We live in a generation filled with Ebenezer Scrooges, the leading character of Charles Dickens’s classic, A Christmas Carol. People usually hurl comparisons to Scrooge against those holding a disposition toward greed and stinginess. Ebenezer, before his reformation, thought only of money, whether that be how to earn it more or to save it better.
We certainly have such men and women among us. But we also live among a different manifestation of the literary character. To understand this point, we must remember another truth about the man: Scrooge is single and childless.
So are many millennials and Generation Zers. We have heard much over the last few years about a “birth dearth.” Ever since the Great Recession (2007-2009), birth rates in America have plummeted to well below numbers needed merely to replace passing generations with new ones.
People give various reasons for having fewer children or none at all. Some struggle to find a suitable mate, especially with the growing divides of education and partisanship between the sexes. Others think themselves incapable due to financial struggles linked to the broader economic hardships of the last 20 years. Still others have plenty of money but avoid childbearing out of a fairly transparent self-absorption — they don’t want the hassle on their time or constraint on their finances.
One might think today’s childless Scrooges would be the last group, those who are well-off and selfishly avoid begetting children. But Scrooge’s rejection of marriage and family does not start off as simple greed. Instead, it began as a deep, fearful insecurity.
When the Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge to see his historic Christmases, one stop includes Scrooge’s betrothed, Belle, calling off their engagement. She observes that Scrooge no longer loves her but instead cares only about money. Scrooge protests that for “the world … there is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty, and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!” Belle responds by saying Scrooge fears the world too much. In particular, he fears the shame heaped on poverty so much he slowly has re-ordered his life’s purpose to place him “beyond the chance of its sordid reproach.”
In other words, fear of economic uncertainty and its attendant social consequences drove Scrooge to reject marriage and family, among many other mistakes. That kind of anxiety haunts many today; the fright of those specters has kept many a new life from being created (or, in the case of abortion, surviving to term).
Moreover, we will soon see the terrible effects of this birth dearth. Yes, the consequences will be bad for society and the economy on a grand scale, but the pernicious results will also be deeply personal.
Many today might see themselves in Scrooge on this count, too.
After re-watching Belle end their engagement, Scrooge then must watch another Christmas where the same woman is happily married to another man. Belle is surrounded by rambunctious children, but the one Scrooge pays attention to the most is the daughter, who looks like her mother. Dickens’s story then says that when Scrooge “thought that such another creature, quite as graceful and as full of promise, might have called him father, and been a spring-time in the haggard winter of his life, his sight grew very dim indeed.”
That sad future awaits many if the choices made now continue. For some, it already is too late. Moreover, the pain and regret can extend beyond these individuals. We have stories of parents, for example, lamenting that their childless children never will give them grandkids.
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The so-called “Pro-Natalist” policies have an important part to play in fighting the declining birth rate. But something much deeper must take place as well. A shaking of people’s souls, one fit for a Dickens novel, must occur. People must stop letting fear keep them from taking the risk of having children. They should take that leap, not just for the good of the country but for their own good as well.
Otherwise, we might wake up one Christmas day alone to a nation of old Scrooges, haunted by ghosts of past Christmases.