The idea that the more educated the population was, the more readily its problems could be solved had quietly faded away. -- Ian McEwan, The Child in Time, location 342
Conservatives have their own level of inconsistency. They would like to see abortion banned, or if they cannot quite achieve that, they'd like to see it severely restricted, and as far as I know, very few of the right wing address affluence and pregnancy termination. On the scale of relative moral value, they aren't too sympathetic to single mothers who have their children, as I am sure Lori Silverbush would agree in the way she contextualizes her film.
I hate the phrase food insecurity, a catch phrase that presupposes our ability to control things like arable land production and the pressures of industrial livestock. The young minority mother in the clip struggling to feed her children and doing it while employed does not earn my sympathy for one reason, despite the fact that my aging quadriplegia has me in a straight jacket almost as constrictive: she had the sex that gave her the children without considering her education or her options, like marriage.
Yes, I had impulsive sex. Had I conceived I would have aborted-- a hard but necessary choice, as no one can have it all, either the left or the right. Abortion can be both, an economic necessity and a lack of personal responsibility, as it was for my middle child sister. Abstinence is a difficult bar to maintain, but it isn't impossible, and had I attempted to be that disciplined at this young woman's age, maybe I would not be stuck in the land of the black underclass, watching my potential rot through the hate in my bone marrow.
A Place at the Table is one documentary I am skipping, despite the complex geopolitical aspects of nutrition. If progressives want to end starvation then they need to acknowledge that it begins with learning constraint. Everything has a price tag.
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