Everyday now for a couple of weeks we have been getting boxes.
Big boxes, small boxes, medium boxes all filled with baby things.
They are a delight to our wife who opens them with unmitigated glee.
We are having our first grandchild, the first of hopefully many more and not a day goes by we don’t talk our future descendent and the monkey theme wall paper we bought from Amazon.
There is nothing unusual in this.
Human beings are the only species whose life spans far exceed our reproductive lives. And being the only species to understand the whole concept of the birds and the bees we are genetically predisposed to recognize our grandchildren and in some case great grandchildren and spend quality time with them.
Indeed it has been suggested the a major reason in our species success was because our forefathers and especially our fore mothers helped out with their children’s children.
A lot has been written about how important grandparents are in child rearing today but curiously very little study has been done on the grand childless.
Oh there are anecdotes and essays about the pain of not having a grandchild, but as far as we have been able to google no scientific study on what separates them from us.
We know there is data it is in the body politic.
And frankly its a little scary.
Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy whose over generous retirement/pension funds are threatening to bring Europe’s and the world’s economy to disaster have perhaps not so coincidentally the lowest fertility rates in the history of the world and have been that way for the past 25 years. Before that they had some of the highest.
That means of course that in those countries there are now a whole lot of adults and a whole lot fewer children.
Is there a connection between a quarter of a century of few children being born to a large adult population and a quarter of a century of voting oneself a government which kept on increasing pension benefits and lowering the retirement age, otherwise known as robbing the future?
We know personally that the imminent prospect of becoming ancestors has changed us in big ways and small perhaps even more so than becoming parents ourselves.
So how does not having any hope of a genetic future play on the mind individually and more importantly collectively?
For the first time in the history of the world childless middle aged and grand childless elderly constitute substantial parts of the population.
They are voters and tax payers and they have a say on how things are done.
Now an argument can be made that this phenomena is only temporary.
The childless and the grand childless will eventually die off in say half a century or so.
On the other hand people with nothing to lose can do a lot of damage in 50 years of voting.
Perhaps just perhaps the division between the left and the right today are influenced by how many children and grandchildren each side has.
Nazi sympathizer and moral dunder head Joe Kennedy Sr. said one very wise thing once that he believed in peace because he had nine hostages to the future.
What course will we take in this brave new world where perhaps half the people living in it have no hope of a descendent seeing the sun rise on a new century