The death of generations

A friend e-mails this shocking story from China: generations of Chinese have been wiped out in the earthquake. Really, it's breathtaking to consider the magnitude of the loss -- a loss at least in part to be blamed on China's barbaric one-child policy. Excerpt:

Hopes of survival of the 40,000-odd people missing or trapped in debris seemed to recede some 56 hours after the earthquake struck China's southwest province of Sichuan. Only a few people have so far been pulled out of fallen buildings and other debris, suggesting that rescue mission in this mountainous region is extremely daunting.

With China practising one-child family norm over the past two decades, many of the parents that have lost children were suddenly faced the possibility of an entire generation or family tree being wiped out.

Several heart rending scenes emerged out of the havoc. Liu Ning, a school teacher, saved the lives of 59 children trapped under the debris of the Beichuan Middle School. He later found that his own daughter, a student in class ninth, had died in the quake.

Who will care for these parents in their old age? The state? Not only must they be shattered by grief, but they're probably terrified about the future.

And by the way, Americans are going to have to face a similar problem in the not too distant future. As Peter Augustine Lawler observed back in 2005, the state will not have the financial resources to provide adequate care for the elderly, because there will not be enough workers to pay the bills. Why not enough children? Because neither the Baby Boomers, nor their children, had sufficiently large families -- and they (we) can't blame our government for forcing us to severely limit the size of our families.

But it's about more than demographics, as Lawler explains:

This potential crisis in long-term care is due in part to the last century’s great advances in medicine. People are living longer and longer, but often at the price of living with severe infirmities—bodily or mental—that render them incapable of taking care of themselves for long periods of old age. At the same time, fewer and fewer people are available to serve as voluntary caregivers: today’s baby boomers had fewer children than their parents; these grown children are more geographically dispersed; and family bonds are increasingly complicated by the high percentage of divorce. And there is no reason to believe that there will be enough professional caregivers to fill these gaps. The cost of decent professional care is increasingly daunting, and fewer and fewer of us will be able to provide it ourselves or pay others to provide it well for those we love.

But this crisis does not arise simply from demographic shifts or shortages of manpower and money. It is, at bottom, a crisis of culture, a crisis about “caring,” a product of our society’s opinions on freedom, dependence, and care. It confronts us with one of the peculiar ironies of our time: The more we understand ourselves as independent of others (i.e., in pursuit of our own self-interest and self-preservation), the more dependent we ultimately become on others (i.e., more in need of the care that all human beings rely upon, especially in their old age). Our spirit of ownership and the realities of our dependence inevitably come into conflict, and this conflict is not easily resolved.

UPDATE: Sorry, I forgot to put in a link to Peter Augustine Lawler's original essay from The New Atlantis.