The real bottom line on the balance sheet. How much is a child worth? How much is our time with them worth? How much is a family worth? In our modern culture, we define ourselves economically. Everything must work for the bottom line. Rather than memoires and diaries, our lives are inscribed on balance sheets. But the real substance of humanity – love, care, nurturance, relationships – cannot be defined financially and by doing so we undermine our ability to recognise the true worth of our role as caretakers.
We worship a value system that attempts to put in financial terms that which cannot be measured. Because it cannot be measured it is devalued. The immense significance of our human relationships – mother, father, child, grandmother and grandfather – are put aside to meet the economic agenda. It pulls the family fabric apart, leaving us to make choices that are not good for us, for our elderly, for our children.
For example, right now in Australia, paid maternity leave is one issue that illustrates our attempt to value something that is intrinsically unquantifiable. In the papers we read the different politicians’ conclusions on the value of parenting and of having children. Now the question, ‘What is a parent’s time and contribution worth?’ is publicly being answered and with the answer, an acid revelation of attitudes toward family.
Please don’t get me wrong. I am in total support of paid maternity leave. But we must be cautious of the fact that it, like all aspects of the economic culture, places motherhood back into a system that defines mothers by dollars and cents rather than human contribution. By itself, without any other value system to which it is balanced, it is a wolf in sheep’s clothing that will instead create a definitive ‘time line’ that is ‘appropriate to be a full-time mother’. If we indeed received the 14 weeks’ paid leave, how many of you would feel it was in the best interest of your newborn child to return to full time work after that time? What about mums who choose to stay home longer? What about dads who choose to work less? Is there another way not yet explored to be introduced alongside these other initiatives that will break the material stronghold over our values as a society?
We have become a money culture. It is a culture where consumerism is the new religion, economy our god and productivity our prayer. Monetary value is the new morality by which all things we do are judged. Parents and carers are the heretics. We are heretics because by definition of what a parent is and must do to raise a healthy, happy child, we must engage in the most ‘unproductive’ activities of all: relating and caring. We are a liability to the cause. To keep it alive we are rigorously encouraged financially, socially and morally to plug into a system that threatens our family’s welfare because it cannot value what is most valuable to family. Media, consumerism’s missionary, converts us with advertisements launched at us made specifically to make us feel uneasy about staying content with what we have right now. ‘Plug in!’ it coaxes. ‘It feels so good when you have just a little bit more.’ Chanting ‘more’ as our mantra, families are an unwelcome distraction.
In the US, fewer than two dozen corporations own and operate 90% of the mass media – controlling almost all books, magazines, records, videos, TV and radio stations, newspapers, wire services, and photo agencies. Thus the number of people who set the terms of public discussion in the US would easily fit into one small room. To the extent that they are visible at all, corporations use the mass media artfully to give themselves the appearance of benevolence. Developmentally, Australia is right on America’s heels. Maybe it is not too late to learn from their mistakes. Just let’s not be naive about the corporate agenda to preserve humanity for their own bottom line.
Economically speaking, preserving the species must make sense on the balance sheet. For example, much of the agenda to ‘help’ mothers by paid leave is founded on an economic basis: to breed more workers as Australia’s population is quickly aging. Sounds a bit like a chicken farm, doesn’t it? Therefore, everything human – how we birth our children, how we school them, how we raise and care for them, what we do with our elderly, how much time we have for creativity – must be manipulated to benefit the economy. Like the maternity leave, Single Mother’s Payment leaves us with the identical dilemma. Either the mum chooses the pension and stays home, thrusting her and her child into economic poverty, or she forfeits the pension to work full time and puts herself and her child into emotional poverty.
We are doing the same to our grandmothers and grandfathers. Too busy to nurture them in our families or communities, we will work harder, taking more time away from our children and them, to make the money to pay for the Elderly Home. There are reports now that many of our elderly are literally dying from loneliness. And our children are coming home to an empty house. Mum and Dad are out paying all the bills. Productivity is the asset, nurturing is the liability . . . as long as this value system stays intact, we raise our children solely in service to the economy and will hand them over to corporate giants like sacrificial lambs. This is scary and it is why many of our leaders are not to be trusted with our families. They have a bottom line directly at odds with our wellbeing, most of it driven by huge corporate lobby groups.
Newspapers reported recently that childcare centres are fast becoming the most lucrative investment for large corporations. They are putting our children on balance sheets, weighing the profits and losses. Will they care for our children or their interests? What kind of being are we creating that is not nurtured but rather bred to sustain consumerism?
For a while I was angry with ‘them’, all those faceless business tycoons and politicians who were undermining my family. But I have to get real and admit I am part of the problem. It is my greed that fuels their machine. As parents, we are not only victims to the religion but also fellow worshippers. Our desire to have it all is the tithing that builds the corporate church. We pray in shopping malls and grocery stores and while driving our child-filled gas consuming four-wheel drives to the latest M movie having communion under the golden arches afterwards. We pray to Nike, The Gap and Sony. We furnish our homes with rainforest timbers and read new age magazines printed on rainforest paper. We pray to the disposable diaper and childcare centre and make offerings to the great almighty television set who assails the same religious teachings to our children in the form of 2500 hours of advertising each by the time they are in kindergarten. More time than they will spend with their fathers.
To have it all, we willingly plug ourselves into the productivity machine signing on for economic slavery. In eerie similarity to that shocking scene in The Matrix where the camera pans back revealing an infinite field of human bodies being bred and harvested as energy sources, we wake up too late to see that we are servants to our own demise. But we will blame our leaders, Alqeada, our schools, our partners, the media and even our children.
At the time of writing, America is at the brink of war with Iraq. The Bali bombings and Washington sniper are being used as further evidence that we should join in the crusade against ‘terror’ and even use my child’s blood to do it. I can’t help but feel dubious behind almost every allegation due to the economical value system at work behind the American and Australian governments’ agenda. As long as the economy is God, can I believe them when they say they are fighting for my family? We all know this war is about oil, not our family’s ‘freedom’. Can we reduce our demand for oil in our everyday lives and therefore reduce their demand for war?
The evil is not some Muslim fanatical group, or some dark masked madman. We should be so lucky as to have such a simple target. Our enemy is far more all pervading and covert. It is greed and fear. Look at most issues circling our modern families: skyrocketing rates of birth interventions, midwifery crisis, vaccination, poor education, ADD, teen suicide, divorce, maternity leave, single mother poverty, genetically modified foods, television, the displacement of our elderly . . . and you will find a economical root to them all. Politicians craftily distract us from the real demon, pointing their fingers at some outside source of our woes. We are told to ‘buy more and fight for our right to buy more’. . . this is our only purpose in life according to them. It makes their bellies fat. Thom Hartman, author of Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, says that if petrol consumption in the States were reduced in each car by three miles to the gallon, they would not need to import oil. Apparently they are not interested in the reduction of oil consumption.
But who am I to complain when I remain a consumer unquestioningly? They after all are serving me to get more. And as long as I keep asking for it, then they will, by golly, be willing to take us into the next world war to keep me supplied. This is where our current value system is taking us. Maternity leave is just one of the bones thrown to keep us busy. We can gnaw on it forever, never looking beyond to see it is the value system in the first place that is the problem. It is time to introduce a new bottom line onto the balance sheet, a new value system. But my consumption habits run deep . . . this isn’t going to be easy.
I propose we put this question to our bottom line: Is it good for the kids? It can be a litmus test that is posed to all we do; personally, politically and globally. If I work overtime, to make that extra ten thousand dollars so I can take my family to Europe but have to spend so much time away from my children to do so, is it good for them? Do they need more experiences and stimulation, or do they just need a simple camping trip and me? Do I really need that bigger TV, what will that cost my kids? What about that extra dress, the new computer, that sexy four wheel drive . . . how will that increase work time therefore becoming a deficit to my nurturing time? What will that deficit cost the kids, not just mine but everyone’s? If I waste water, don’t recycle, don’t vote . . . ? If it is good for the kids, then it must also be good for the environment, for our sustainability, our quality of life, our future. It must be good for me.
This is not the 60s. We don’t have to be radical idealists to rebel against the system. For the system has become so radically anti-human that indeed the revolutionaries are just normal, ordinary conservative parents who love their kids.
You can read more of Kelly’s writing at EQUUS, here.