Tuesday 20 April 1999

Pic of the day: Spreading it on thick.

In town today I saw a young woman with those new-fangled one foot high soles, and strolling a small child. Now that was a sight I had hoped to avoid. Those shoes are sooo puberty. Like it's the only way for those not-yet-grown girls to get their tiny rear so high that anybody will notice it, much less touch it. This girl was slightly older than that, so much so that the child could well be hers. Now that would be "a personal tragedy", as they say when people shoot their brains out. I think it's pretty tragic when people have too little brains to start with, too. And then go off and have kids, presumably for that reason.

Have you considered that there ought to be a parent license? A kind of certificate that you're mature enough and reasonably mentally stable to have a kid. Technologically it should be feasible any day now, as long term contraception is already possible at least for females, probably soon for men. (Not that men are all that important in this picture ... children are assumed to belong to their mother in our society.)
The reason why I don't actually support such a scheme is not that it restrict personal freedom. We already have established that personal freedom can and should be restricted when it harms another human. In this case, the child. The problem, as I see it, is that government would have to regulate the kid-licensing. And government is in general so incompetent as to be virtually indistinguishable from evil. If it is possible to goof up, watch government do it, from the lowliest clerk to the world's most powerful elected official.

Luckily, with the advent of better communications, I believe that democracy will get a new chance. What did Dwight D. Eisenhower say? "Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen"? And to quote James Madison: "Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

I think we are on the verge of reaching the age in which we can share our tiny bread and fishes, and find that after all have gotten their fill, there will be more left than what we started with. Isn't this a striking metaphor of the information age? And it's not just nice words either. Information is more and more an actual ingredient in the economy, that can be substituted for other resources. With the right information, we can get more out of the soil, of the sea, of the ores and the energy. We can literally all have more, by the knowledge we share. What a coincidence, huh?