Proposal to abolish marriage

The Dilbert cartoonist writes:

Last night I was watching a special on CNN about the United States in the 1960s. A women’s rights activist complained that being home all day with two small kids was mental torture. She was nearly in tears. I totally get that. I love kids, but being around them for more than ten minutes feels like brain death. You can’t think your own thoughts, do what you want to do, or take your eyes off them. And 80% of your interactions can be unpleasant if you are the disciplinarian.

Being a parent on a school night can be torture. The schools load up the kids with hours of homework and hand them off to their parents, tired, restless, and unsatisfied. The workload is beyond what most kids can handle without a struggle. The parents compensate by yelling and threatening their children. The family environment is a cage fight on a good day.

You know what would solve that?

Get rid of marriage.

The only reason the local school system can crap on kids with truckloads of useless homework is because they hand-off the problem to parents. If kids were under one set of rules all day (such as the school’s rules) that wouldn’t happen. The schools would adjust the workload to be reasonable because THEY would have to deal with the fallout, not the poor parents coming home from long days at work.

I’m not suggesting that schools raise kids. I’m only going to make the case that marriage is civilization’s biggest mistake and we’re all too brainwashed to admit the obvious.

For the sake of comparison, imagine a system in which kids are raised by some sort of organized partnership of parents, teachers, and medical professionals. Parents can spend as much quality time as they want with their kids, but mostly for mentoring and social reasons. The jobs of discipline, healthcare, feeding, fitness, and education would be handled by the greater organization.

He is probably trolling us, but this is the direction we are heading. Marriage and family laws and policies have gotten so damaged that his proposal will seem like a better alternative.

Likewise, our health care system is so screwed up, that a fully socialized medical system now seems better than Obamacare.

A commenter replies:

I became a father a year and a half ago. The idea of giving her away to strangers, to a school or institution so they raise her goes against every instinct that I have. It's not about having "quality time" whatever that means. Being her father is the thing. It's the job, it's the responsibility. it's the taking care of someone, teaching someone. It's not a burden, it's a mission.

When I was a kid I hated my family, and I dreamt of running away and living in a parenthood-free socialist hippy farm. Many years later I discovered families aren't the problem. People are the problem. Some people are inept and shouldn't have kids, shouldn't be burdened. People should have kids when they have a certain degree of emotional intelligence and skills to pass on, and the abiltiy to teach these skills. And people should have kids when they have the motivation and drive to do it and do it well. It's a very important job.

The kid experiences everything in a magnified way. it comes pre-written. Anything mom or dad do is magnified x10. Rules are laws. Little incidents are major adventures. Everything has significance. It's a delicate ecosystem.

Teacher, doctors, gubernamental officers, neighbors, etc, they cant do the job. They just cant, because they don't care enough - they cant ever care enough, not as it was their own child.

The solution for most things is that people don't have kids and we go back to being just a few, but that the few are wanted and loved and have meaningful relationships.

Moving the business to the state would make things worse. As in, how much would you've liked to have been raised in a foster home.

He is right except for one thing -- if he ends up in family court, then there is a good chance that judges and psychologists will use the law to destroy it all and put him on a visitation schedule. He will be reduced to what some bureaucrat thinks is quality time. His opinion may change then.

Update: See this rant:

I learned how to tell if a man was dead by looking in his eyes. ...

Men over 40 were lied to. The rest of us have no excuse. ...

Most men are dead, but you are free to live.

There is wisdom in that essay. Those who defend marriage and family are usually defending some other system that we do not have anymore.