What Child-Free By Choice Means

When I came of age in the 60's and 70's, one of the big issues of the day was overpopulation. It was a subject that took on new relevance with the advent of reliable birth control such as the pill. And it spun off into an idea that was radical at the time: having children was a choice not an obligation.

At the same time as the pill came on the scene, there were other factors at work such as the growing Feminist movement that also served to show women had more choices than staying home and popping out babies. Even though the idea of equality for women was not a new idea, it finally reached the mainstream in the 60's after JFK appointed Eleanor Roosevelt as chairwoman of President's Commission on the Status of Women. Much of what we consider "women's issues" now, such as equality in the workplace, maternity leave, etc came from the studies conducted by the commission.

With this new awareness of women as more than baby machines it was inevitable that large numbers of us realized we could do more with our lives and leave behind a more powerful legacy of work, art, literature, music and contributions to the sciences if we remained child-free. A book that influenced many to remain child-free was Ellen Peck's The Baby Trap. She presented a powerful argument that used real world examples to show not everyone needed to breed to live and enjoy a fruitful life.

As I grew up and matured into an adult woman I had many examples of successful and child-free women to show me this was a valid choice in a world faced with hunger and wars brought on by overpopulation. The images of starvation in places like Ethiopia really affected me and a lot of people my age. We saw the devastation and accepted our role in it and knew our contributions, although small, would be large ones if more people believed as we did.

Many of us chose not to bring children into a world always at war and running out of precious resources. It allowed us to move forward and learn to create a legacy that came from our hearts and minds instead of from our physical bodies. And for the most part the rest of the population was okay with this. They considered it strange, eccentric at times, but completely and totally our choice.

One of my reasons for opening up a Cafepress store that is devoted completely to the child-free by choice is because this tolerance for "our choice" has changed in the last few years. There's almost this rage at those of us who made this choice, as if we are somehow defective or threatening to those who choose to breed. I've had less hatred directed toward my left of radical politics and my Atheism than I've had directed at me because I actively promote a child-free lifestyle.

I consider this hatred as stemming from the Entitlement Movement that believes having babies somehow gives one special powers over the rest of the population. These special powers translate into such things as forcing adults to watch only kid-oriented television, movies, and have access only to child-safe entertainment and lifestyles. The old-fashioned idea of parenting being something that took place in the home has fallen down the pit of letting the government, the schools, and the churches raise children instead of the parents. The Entitlement Movement never learned about off switches, v-chips, filtering software, or adults only, and those of us who choose a child-free lifestyle have to suffer for their ignorance and inflated sense of me-me-me.

My child-free by choice store is one way to bring the choice back to life and out of the hands of the entitlement bunch. I have a range of designs that include options such as overpopulation, anti-war philosophies, and yes, some that the breeders by choice will consider mean and insulting. The reason for those is that parents sometimes fail to get the idea that not everyone wants to interact with their children, not everyone thinks it's okay to let children run over every one's right to existence, and it draws on the old-fashioned idea that you had them so you raise them.

I will be adding designs on a more frequent basis now that it is it's own store instead of a section in Ursine Logic, and I'll also be adding cat and dog designs as many child-free humans devote a lot of time to making sure our furry companions have a good life. For those who think the child-free are selfish, just check out how many of us do support causes that deal with poverty, hunger, the environment, and saving innocent furry creatures that others have abandoned to a life of misery and death before you drop words like "selfish" so casually.

And if you have a favorite design idea or phrase you'd like to see on a t-shirt or other item, do drop me a line and I'll put it together for you because it's time we work together to save what's left of this planet's precious resources.

My email is ursinelogic at gmail dot com. Hate mail will be posted with a link to your email, and threats will be forwarded to law enforcement. On no other topic have I been forced to post that warning, which tells you how rabid breeders can get when their world view is threatened.

Peace.

What Child-Free By Choice Means

Al Gore, The Environment, Blog Action Day

As I look over the present field of Democratic candidates I realize my heart is not with any of them. Sure, I appreciate Kucinich and his honestly true anti-war stance as it mirrors my own. And I wonder at times what kind of country we are when we view someone like Kucinich as "unelectable" because he doesn't appeal to the fringe religious warmongering whackos that Karl Rove pandered to just as the Fascists pandered to broke European aristocrats to further their own agenda. I understand the concept of democracy really means the lowest common denominator shall rule, but do we have to settle for less all the time?

I am one of those people who really does believe in the power of human beings to grow, evolve, change, admit mistakes and embrace altruism over selfishness. The only problem is the number is still small and it needs to increase before being a good person becomes a valid demographic in this country. I will either live to see it or I will die saying goodbye to a planet that allowed its tenants to destroy it into oblivion.

I cannot understand the shortsightedness of people who fail to understand they are destroying the future of their own generations. How can they care so little about their own grandchildren? How can they leave them with perpetual war that enriches only the warmongers and makes cannon fodder out of the rest? How can they leave them a planet that has been stripped of all resources by a horde of corporate looters who obviously chose not to breed or have no faith they will be survived by their offspring. How can they love their own flesh and blood so little that they don't care they are leaving them a crap pile of festering debt and hatred as a legacy. If I was a kid I'd be seriously pissed at adults right now. How dare they do this to someone else's future?

So today, as I ponder a world where Al Gore becomes the President he was cheated out of being by an idiot who ended up destroying this country far more effectively than any enemy from the outside, and as I think about the bounty of nature that is stripped for corporate gain without any consideration for future generations, I imagine that today, Blog Action Day, needs to be a call for all of us to take a good long look at what we're letting happen all around us.

Are we really so busy, so indifferent, so burned out that we let this corporate looting continue? Or do we still have enough in us to get good and angry enough to turn out the corporate whores in congress and replace them with people who can see a future beyond their own bank accounts? Do we have enough spare change left that we can donate it to an organization devoted to peace, to saving the planet, to electing responsible individuals who will right the wrongs of Bushco's unconscionable thievery of our lives and resources?

It's not too late. What are you doing today to make a difference?

Al Gore, The Environment, Blog Action Day

What Disappearing Bees Really Mean

While it's true these are serious times, some of the things we choose to get serious above show our frustration and helplessness over our inability to effect the kind of change that works for all of us. No one wants war except those like Dick (where's my conscience) Cheney who would sell his own mother on Mother's Day if it put a few extra pieces of silver in his personal bank account.

The frustration over having to wait until the next election to vote out even more of Congress members who still don't get it, does boil over into our personal lives. One example is what happened on two of the mailing lists I'm on--huge arguments broke out over bees. Yes, it is scary to recall Einstein telling us we would know our doom was upon us when the bees disappeared. They are the canary in the coal mine warning us we can't keep consuming and abusing the way we are. But there is no one reason for this just as there is no one reason the planet is dying.

Cell phones and pollution and pesticides and replacing of bee friendly environments with asphalt and concrete all have an effect. Yet arguments broke out over whether those of us who use cell phones were contributing to the doom of the planet. Of course we are, just as everyone who takes a drink of water, eats some food, wears clothing on their bodies, uses some form of heat to keep themselves warm and chooses to live somewhere besides a cave naked and cold and half starved is contributing to our eventual doom.

Yes, we can argue about it and call each other names, but that's not going to change the fact that we all have to give up something. Will it be electricity because in the last six months I've watched both a raccoon and a squirrel get sacrificed in a blazing finale of getting too close to that transformer thing so I could have light at night? Will it be the rodents my neighbor trapped and killed because they were chewing into his underground phone line? Will it be my other neighbor's son who just left for Iraq so we can drive cars and get Agra-biz fruits and veggies delivered to us any time of year? Will it be our civil liberties because we couldn't be bothered to vote? Will it be our right to choose because we didn't take seriously a few religious wackos who paraded around with fetuses in pickle jars? Will it be our country because we have a President who thinks the Rapture is a foreign policy? Will it be greed, selfishness, hatred, and the need to force our personal beliefs on a sleeping and unconscious public that eventually brings us down? Or will it be a war that was somewhere else and perpetuated by warmongers who care nothing about human life and care only about power and money? What will get us in the end? What distraction will take our eyes off the real problems?

This week it is bees that set off the alarms. And yes, we need to have the alarms set off. But we don't need to fight with each other over bees. We need to see that bees are an indicator species of how much time we have left if we do nothing but argue with each other. If we choose not to act, then of course Einstein will be right. But if we choose to take responsibility for our planet, for our daily lives, for the things that politicians do in our names, then maybe we have a chance to survive and so do the bees.

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Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

What Disappearing Bees Really Mean

Save The Planet, Save Ourselves

Whenever I need a break from the stresses of day to day life, I go for a walk. It helps that I live in a magnificent part of the world. Within a half hour of my home I can walk by a river, a couple lakes, a saltwater bay, and numerous parks with tall trees and creeks and ponds. By most people's standards, especially those who live in urban environments, I live in a wondrous nature paradise. I show it off to visitors. I live in awe of its stunning beauty even now, a quarter century since I first moved here. It never pales for me. It never loses its magic.

But I can also see the changes. The mountains and hills that surround much of this area have bald patches from the obscenity of being one of the few places in the world that still clear cuts entire mountainsides without any thought to future or even present generations. In the rainy season, which is a good deal of the year here, the clear cut patches become conduits for mud and debris filled flood waters that destroy homes and farmlands at their foothills.

In the out of control greed of slash and burn GOP rule these last few years, the families in those homes and farms become insignificant. It doesn't matter how long they've lived there or if their family homes and farms get washed away in the debris. Only one thing matters and that is how much the corporate clear cutters can get for the mountain's "lumber." There is no thought to the safety and well-being of the people below. The spindly replacements are reforested into the ground using desperate, transient and undocumented laborers willing to work for little money. And then everyone moves on and what the deer don't eat, the winter rains wash away, leaving a few tiny twigs to replace the thick forests that were clear cut away.

The mountains and hills stripped bare by cut and run profit taking are forgotten. They become as insignificant as the human beings whose lives were permanently devastated by the profit grabbing from above. Sadly, in some of the cases, those who were destroyed and will be destroyed are the same loggers and their families hired by the corporations to put their own property in danger. The Corporate Pigs know people don't dare complain or worry out loud when they're desperate for work. They shut up and pray. And they collect their paychecks until the Pigs move on to somewhere else. And then the loggers pray the unemployment checks don't run out before they find more work, and their homes won't wash away, and that mudslides won't turn into raging avalanches of boulders, uprooted stumps, and small trees left to rot because they weren't big enough to put on the truck or small enough to plant back into the ground. In the meantime, the rains come and the hill turns to mud and prayers don't seem quite enough anymore.

I also see this same lack of foresight when I look to the bay. Salmon comes from out of town now. Some of my once favorite fish aren't safe to eat in large quantities anymore. I can't find any fresh mussels in the store and the shrimp and clams come from China instead of from the fishing boats these days. The waterfront is changing from industrial to overpriced condominiums for urban refugees and wealthy retirees. But the train still runs below these condos and parts of the bay are preceded by the words: Superfund cleanup...

It's also impossible to walk from one end of town to the other anymore without crossing a major highway or intersection. The interurban trail system crosses more and more through urban areas and instead of forests, they are part of people's backyards. The traffic is horrendous and the roads are falling apart. There's no money to fix anything and yet new housing developments take over more homeland, and more poor and working poor are evicted from apartments that are converting to condos. The air smells like fuel, gasoline, diesel and continual traffic in many parts of town now. It is noisy and crime-infested in more and more of it. It is a dying paradise.

But the saddest part of all this is what is happening to the wildlife. Unchecked growth has displaced so many of the creatures who live around here. During a cold stretch a few weeks ago when the snow froze on the ground and didn't melt for days, I ended up with squirrels, raccoons, possums, and so many birds they would empty the feeder in less than an hour. I put out pans of hot water that they drank thirstily and quickly before it froze.

And the deer came. Skinny, hungry, thirsty deer who were so desperate they put aside all their fear of human beings. I fed them apples and gave them water and felt both a sense of awe that they were eating from my hands and also a deep sadness that in a place so lush, so beautiful, so filled with plenty, these beautiful creatures were starving because their homes were gone. Their grazing meadows were now condo villages. Their creeks were now in the middle of housing developments. They had to dodge traffic to go from block to block to try and find something to eat that wasn't frozen solid under the snow.

I took a picture of one of them after he hungrily ate three apples in a row and drank a bowl of water. He's tiny with ribs showing through his fur. But he's so beautiful and such a symbol of what greed and a total disregard for nature leaves behind. Look at him good. Look in those eyes. And then get out and do something to reverse the damage being done to our planet because no human should be able to get so close to a wild creature. It's just not natural. And it's our fault.

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Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

Save The Planet, Save Ourselves