Change/No Change
Here's a passage from Judith Warner's Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety:
Our baby boomer elders often call us selfish, but in doing so they miss a larger point: that what our obsessive looking-inward hides is at base a kind of despair. A lack of faith that change can come to the outside world... The desperate, grasping, and controlling way so many women go about the job of motherhood, turning energy that used to demand social change inward into control freakishness is our hallmark as a generation. We have taken it upon ourselves as super mothers to be everything to our children that society refuses to be: not just loving nurturers but educators, entertainers, guardians of environmental purity, protectors of a stable and prosperous future.
On one hand, this explains a lot. It explains the depressing lineup of stories about the nation's troubled state that Amy has gathered up at The Bisuit Report. (The quote comes from an article in the current Atlantic by Sandra Tsing Loh, "Kiddie Class Struggle.") For example: why nobody cares if George W Bush lied or is still lying about Iraq. Or if Pat Robertson compares judges adversely to terrorists. If the public sphere can't be fixed, why complain about what goes on it in? Better to stay home and optimize the kids.
But on the other hand, Ms Warner's passage makes no sense at all, at least from my perspective. Looking back on five decades of reasonably attentive life, I'm astonished by all the changes that this country has witnessed. It will suffice to name but two: the radically altered positions of blacks and women in the United States. No matter how far short of improvement these changes fall, they remain unmistakably epochal. And it is no surprise that they have not been fully or evenly digested. Nor have many of the other changes - the absence of a military draft, for one; the Internet, for another. Perhaps the most pernicious, because the most wrongheadedly pursued, has been the privileging of "self-realization."
Our society is one that's plainly in shock from too much change, which is why those who aren't standing around with their tongues lolling are combining beneath the aegis of reaction. The Democratic Party, our leading agent for change, has exhausted its energies in the good fight but is too punch-drunk to realize that it itself stands in the way, not of progress - that would entail yet more change - but consolidation, in sedulously rooting the new arrangement against all weathers. This rooting work, moreover is difficult, dull, and solitary. It is much easier to drift off to the local megachurch and chant in herds.
The only thing a super mother can produce, so far as I can see, is a cynical and anxious child. Hey Moms: Demand less of the kids and more of the world.
