kjmitchell715
I just this very minute saw a commercial for a new model of Volkswagen that used the word epidemic in the most bizarre context ever. Or was it?
The woman in the commercial says a new epidemic is sweeping the nation. At this, I perked up…
She continues to say that women all over the country are becoming pregnant just to have a reason to buy this new, spacious car.
BAM….pregnancy…the epidemic.
Wow.
Reproduction. Continued population of the earth. A disease, a blight upon earth. I mean, maybe…but really??? Volkswagen is so bold as to say it in a commercial???
This really made me do a double take.
A pregnant woman standing by the car says, “That’s not why we got pregnant…” –it’s both hilarious and really disturbing. Because the commerical almost suggests that the reason for becoming pregnant is irrelevent, as long as it results in the purchase of a Volkswagen.
But honestly…what reason do we have to reproduce?
I know I am getting a little off topic here….but what does our procreation gain us?? SELF-PRESERVATION. There is no immortality….the closest thing we have to it is preserving a small part of ourselves in the next generation. But if our offspring are what save us from inevitable exstinction, then they can’t be the disease. So the disease must be death.
The ultimate epidemic. The one that gets everybody.
The end result of the epidemic.
This is the tiniest bit disjointed (HA) –but some food for thought anyway.
And yes…as much as I just bashed it…I do want to have kids some day.
6 Comments
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
The Contagious Narrative 
I really like etymology, and find it’s often quite helpful when thinking about concepts. In this case, ‘epidemic,’ which is epi-, among or upon, and demos, people or district. So, it’s not strictly wrong to talk about pregnancy as an apidemic, since it happens among the people. It threw me for a loop when someone told me they were an epidemiologist, which I’d always associated with things like lateral population studies of this or that characteristic (obesity maybe, or blue-eyes), and she mentioned later the study of epidemics. Well, of course, I thought- that makes sense, given the similarity of the words and the conceptual closeness as well, but man, damned if I had ever made that connection before.
All of which is to say: I dunno, words are funny, and sometimes they point toward things different than one might think initially.
…There is no immortality….the closest thing we have to it is preserving a small part of ourselves in the next generation.”
Yeah, that’s part of it, anyway.
Do you have any desire to elaborate? I’m interested.
It’s difficult to describe to someone who doesn’t have kids. I don’t mean that to sound deliberatly obtuse or condescending in any way; I didn’t have a kid (just the one) until I was almost 40 and on my second marriage. Up until then, I thought that all of the blather and romantic notions of parenthood that my “strapped-with-a-brood-of-ankle biters” friends would spiel out nonstop were just so much nonsensical bullshit.
Then I had a kid and I GOT IT. It all made sense.
There is the whole “leaving a part of myself to carry on…forever” aspect that you mentioned, and the “contributing to the continuation of the species” thing as well. The rest of it gets gushy and emotional and almost impossible to describe.
When I look at my boy, there’s this overwhelming feeling of…I ‘dunno, I guess “hope” comes close. Maybe “possibility”? The sensation that something exists that is sooooo important that makes all of my comittments to anything else seem like a silly lil’ hobbies. A connection not just to eternity but to…God. No, I’m not at all religious (other than a vague feeling, like the beginnings of an acid trip, that ‘something’ is happening), but my son inspires in me the feelings that the Friends of Jesus (or Allah, or Yahweh, or…) use to describe their religious beliefs. Hope, faith, eternity, love, sacrifice, connection…all that shit.
Of course, I AM aware that trying to describe how fatherhood makes me feel to someone without a rugrat, yard ape and/or porch monkey probably makes them feel the same way I do when a passel of Jehovahs Witnesses comes to my door to do some testifyin’ (right before I slam the door, that is), or when someone tries to describe magenta to a blind man.
Actually I think what you say makes perfect sense. I won’t claim to have those feelings since I am not a parent myself. But I do value what you’ve said and think it adds another dimension to the post. I only write from my solitary point of view…so other ones are welcome. They give me perspective!
Thanks for divulging a bit for me. Hope you’ll come back and tell me more soon! 🙂
Well, firstly, it’s a commercial, and a funny one at that, no serious thought required. Truthfully though, there is something there, that it could be a problem if people have children for the wrong reasons, a life isn’t a toy, and many would describe the staggering growth in the rate of underage pregnancies an epidemic.
However, the world is pretty much at the maximum usage of sustainable land that can produce food. We are seeing what could soon be a famine, because the world consumes all of the food it grows; ie, there are no stores, yet, we continue a trend of rampant and uncontrolled population growth in some of the world’s largest nations. It’s difficult to see coming from places like the US and europe where there are vast excesses of farmland, and you’re the world’s largest exporter of foodstuffs. Not so difficult to grasp when you’re in a land that is 92% desert, with a population 3x that of the US or europe in a comparable space to the larger. It also goes a long way to illustrating the disparity inherent in the value people place on life in different parts of the world.
I don’t wish to broach the parental feelings portion of the topic, it’s not rational to reason with an emotional argument, and this is the other side of the coin as it were.
The equation of overpopulation is not simply a factor of enough space to cram bodies divided by predictable body count growth, it’s moreso the concept of resources available per capita and the ability to maintain a quality of life with a presumably ever expanding population.
That’s food for thought.