America Eats Its Young (& Everybody Else)

Ann Romney busy raising her five spawn.

Apparently it's hard out there.

The situation is impossible for all of us, whether we're working in an office or working at home or taking a few years out of the workforce to manage the house and children and then find it difficult to get back in at a reasonable-enough wage to ensure a decent Social Security check in old age. The United States is set up on the assumption that everyone who works should do so around the clock ... and that children should be a parent's full-time focus at all times, so much so that you must abandon the rest of your life to pick them up from school at appallingly early hours so that you can then ferry them to an endless array of after-school activities. The problem with this clash isn't personal; it's a structural problem. We have set our society up in a way that makes it impossible to both work and parent. And I don't see any interest in solving this as a society.

Probably because most of the society can't even see/realize the problem. (Forest/trees.)

Any contemporary American parent has a comparable story. And of course, any meaningful career requires the same kind of around-the-clock, work-when-you're-needed-which-is-always schedule, while waged work increasingly requires a willingness to work crazy shifts without much advanced notice. Our system is just not humane—or to put it differently, we leave no time to be human. But I don't see any change on the horizon. Do you?

Yes. Yes we do. At the barrel of a gun. After we've burned everything to the ground.