Here are two articles published in the National Post. It was discussed at lenght on other sites, but I copy-paste them here, because you need a subscription to access them.
1-At a restaurant near you, the war between Daters and Breeders
Jonathan Kay
National Post
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Hi! Yes, you over at the next table. I was hoping we could have a chat. Mind if I pull up a chair?
You two are on a date, right? I can tell. You make a lovely couple! I'm sorry to intrude. This won't take a moment. We'll be done by the time your entrees arrive.
You know what this is about, don't you? Come on, now -- don't play coy. How many glances have you shot over at my table since you sat down? You've been polite enough not to actually say anything, naturally. But every time one of my kids make a peep, I detect your umbraged stare.
That's usually how things play out between our two camps -- the Daters and the Breeders -- isn't it? No loud scenes or confrontations, just a ritualized discharge of passive-aggressive gazes, frowns and eyeball rolls. If things get especially out of control -- like, maybe a toddler-launched bread roll sails over your heads -- you switch tables or complain to your waiter. But that's usually as far as it goes.
No, no -- don't try to deny it. Let's be adults about this. And don't be insulted, either. Hey -- I've been in your shoes! That's the thing:Most Daters have never been Breeders. But every Breeder has been a Dater. That's how we got to be Breeders in the first place.
Which is to say: I know what it's like. It's Saturday night. You're trying to get a vibe going with your honey. You've sprung for a good bottle and the table d'hote at a trendy boite. Things are going smoothly. Then all of a sudden, some noisy brood spills out of a Honda CR-V into the adjoining table. Next thing you know, you're surrounded by chicken fingers, sippy-cups and all things Dora.
Kind of kills the mood, right? Nobody wants to pitch woo in a daycare centre.
Ah, see -- you're nodding. We understand each other. Aren't you glad we had this little chat? We're not so different, you and I.
Well, I suppose we are in one crucial chronological sense: I'm you ? in 10 years.
So maybe now that I've sown the seeds of empathy, let me describe the restaurant experience from my perspective.
The first thing you should know about the family that invades your favourite restaurant at 6 p.m. is that everyone has been up for 12 hours. Kids don't know weekend from weekday: They bounce around from the crack of dawn. And by necessity, so do their parents. That's why you and your date look so relaxed and wellgroomed, while I've got bags under my eyes and stains on my clothes.
Kids are blessings -- don't get me wrong. But after a day of weekend child care, I'm ready for someone else to cook for me. Sometimes, that means drivethru at McDonald's. But every once and a while, the missus and I get ambitious, and we go for something more upscale.
Like tonight, for instance. This is a big deal for us, a special treat. And we don't like to have it ruined by guilt and cold stares from the likes of, well, you.
I know, I know -- there are some Breeders who give the rest of us a bad name. We all have our favourite horror stories: the parents who sit there idly chatting with one another while a kid wails away. Or who spread their kids' toys out all over the floor, like they own the place. Or the "continental" types who drag overtired children to trendy restaurants late at night. They deserve all the nasty looks they get. But me, I'm one of the good ones. I come early, eat quickly and get the bill paid by the time
the Daters' rush starts at 7 p.m. When my kid screams, I take her outside till she quiets down -- even if it means my food's always cold by the time I eat it, and the only conversation my wife and I get to share is a quick bicker over who forgot the colouring books.
Like everything else about parenting, dining out en famille is hard work, in other words. That's why it rankles us Breeders when we get the leper treatment just because, despite our best efforts, our kids occasionally spill their food, raise their voices and generally act their age.
OK, lecture's over. I've left my wife holding the fort over at our table long enough. Plus, I see your food is coming. Ah, you got the Smendozzata. And Madame has the San Giorgio. Excellent choices! I've always wondered what they tasted like served hot.
But please don't forget what I've told you. Indeed, you may want to commit my little speech to memory. Ten years from now, I predict, you'll be repeating it to a couple sitting in this very restaurant, word for word.
Jkay@nationalpost.com
2-The sequel:
Send in the assmonkeys
Behold the latest environmentalist fad: going childless
Jonathan Kay, National Post
Published: Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Last Tuesday, I wrote a column for this space entitled "At a restaurant near you, the war between Daters and Breeders." It was one of those airy, self-indulgent pieces of cultural commentary that otherwise self-important op-ed pundits publish every few months to "show their human side." (See: I eat in restaurants with my kids --just like you!)
My basic point was that restaurant diners shouldn't go hard on parents whose kids emit the odd yelp at dinner time. I know, I know -- not exactly Pulitzer material. But I can't solve the Middle East conflict every week.
Besides, vapid as it was, the column hit a nerve: In the days following publication, I got a flood of e-mail feedback. The messages came in two flavours: (1) Brief, appreciative comments from fellow parents, often punctuated with smiley-faced emoticons; and (2) searing, cuckoo-pants rants like this one from a certain Gaby Kaplan:
"Mr. Kay, I hope we never have the misfortune to have your family ruin a nice restaurant near us, because I could hardly resist the compulsion to empty ice water into the faces of both you and your broodsow of a partner. Attention, Mr. Look-My-Sperm-Works, your job as a parent does not end at ejaculation: Would you please show the rest of us the Get Out of Courtesy card that they gave you when your wife grunted out your first replicant? Polite parents do not assault diners with their loud brood of assmonkeys."
I got so many eccentric messages of this type that I suspected an outside writing campaign: The Post's rank-and-file readership couldn't be this weird.
Sure enough, after a little ego-surfing, I found my column had been posted as flame-fodder on selfishheathens.com, Reprodcutive Ruckus and other Web sites catering to the "Childfree" lifestyle. (Whatever you do, don't call them "childless." As one site puts it, "'Childless' implies that we're missing something we want -- and we aren't. We consider ourselves Childfree -- free of the loss of personal freedom, money, time and energy that having children requires.")
This is apparently a vibrant niche on the Internet. And skewering "pathetic, self-congratulatory, over-entitled asses" (to quote the above-cited Welcome Back, Cotter name-alike) is the favored pastime. Masochist that I am, I spent much of the weekend surfing their many complaints about broodsows, replicants and the travails of living in a "kidcentric" society. (Sadly, none were as well-written and amusing as Mr. Kaplan's.)
For now, Childfree remains something of an obscure movement. But as environmentalism gradually becomes the West's secular religion, that may change. Indeed, if Stephane Dion and other Kyoto fanatics get into power, a sanitized version of Gaby Kaplan's complaint that I've "burden[ed] our humanity- clogged planet with [my] obnoxious seed" may become the stuff of public-service campaigns.
Here in Canada, the most militant enemy of human fecundity is environmental activist Paul Watson, president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Earlier this month, he declared that the world's human population -- "the AIDS of the earth," as he puts it -- should be cut by 85%. Humans would revert to a car-free "primitive lifestyle" and, under the creepiest part of his plan, only "a very small percentage of humans" would be permitted to reproduce.
In Britain, the more polite face of this movement is represented by the respected Optimum Population Trust, which last week put out a briefing statement exhorting the world's parents to have fewer children. Noting that a British baby born today can be expected to produce about 744 tons of planet-warming CO2 (the equivalent of 620 return flights from London to New York) over the course of a lifetime, the trust concluded that "Population limitation should therefore be seen as the most cost-effective carbon offsetting strategy available to individuals and nations." (Penny-pinching paramours take note: Given the expected cost of global warming, the Trust calculates that the use of a 35-pence condom produces a "9,000,000% potential return on investment." How's that for safesex pillow talk?)
On an intellectual level, I have a certain amount of respect for anyone who truly would forsake reproduction in the furtherance of "carbon offsets": Unlike the hypocrite yuppy who drives his Hummer to three different malls so he can pick the right kind of "carbonneutral shampoo" (yes, the product exists), the Paul Watsons of the world are at least trying to make good on their convictions.
But in my gut, I am well and truly weirded out. As George Orwell wrote, the surest sign of dangerous extremism is the willingness to pursue ideological purity and societal perfection at the expense of fundamental human imperatives. All things considered, I would much rather live in an overheated world teeming with assmonkeys than a Kyotofied utopia in which human life was measured against carbon credits.
And thankfully, my broodsow feels the same way.
Jkay@nationalpost.com