By historical standards, security and quality of life in 21st-century America are remarkably high. We may be on a slow decline, but the journey to the bottom is a very long one. And despite daily predictions of doom, Donald Trump has yet to turn the country into a hellscape where the few citizens who haven’t been arrested wander the streets in a daze, desperate to get their hands on outlawed birth control.
Our elite are sure they know better, however. A Washington Post headline this week: “It’s not wrong to compare Trump’s America to the Holocaust.” Another, in Politico, reads: “Putin’s Attack on the U.S. Is Our Pearl Harbor.” But perhaps the best recent contribution to this burgeoning genre of apocalyptic commentary appeared in the New York Times: “Raising My Child in a Doomed World.”
Environmental devastation, climate change—it’s all too terrible for this Times contributor not to regret having a child. “My partner and I had, in our selfishness, doomed our daughter to life on a dystopian planet, and I could see no way to shield her from the future,” writes Roy Scranton, a Notre Dame professor of (what else?) English. If we hope to stop our mad march to destruction, he argues, we must seek “centralized control of key economic sectors.” Well, obviously! He seems to think that David Buckel, the environmental activist who earlier this year committed suicide by self-immolation, made a reasonable choice. Scranton does, you’ll be relieved to learn, repudiate the conclusion that “if you really want to save the planet, you should die,” though not perhaps with the ardor one would wish.
It’s pretty bracing stuff, but the piece ends rather disappointingly: “I can’t protect my daughter from the future and I can’t even promise her a better life. All I can do is teach her: teach her how to care, how to be kind and how to live within the limits of nature’s grace.” We’re not sure what that phrase “nature’s grace” means, but we wonder if it occurs to Scranton that no one at any time in the history of the world could protect his or her children from the future or promise them a better life. It’s pretty ordinary to worry about their prospects and to conclude that all you can do is teach them well. There, there, professor. We’re sure your daughter will be fine. (Young parents are so adorable.)
