HOW MUCH SENSE WERE YOU BORN WITH? [F, 8-9-24]

BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Musings of an Old Man—HOW MUCH SENSE WERE YOU BORN WITH? [F, 8-9-24]

 

Unlike Butterfly McQueen’s character in “Gone With the Wind,” I know plenty ‘bout birthin’ babies, because I see babies being born several nights a week. It’s always a struggle. So much anxiety. So much pain. So much screaming.

The mothers, yes, them, too, but I’m talking about me. I’m not exactly non-squeamish.

So, I refused to watch “Call the Midwife” on PBS for about six years, even though friends raved about it. Why would any man choose to watch something so elemental, so beyond reason, so… yucky? Along about season seven, though, we caught a show by accident. We couldn’t stop watching. Now we are going through the whole 13 seasons again on Netflix.

As Helen says, “It’s appealing because it’s about good people trying to do good things. It’s realistic. Sometimes they make mistakes. Sometimes there are conflicts. Sometimes tragedy strikes. But it’s so nice to see people trying do good instead of being stupidly destructive of everybody, including themselves.” [It also helps, for us, that the show is set in the period of the 1960s when we ourselves were having babies.]

Most episodes, I have to remind myself that the screaming mothers are really good actors. And that those babies aren’t really being pulled out of their bodies. And that they actually have a whole drawer of umbilical cords of different lengths to cut, so that the birth looks real. [1]

But the babies! They are so little. So vulnerable. So adorable. Some white. Some brown. Some black. Some yellow. [Yes, every ethnic is assigned a color for TV, and Asians get yellow.]

I look at them with relief as they are handed to their exhausted mothers, and I think…isn’t it strange that the attributes that are going to give these little babies the most grief are the very things they have no control over, the things they are born with—color and gender.

They did not choose to be black or white, male or female, straight or gay. Yet those are going to be their defining characteristics their whole lives. And if the color or gender they did not choose is the wrong one--according to other people who did not choose their race or gender either—the lives of those sweet little babies will be miserable.

Our characteristics over which we had no choice, and over which we now have no control, are the very ones for which we are held most responsible. “No, you did nothing wrong. We’re just treating you like a lesser person because you were born black or female or gay.”

That makes no sense.

I guess there may be one more birth characteristic that makes a difference. Were you born “with as much sense as God gave a goose?”

I have total sympathy with persons who are born stupid, but none with those who choose to be stupid.

John Robert McFarland

1] One of our introductions to St. Mark’s Above the Bypass was at Christmas when the preacher asked the kids at “Children’s Time” what they would have brought as gifts to the baby Jesus. One child replied, “Scissors, to cut the umbilical cord.”