As I was listening to my Dave Ramsey podcast the other day, I heard a man call up who had the standard litany of financial woes. He had credit card debt, had fallen behind and was beginning to receive phone calls from collection agencies. He wanted to know if he should declare bankruptcy. As Dave did his normal sleuthing, it seemed strange that the man should be in such dire straights. He was single, owed $30,000 in credit card debt, but had an annual income of $42,000. With some discipline, he should have been able to knock out his debts one at a time, but instead he was in deep trouble.
It turned out that the guy had to pay a lot of child support, all of it court-ordered. He had kids by a variety of women and the government had stepped in to force him to do right as a father.
Just like the young man whose first interaction with a male authority figure is with a policeman who is carting him off to jail after a crime, this guy had lived the modern American life, fathering children all over the place without staying around to take care of them. It was all cool and groovy. Like CSNY told us to do, he loved the one he was with.
However, just as the youthful criminal discovers, we've passed laws that codify a stricter morality. If you steal, the government sends you to jail. If you father kids, you have to pay for them. Our moral relativism told this guy that his sleeping around was OK, but the rest of his life was going to be a financial train wreck as the government forced him to pay for his kids.
Listening to the guy talk, his future became visible, spent working hard, but never being able to do more than rent a small apartment and pay the bills for living the life our culture embraces.
9 comments:
You racist, telling people that there is a moral code and consequences for their actions. That kind of racism is tearing this country apart. When will you racist haters stop?
BTW, do you know this guy's number?
Mo Dowd
Here's something as a contrast.
Loving the one you're with...
"[I]n this they are condemned to the sex life of children." (David Stein)
So why would anyone expect their financial planning to be any different?
Moral relativism? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
My understanding is that a moral relativist basically considers an action to be wrong if it leads to consequences that the person doing the action isn't going to like (and the degree of wrongness depends on just how much they are going to hate the probable consequences). By that standard, even a moral relativist would agree that this guy was behaving in an immoral fashion.
I agree that a lot of what passes for "modern culture" these days is promoting immorality, but I don't think it is because of "moral relativists". I think it is because there are a lot of idiots with no foresight, who aren't actually giving any thought at all to the consequences of their actions.
That's Nazi racist to you, Miss Dowd.
Tim, what I mean by moral relatavism is the rationalization of behaviors as opposed to the adoption of a fixed moral code. You can object to this by pointing out contradictions, difficult choices or gray areas, but I would suggest that Man is a rationalizing animal, not a rational one and that in the absence of a fixed moral code you get lots and lots of cases like this.
Our laws are a fixed moral code, but our culture denies that one exists. So for this guy, he slept around which our culture says is OK, but the government disagrees and socked him with huge financial penalties.
Kelly, thanks for pointing that link at us. I love Michael's work.
Aren't those photos amazing!
I had a classmate in graduate school who was in a similar situation. As a graduate student he had nowhere near the income to make the court ordered support payments. The court told him to drop out school and get any job he could or else face jail time. Fortunately he worked out an exchange of child care with the mother. She had a good paying full time job and needed someone to look after their daughter. Ironically, this new responsibility is what forced him to grow up - and the little girl has a father now.
That's a great story, Kelly. Were my son in that position, I'd have told him the same thing the court told your friend.
The government enforces very strict morals!
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