Bifurcated

you have to choose, and to know that you're choosing

I’ve written many times about the meaning of our declining rates of marriage and childbirth, in what I’ve called the politics of the death instinct. This is from 2022, when school reopening was still very scary, toddlers flying without masks was a major health risk, and the Canadian government was expanding MAiD to help the poor and the depressed die with immediate and government-assisted dignity:

Children are the future. They’re the people who will be here after we’re dead. And we increasingly seem to have a considerable subculture, or a growing explicitness in mainstream culture, that there is no future — that there’s no point to the existence of any continuing human presence after we’re gone. Relentless sexualization of childhood, relentless hysteria over the health risk of contact with children’s bodies (a psychologically interesting combination of premises, sexualizing frightening bodies that carry disease and have to be covered with masks and locked down), the casual turn to suicide as a solution to social pathologies: death instinct.

So I spent several days in a campground with an elite corps of Tell Me How This Ends readers, this week, watching a good number of children ride around on bikes and raft down the river with their parents. We helped a dad drag his raft from the river to the trailer while his three young children waited¹, and we talked to a different family at their campsite as their three young children ran around and used the family river raft as a trampoline. Three young children, is the pattern I’m declaring on all of two examples. One of the daughters at the campsite presented me with her Junior Ranger workbook from a recent national park visit, and we talked in serious tones about the grueling testing standard for the aspiring junior ranger. Blue Highways Natalism. There are people in the country who are voting for the future, with their bodies and with the days of their lives. Go to America: go to a campground and see the health and the strength.

Also, driving down the I-5 for home, I watched the morning commute of men, alone and doing the fentanyl zombie shuffle up the shoulder of the freeway for town after spending the night in freeway-adjacent encampments. “Why are there so many pedestrians on I5?” a Reddit thread asks. The small towns of Southern Oregon have a remarkable homeless population, so obviously drug-centered that the constant narrative in news and politics about housing availability is insultingly obtuse. We camped near the unincorporated town of Merlin, where the lifestyle-poor white thirtysomethings sit in front of the one grocery store to take turns charging their phones on the single outdoor socket. Meanwhile, one state to the south down in Redding — a remarkably pretty town town graced with extraordinary factor endowments — a bunch of the downtown hotels are obviously surviving on housing vouchers, and the parking lots are full of people who don’t have anywhere else to be.

Click the link to watch the video from the Portland street journalist Kevin Dahlgren:

So: Go to America and see the real country outside the media narrative, I keep saying. But which one is the real country? It seems to me — this is my guess, not a thing I can prove — that both are equally real and more-or-less equally available, but that the “mainstream” culture is increasingly offering the decline and the despair. If you don’t make a conscious choice, you can slide into the culture of degeneracy and hopelessness without much effort. Remaining in the hopeful America, the one that’s choosing a viable future, strikes me as a deliberate act that requires willpower, consciousness, and sustained focus. Campgrounds seem to help. There’s something very ugly brewing, but you can choose to stay away from it — if you notice that it requires the decision. Seen on the Internet:

1. THIS ONE TIME MY SISTER FELL IN THE RIVER, they explained, hopping from foot to foot. No, they weren’t scared — they just got her back into the boat. Like, obviously.