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Timing (Free verse) by Dovina In another age,
I would have married young,
To a pre-selected man from my village,
had too many children,
broken my back with my hands,
died early,
rested beneath the second of three crosses
behind his house,
while our hated king lived on a far away hill.
I would have believed in servitude
and done what the priest said,
until my husband came home drunk,
layed me and fell asleep.
Then I would have hung a red lantern
for seafare to Paris.
Up the ladder:
Know Me
Down the ladder:
Direct Current
Votes: (green: user, blue: anonymous)
Arithmetic Mean: 7.142857
Posted: October 10, 2006 1:30 PM PDT; Last modified: October 10, 2006 1:30 PM PDTWeighted score: 5.576303 Overall Rank: 2386 Comments:
[9]
nypoet22 @ 65.10.104.91
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10-Oct-06/4:15 PM
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Reply
this is inspiring. i would have liked more sensory detail about the hypothetical life you pictured, but i love the end, it's of a real person, tough and hard and ultimately free. and when the mind is free, the rest is just a matter of time...
[n/a]
Dovina @ 12.72.42.194
> nypoet22
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15-Oct-06/7:27 PM
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Reply
And if the mind and body are trapped, they look for any way out.
This is great writing. Looks like you are looking back in time and seeing the positive side of not being married (or something like that). Cool write and good ending.
Nice write, if you edit this maybe look at making all the line endings strong - there are a couple of weak endings which disrupted the rhythm a little for me.
Story of my life.
True of many women in rural India except for the last two lines !!
Yes, I think there are parts of the world still in the Middle Ages. Maybe they still consider women possessions, not quite human, of value as cows and horses are. I think these woman would have fewer children if they could decide on the issue, and the world would be a better place. What do you think of the estimate of 9 billion people by the yeat 2050?
In third world countries, more children = More hands = More Revenue for the family ! Its a vicious cycle !
India is a first to second world country.
Yes, but it's populated mostly by non-whites with a religion which nobody understands, odd-shaped gods, brightly-coloured clothes, stuff being sold in the street, and lepers. So of course it's going to be seen as full of quaintly backward poor people too helpless to do anything for theirselves by those of us fortunate enough to live in this respectably black-suited world of legalities and pristine healthcare. I mean, it's not as though we have to worry about beggars here, is it?
The first 3 times I read that comment I thought you said 'more chicken = more hands = more revenue'. I need a dyslexia test.
Thanks for reading it thrice. What I said was more like âMore hands = more chickens = more revenue.â The problem is that our present six-billion population is destined for nine billion by 2050 if we donât scrap that idea. And women all over the world are mostly willing to scrap it, if only their ruling men would agree.
Scrap the idea of women as possessions you mean? Maybe it would work. But you could also argue that it'll have the reverse effect, like over here. Women are not treated as possessions (for the most part) in Britain any more, so thirteen-year-old girls are free to fuck whoever they want without contraception, get pregnant, and contribute to the rising teenage pregnancy rate. Not to mention the spiralling number of single-parent families. That's in very simple, not-capable-of-much-real-thought terms, but I think it explains what I mean.
Of course, I'm not saying that women should be treated as objects. But if you don't want nine billion people on the planet, absolute liberty isn't the solution.
"Absolute liberty" for women is better than slavery of women, which we have, for the most part in India and other countries where women have many more children than in the UK and the US. The goal should be no more than two children per woman, and yes, oterh remideis besides "absolute freedom" are good. But studies show that if women are given the choice, they will have far fewer babies in third world countries than they do now.
Well I've never been to India or any third world nations, so I'll take your word for it (Amanda doesn't seem particularly enslaved though, to be fair). I wouldn't want to see anyone have to live as a slave, man, woman or child. But similarly, being totally freed will not make any impact on the situation, I don't think. If you're talking about children being born purely as workers, then simply changing attitudes won't do anything. Kids will still be mass-conceived purely out of necessity. You've got to find some way of making everyone richer without adversely affecting the economy.
If you say everyone should be totally free, you can't then limit the number of children they can have. You can't even set an unofficial 'target', because that's doing pretty much the same thing as enforcing a strict limit, except it's being done through emotional blackmail rather than armed troops. And hasn't China proven that even if you do set a child cap, the population will still swell uncontrollably?
Amanda is not one of them, but she has said that most of the women in India are virtually enslaved to their husbands and have far more children than they want. We cannot just tell them to rebel. But it is WRONG. It's a society problem that will kill the earth as we know it if something doesn't change.
The world as we know it will change either way. If we do nothing then eventually nature will cut us back down again. It's already happening in China, in the AIDS-ridden countryside. But if we go for an all-out change of attitude on a large scale, there is no way that the world can stay the same either. For one thing, the idea of lasting marriage will continue on the slippery downward slope that it's already on.
Arguments loke this should be won by the person having the most to lose if his way is not followed. I yield the world's future to you.
What have I to lose? By 2050 I probably won't care too much about this, if I'm still alive, because by that point I'll have to keep working until I die just to live that long. The fact is (as I see it) that giving women more liberty and keeping the world's population down share very little common ground. Nobody should be wholly subject to another person. But if everyone is completely independent, where does that leave marriage? It will no longer be a binding force which keeps people together through the rough times out of necessity. As soon as a marriage has its first problem, there's nothing preventing one party upping sticks and leaving. You'll say that there's nothing to show such a result will necessarily happen, and there isn't. But just look at the general first world trends over recent decades. Divorce rates and the number of single-parent families are increasing on a scale unimaginable a century ago. What was once a sacred bond is becoming little more than a token novelty which can be discarded at any time.
As for the rising population, well we're going to reach the limit one day unless natural forces intervene, aren't we? And when we do, war, famine or plague will keep the numbers in check. It's ironic that you call the mentality one from the Middle Ages (which is true enough) but look for a reduction in numbers, because the only thing which can drastically diminish the number of human beings on the planet (aside from a good ol' epidemic) is a social return to the Middle Ages. While we continue to attempt to create an entire first world planet, we will create more problems of space and resources. After all, the whole point of first world society is to be populous and prosperous. But are there enough world resources for Earth to be totally first world? I don't think any of my comment made sense.
At least you didnât make any typos that I caught. Your comment does make sense, but it rambles from the problem of overpopulation into the sanctity of marriage. I support you on that sidetrack. But where you glibly say that war and illness will naturally correct overpopulation, I must complain about the suffering such corrections cause. If we are doing any better than past generations at making life better and alleviating suffering, let us look for means of stopping life before it starts, not after it outwits the planet, or kills itself fighting over resources. Surely, modern humanity can agree on this basic premise.
I tend to go off on tangents. All anyone can do at such a time is nod politely and humour me.
The thing is, if we have to afford potential human beings equal (or nearly equal) consideration, as you seem to be saying, is it not more immoral to deprive them of the chance to live than it is to let them come into a world where their chances of a high quality of life are slim? I guess it's an extension of the abortion issue. And anyway, if modern humanity was bright enough to be able to agree on this, surely we wouldn't need to instigate any action? People would work it out for theirselves. Rather than leap into action against the ordinary people (quite literally) on the street, I'd rather see some sort of advancement take place in the higher echelonsof government; i.e. less corruption and more looking after the people they're supposed to represent. Naive of me to say this, I'm sure, but at present the lifestyle many impoverished families lead is the only one which is going to allow them to see tomorrow. I don't think that any change of attitudes, however noble and right, will remedy the situation one little bit. Unfortunately the West, who has the potential to make changes happen, has been neutralised in the regime-altering department after Afghanistan and Iraq. America might get away with going into Iran, but beyond that what political clout will you be left with? We already have none, and I don't see that improving for a long while.
Does knowledge beget responsibility? That, I believe, is the question. Does the knowledge of how to cure smallpox, for example, beget responsibility to do all in our power to spread the vaccine throughout the world until the disease is eradicated? Few people asked, in those days, whether it was one personâs right to incur smallpox if that person wanted it. I do not say that birth control should be forced on all people for the good of future generations, but it should be recommended, encouraged, funded, and rewarded in more ways than insightful people are now doing. The suffering and death resulting from not using that knowledge promises to be greater than the suffering we would have seen if we had not used our knowledge about smallpox.
Oh, by the way, typos = theirselves, echelonsof. :)
Well okay, if you're not deeply Catholic or something like that, maybe birth control should be made more available and acceptable. But you've then got to tie that in with the aforementioned shift in attitudes, and more importantly, with a change in circumstances for those people who you're talking about. And that change in circumstance won't happen if you just target the ordinary people. What power do they have?
You say that women in this sort of situation would prefer to have fewer children. That may well be true at present, but it's a potentially cyclic desire. We're seeing it happen here; women wanted, and to an extent got, the power to have their own careers, lives, freedom and something vaguely approaching equality with men. And it's backfired spectacularly for some, who've got to the point where they've decided they now want a family, but can't have one. A rising number of women are now eschewing the career opportunities in order to return to having a traditional family. That's how I was brought up so my view is probably blinkered, certainly, but in 5 or 10 years we could be seeing a large percentage of women actually wanting to be housewives with 3 or 4 kids. And the same could easily happen in the parts of the world we've been discussing; after a decade or two of liberty, women may begin to actively want to return to being mothers-of-many. In which case, won't we be back to where we started? As for the typos, I'll admit to the second, should have had a space, but 'themselves' really annoys me. 'Work it out for them selves' doesn't make sense to me. The self is the possession of the individual, right? So 'my self' and 'your self' should in the plural become 'their selves', surely?
You seem unconvinced of the major point I have been trying to make, as evidenced by your diversions to side issues. I agree with you on the trend back to motherhood in England and America, and I agree on the transitory nature of womenâs current opinions in developing nations where most of them presently want fewer children. Those are good points, but they are not the main issue.
If the worldâs population grows at its current rate, then within a hundred years or so, the planet cannot support all the people, or at best, it cannot give them any minimum quality of life. The obvious solution is fewer births. Other solutions like allowing war and disease to do the job are as inappropriate as ignoring the smallpox vaccine would have been. Relying on future technology to support more people is not going to work in the long run. If you will grant me that, I will grant you âtheirselves.â
I'll have to ask forgiveness for sidetracking. I tend to chase butterflies when I'm supposed to be hunting the jabberwock, although they always turn out to be Jabberwock-Life-Force butterflies, so they're a partly relevant quarry.
So the world's population is going to outgrow the planet's means of supporting it. That's true enough, but while the human race is prosperous it will always grow, and that cutoff point will be reached one day regardless of how long it's put it off. I don't believe it could ever be practically possible to keep the earth's population static. If you only want to look fifty or a hundred years into the future, then fine. Your argument is valid, regardless of whether it can be successfully implemented. But this is immediately either giving a greater moral status to the children of the next 50-100 years than to those born after, or it's saying that we have a diminished responsibility towards those born after the cutoff point. Unless, of course, you are just going for buying us a bit more time in which to find a complete answer. That's fine by me. And I'll grant that the obvious solution is fewer births...plus social change which makes it unnecessary to have many children. But, if you accept that we're going to max out the planet sooner or later, you've also got to accept that we need a more permanent solution as well. Maybe we could populate Mars. Please grant me 'theirselves'. It'll make my day.
I will grant you âtheirselves,â but just barely. You have pushed against my fence of morality just about hard enough, spared only by confession that âthe obvious solution is fewer births . . .â What you donât seem to accept is that if population growth stops, then overpopulation will never occur. We cannot predict much about the world in 300 years, except that if population grows at the present rate, our descendents will have a huge problem. Can you not see how imperative population control is for our generation?
Of course I can, but how can you possibly hope to stop the entire world's population growing? You can slow it down - through birth control - but I don't believe anyone could ever stop it. Therefore, overpopulation will inevitably happen one day. Does our task, by your account, end simply with pushing back that day? We cannot predict exactly what the world will be like in 300 years, but we can say pretty confidently that the planet will not be any bigger. We can also say that the natural resources are unlikely to have suddenly replenished theirselves (*grin*), and you've already said we can't rely on future technology to provide. So yes, population control will be a useful tool for giving a bit more breathing space to the future generations. But we still need to come up with an ultimate solution (nearly said 'final solution' there, that would have been interesting...), either to hold a static population level (which I don't think can be done) or find a new way of accommodating and providing for everyone. Maybe we could build massive tower blocks and multi-storey farms.
We agree on the imperative to stop population growth. We disagree on whether it can be done. We are two climbers trapped on a ledge, where we will die of exposure during the night. I say that we can take a leap to a nearby ledge, and possibly survive. You say the leap is too long.
I say the leap is too long because it's a gap of twenty feet and I broke my legs falling onto the ledge. But I do say that if we can fashion a crude parachute and a couple of splints it may just be possible to tumble not too fatally down to a more promising vantage point.
To that I can agree, and perhaps end a another long, and delightful I might add, discourse.
Amen, unless of course anyone else has an interesting and enlightening view on the matter.
Wow look at the pretty colors this discussion has created! I say the one with the most children wins.
Yes, these feminine pastel colors have a subliminal calming of the nasties.
Most of the men in developing countries agree that the one with the most children wins; and that is the major source of the problem. I presume you were kidding.
Was Paris any better?
This is really good. Not sure about layed. Should it be laid. I don't know.
One dictionary says layed, but downrates the usage as improper. Maybe it can be done either way.
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