a marriage convenient to both of their careers.)
Alas, Harris is from a different tribe, and two generations distant from Ella. They were adjoined a mere ten years ago, when Ella was 15, well past the bonding age. Harris was working full time, Emhoff was quietly trying to rebuild his public image.
Yes, in some cases, the stepchild-stepmother relationship becomes a loving, vibrant thing, a covenant, if you will. What Ella and Kamala have is an agreement, an entente cordiale.
Harris seeks to join the international pantheon of childless world leaders. Among them, past and present: mirthless Angela Merkel, psychological jigsaw puzzle Emmanuel Macron, English footnote Theresa May, and tipsy EU bigwig Jean Claude Juncker.
Globalists all, and why is that?
Globalism--and its attendant philosophies--are a natural extension of broken homes and childlessness: the dissolution of the nuclear family in favor of the state as parent. Individual rights and values compromised for the sake of a shared agenda. Own nothing--not even children--and be "happy", just so long as it's not the kind of traditional family espoused by all three of the Abrahamic faiths.
It would be harder to push for war if your children might end up fighting, or so goes the old saw. But that hasn't been true for the elite since Vietnam. Still, privileged children die of overdoses from drugs that flow across open borders. They could conceivably take a poison vaccine pushed by big pharma. They could be killed in a terror attack resulting from oppressive One World Government-style mandates.
Every parent knows intimately the fear of necessarily allowing a child the responsibility to go independently into the wider world. The fear that violent crime will touch their lives, by hands alien or domestic, is a fact of life, increasingly so.
The childless adult--and/or leader--lives entirely free of this fear.
Now add a growing strain of Western atheism, indeed, a disdain for Christians specifically ("Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally," Harris quipped to two Christians recently), and you have a recipe for godless behavior and no lasting consequence.
Our public officials need skin--as in their flesh--in the game. The stakes are too high, and the politics too brazenly corrupt, to deny this lasting truth.
ps: to those who point out that George Washington didn't have any children, I disagree. He had a son, born in strife, who grew up to be strong and tall. He struggled mightily with himself, and recovered. As he grew into manhood, he got into two big brawls with gangs of other men, and came out on the winning side. For some time, he has been regarded as the most powerful man on the planet, though he has suffered several humiliating defeats at the hands of lesser men. Some say he's not the same man he once was.
His future may be uncertain, but Washington's only child lives to this day.