The Past and Future Generations

I was walking home from work yesterday when I ran into an old black lady also waiting for the bus.  At first I thought she was crazy, but after chatting with her for a while, I drew that she wasn't crazy, but mostly angry because she had missed the bus, after screaming at the driver who refused to slow down for her.  I've had this happen to me a couple of times, and it IS infuriating.

We talked for a while, and eventually it started to rain, so I let her use part of my (huge) umbrella.  Well, I thought, at least I will not stoop to the indecency of MUNI bus drivers.  We talked from hair, to kids, to all sorts of things, and I actually listened to her.  I'm normally afraid of people I meet on the street, but not, for some reason, in this case.  This woman had a wisdom about her, and she had grown up in San Francisco near the Haight-Ashbury, where I live, during the summer of love.

She struck me with this statement: "Don't have kids until you don't have anything else to do."

Which to me, is weird.  Looking at history we can say that there was a time in America where there was a push for women to churn out babies like a machine.  Nowadays, it seems like the idea of having children is just a waste of time and resources.  Having children?  Are you insane?  Of course, I'm not planning to have children at my age, that would be stupid, but I probably won't decide to have kids ever.  Not when I'm 25, not when I'm 30, not when I'm any age at all.

There's also the global problem.  We are running out of resources as it is.  Pollution and global warming are just a few things that are damaging the earth we live on.  So having kids?  Probably not a good idea anyway.  Who would want them to suffer?  But this is simply unrealistic: we must procreate in order to create.  We have a constant will to be remembered, or else we are nothing.  Which simply means this: we need to start worrying about the place we live, right now.

Perhaps this is an extravagant response to a simple chat with an old lady, but it was certainly thought-provoking.