From Newsgroup: soc.culture.bulgaria

America is running out of Americans
A scathing review of our culture: children were once understood as part
of adulthood rather than an interruption of it, but no longer.
George P. Brooks | September 8, 2026

America has developed an extraordinary talent for discussing symptoms
while politely avoiding diseases. We debate Social Security solvency,
labor shortages, school enrollment, housing, immigration, economic
growth, loneliness, and the deterioration of communities as though
these phenomena occupy separate universes. Beneath many of them sits an uncomfortable demographic reality: Americans are having fewer children,
having them later, or deciding not to have them at all. Conservatives frequently respond with the predictable admonition to marry and
reproduce, while progressives often treat declining fertility as either economically inevitable or environmentally beneficial. Both responses
strike me as inadequate because the interesting question is not simply
why Americans are having fewer children. The question is what happened
to a civilization in which creating the next generation increasingly
feels irrational?

Children were once understood as part of adulthood rather than an
interruption of it. Marriage, family, work, faith, community, and responsibility formed a reasonably coherent architecture through which
people understood a meaningful life. That architecture has fractured.
Modern America increasingly presents adulthood as an indefinite project
of personal optimization: acquire credentials, build a career, travel, accumulate experiences, establish financial security, discover
yourself, heal yourself, protect your peace, and perhaps eventually
consider another human being sufficiently compatible to share the
remaining decades. Children enter this worldview almost as an
inconvenient footnote because children are the antithesis of radical
autonomy. They require sacrifice, permanence, patience, money, sleep, compromise, and the horrifying realization that the universe no longer revolves around you.
I say that without romanticizing parenthood. Raising children is
difficult, expensive, exhausting, and occasionally terrifying.
Conservatives lose credibility when we reduce declining fertility to
selfish millennials refusing to grow up. Housing costs are real.
Childcare is expensive. Healthcare can be financially punishing. Young
adults often begin their working lives carrying substantial debt while confronting a housing market that makes previous generationsrCO
experiences seem almost mythological. Telling a 29-year-old couple to
rCLjust have childrenrCY while they are calculating whether they can afford another bedroom is not a family policy. It is a slogan.
Yet economics cannot explain everything. Human beings throughout
history produced children under conditions considerably harsher than
ours. Something cultural has changed as well, and conservatives should
be willing to say it. We have spent decades dismantling institutions
that once encouraged permanence while constructing a culture that
worships optionality. Marriage becomes one lifestyle choice among many.
Sex becomes recreation detached from reproduction. Divorce becomes
ordinary. Pornography industrializes fantasy. Dating applications
convert human beings into endlessly scrollable commodities, creating
the illusion that someone slightly better is always one swipe away.
_Men and women increasingly discuss one another not as potential
partners but as opposing interest groups negotiating terms of
surrender_.

rCa

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/america-is-running-out-of-americans/


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the lunatics are in my head ...

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