Boys good, girls bad.

Happened to see two stories on the same disturbing subject on the same night on different networks. In the upcoming generations, the girls have been bred out and now there aren’t enough women for all the men. 60 Minutes talked about this in China, and Newsworld had the same issue in India and Pakistan. In China it is state-sanctioned, but in IndPak it’s “cultural”. How much forward thinking would have been needed to see this crisis coming?

In the Indian villages, the idea was “hey, we can always find women in the next village”. Too bad nobody thought to ask if the folks in the next village were thinking the same thing. Now if you don’t have land or some form of wealth, forget it, pal, you are single forever. And men without women equals one thing: trouble. Self destruction and destruction of one’s community and environment.

And not to get all Bushie about it, but lots of men with no future in Pakistan means lots of easy recruits for jihad. When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.

In one family, there was a man who had three unmarried sons. He was ashamed and embarrassed about it. The sons, in their early 30’s, knew their lives were already over. They also clearly expressed their fear and understanding that their society is doomed. But the father had a fourth son, who was married, and had a baby. And the baby was a boy! What endless joy! Does nobody grasp the problem yet?

I understand the women, though. If your life is crap and your daughter’s life is crap and the only thing that can ensure that your grandchild’s life isn’t crap is that your grandchild is a boy, then you want the best life for that kid. It makes no sense on a wider scale, but is perfectly reasonable within each individual family.

The temptation is to point fingers at these people and tsk tsk them because we believe them to be poor, ignorant and having cultures that provide a lousy, miserable existence for females. But in clinics in the Western world, if couples have an option of choosing the sex of their baby, more often than not they go with a boy. Human beings prefer boys to girls, especially since in many cases, there’s only going to be one kid in the family. My conclusion: whenever the human race is given the opportunity to control its destiny, we opt for self-destruction. Whether it’s quick by the means of nukes, or slow by environmental destruction or genetic engineering, we have a death wish. What a bunch of losers we are.