High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [44]
It’s an inspiring thought. But in mortal fact, here in the U.S. we are blazing a bold downhill path from the high ground of “human collective,” toward the tight little den of “self.” The last time we voted on a school-budget override in Tucson, the newspaper printed scores of letters from readers incensed by the very possibility: “I don’t have kids,” a typical letter writer declared, “so why should I have to pay to educate other people’s offspring?” The budget increase was voted down, the school district progressed from deficient to desperate, and I longed to ask that miserly nonfather just whose offspring he expects to doctor the maladies of his old age.
If we intend to cleave like stubborn barnacles to our great American ethic of every nuclear family for itself, then each of us had better raise and educate offspring enough to give us each day, in our old age, our daily bread. If we don’t wish to live by bread alone, we’ll need not only a farmer and a cook in the family but also a home repair specialist, an auto mechanic, an accountant, an import-export broker, a forest ranger, a therapist, an engineer, a musician, a poet, a tailor, a doctor, and at least three shifts of nurses. If that seems impractical, then we can accept other people’s kids into our lives, starting now.
It’s not so difficult. Most of the rest of the world has got this in hand. Just about any country you can name spends a larger percentage of its assets on its kids than we do. Virtually all industrialized nations have better schools and child-care policies. And while the U.S. grabs headlines by saving the occasional baby with heroic medical experiments, world health reports (from UNESCO, USAID, and other sources) show that a great many other parts of the world have lower infant mortality rates than we do—not just the conspicuously prosperous nations like Japan and Germany, but others, like Greece, Cuba, Portugal, Slovenia—simply because they attend better to all their mothers and children. Cuba, running on a budget that would hardly keep New York City’s lights on, has better immunization programs and a higher literacy rate. During the long, grim haul of a thirty-year economic blockade, during which the United States has managed to starve Cuba to a ghost of its hopes, that island’s child-first priorities have never altered.
Here in the land of plenty a child dies from poverty every fifty-three minutes, and TV talk shows exhibit teenagers who pierce their flesh with safety pins and rip off their parents every way they know how. All these punks started out as somebody’s baby. How on earth, we’d like to know, did they learn to be so isolated and selfish?
My second afternoon in Spain, standing in a crowded bus, as we ricocheted around a corner and my daughter reached starfish-wise for stability, a man in a black beret stood up and gently helped her into his seat. In his weightless bearing I caught sight of the decades-old child, treasured by the manifold mothers of his neighborhood, growing up the way leavened dough rises surely to the kindness of bread.
I thought then of the woman on the airplane, who was obviously within her rights to put her own comfort first, but whose withheld generosity gave my daughter what amounted to a sleepless, kicking, squirming, miserable journey. As always happens two days after someone has spoken to me rudely, I knew exactly what I should have said: Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back.
PARADISE LOST
The Canary Islands weren’t named for birds, but dogs. Pliny the Elder wrote of “Canaria, so called from the multitude of dogs [canis] of great size.” In Pliny’s day this archipelago, flung west from the coast of Morocco, was the most westerly place imaginable. All maps started here. For fourteen centuries Arabs, Portuguese, and eventually the Spanish came this far, and no farther; it remained Meridian Zero. When Columbus gathered the force to head west and enlarge the map, it was from