On Children

As you may have heard, Barak Obama suspended his campaign for two days to visit his ailing grandmother. (This is in direct contract to John McCain who said he suspended his campaign for two days but in actuality did not. )

This post touchingly muses on the results of having children and sez two interesting things:

1. ...too many black men see child-rearing as "responsibility" and not "personal investment."

2. Obama's mother, a relatively young woman when he was born, will not be here to see him inaugurated, should he win. Whenever, I think of that I just get sad--mostly because she did know the rewards of parenting and threw herself at her kids. There's something unjust in the fact that she won't get to see the results of all her work.

The idea of a child being an "investment", other then a cynical "someone's gotta take care of me when i'm old", is an interesting thought. I've always thought in the back of my mind that bringing a child into this world, with its mass murders, class warfare, and crazy leaders, is implicitly selfish, but this article really made me think that it's really optimistic: you're thinking that your child could really help make things better. Obama's mother certainly realized her dreams of her son making the most of himself - he'll almost certainly be the next president of the United States!

But when Coates writes that Obama's mother "won't bet to see the results of all her work", I think that's unfair. I don't believe she had a child with the goal of having him become president; she had a child out of love, and she did see the results of her work by seeing her son grow up to become a decent human who loved not only her but also others in the world. The rest of it - even being President - is really just whipped cream on top. And to call being president "results" is, I think, to cynically dismiss that accomplishment.