I always have mixed feelings toward people who say they wouldn't want to "bring a child into this world." Actually, scratch that: I have feelings of disgust toward people who say that. Westerners are spoiled. Things have never been better for us. The reason we shouldn't be having kids is more a matter of overpopulation, not of being swept up in some apocalyptic mortal coil. A century ago, there were two kinds of people: those who had to work their asses off, and those who were born rich. And by "work their asses off," I don't mean that they put in 40 hours a week at Chevys. I mean that they physically worked 16-hour days, seven days a week. Thank god for labor activists and communists, whose diligent lobbying led to weekends, 8-hour workdays, bans on child labor, and sick leave. All of that led to a stronger middle class, which led to the rise of the teenager in the '50s and '60s, when the children of these middle-class adults had the free time to actually be teenagers and not farmhands. This, however, is when we started to get spoiled. Things got dull, so we started to... More >>>