The Millennials are killing babies

Here's a photo I took on vacation. I'm betting this is outside a no-longer-abandoned hotel along Route 66 in Tucumcari, New Mexico. I really liked that town.

The salaries of the New York Times’ gallery of out-of-touch pundits should be published online the same way we publish our elected officials’ and appointees’ salaries. That way, we can have a bit of an idea how the people pushing the “we aren’t having enough kids” nonsense live.

I’ll credit Anne Lutz Fernandez, rather than David French or whichever the-kids-are-always-wrong beat pundit because Fernandez actually gets to the heart of the issue with her skeets on Bluesky.

“WaPo, NYTimes, New Yorker, & Atlantic are all running pieces on young people eschewing child-bearing. They do this as RW pronatalism is resurgent, with high-profile adherents like Musk & Carlson pushing catastrophic thinking about depopulation and conspiracies such as the ‘great replacement theory.’”

If I could figure out how to embed skeets, I would. I’ll link the thread instead.

Fernandez, in doing the kind thing and reading these bullshit articles so I don’t have to (though I did anyway, and discovered Fernandez got these several thousand character columns down to a few hundred characters because nobody actually wants an editor anymore), said the Washington Post editorial board blamed helicopter parents for making parenting too much work and childfree, single adults for having too much fun enjoying their lives.

Maybe it’s unfair of me to be annoyed about this but, anecdotally, I’m not enjoying life all that much! Life is expensive, and at 30-years-old, I’m making enough money to survive for the first time as of September of this year. Would things be easier if I got married when I was 25? Maybe, but probably not given I’ve had several personal crises since then that would’ve made any smart woman run for the hills. Imagine seriously marrying a man who is three cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon away from ending up playing with the stray cats in the alley behind the bar.

That actually happened, by the way. I’m still sober now. It’s been over a year now. How exciting.

Anyway, I think the constant deluge of columns would go away if these folks, who live exclusively in New York City or Washington DC, stuck around Small Town America for more than a few moments on the interstate when they’re traveling. The jobs don’t pay that much here. The real estate is getting more and more expensive thanks to out-of-state landlords deciding to use our land as investment property. The industry has either gotten up and left, or is eating the lunch of municipalities desperate to keep them there. Jobs that require an education, like say, news reporting and teaching, don’t pay enough to cover the degree they require. Day care is expensive, and the workers there don't make enough, so there's a terror behind leaving a child there all day.

Parents around here either end up leaving the kids at home with family like Grandma and Grandpa, if that's an option, or deal with the terror of being a one income household. This doesn't even start on the nightmare scenario for those like me, whose student loans will either get forgiven or strangle him to death.

Enough ranting. I disappeared for a while because I was traveling across the country, and then didn’t feel like writing anything when I got back. I’ll eventually sit down and write all about it.