I just watched an interview with a couple of authors who have both written about the myth of choice in our country. This is a subject I haven't necessarily studied at great length, but I've spent a good deal of my life thinking in terms of my own choices...or non-choices.
I remember vividly in my late 20's suddenly coming to the realization that there were some major life choices I didn't really make consciously. That is, I didn't know there were other options.
An example: I don't remember making the conscious choice about whether or not to marry. I made choices about when and who and where, just not ever making the choice to not stay single. Or, having children. I remember deciding how many kids I would have and when I would have them, but I don't remember making the choice to have them or not.
Don't get me wrong...I think I would have made the same choices anyway, and with the same result. I'm just not sure one can call it a "choice" if you don't see any other options.
The guy author, whose book is "The Myth of Choice", pointed out that perhaps we have far too many choices in our culture. Not the big ones, but the small ones. We expend way too much time and energy and capital on making choices that aren't earthshaking. It takes me far too long to do my grocery shopping, as an example, because there's like 300 different types of coffee on the shelves, with 200 different prices and 100 different ecological ramifications. It would take me far less time to complete my shopping list if there were only 10. Or 8.
In college, in a sociology class, I remember reading that we think we have choices in this country for our life mate, but really, we are so hemmed in by societal strictures about which race would be an appropriate husband material, and age and socio-economic status and education level and geographical location and...the list is endless which limits our "choice" of even whom to date, let alone whom to marry.
A man I met and dated in high school came to my college my freshman year and proposed marriage to me. Yet he was enrolled in another college located a state away and I couldn't see how a long-distance relationship would work. So, despite the fact that I loved him greatly, I sadly had to say no.
But back to the coffee analogy, maybe we are better off not having 150 million men to choose from. How would we EVER make a choice? Would we all die single and alone if we had to choose one life mate out of all the men in the world?
Not to get too political, but the Anti-Abortion folks think that, given a "choice", pregnant women would ALWAYS choose abortion over adoption or keeping the baby. They haven't a clue that sometimes, there is no other choice. If the father is absent and not wanting to be involved, if the woman is compromised by her health, if the fetus is no longer viable...the list is endless about why abortion would be a sad choice. If you do away with abortion altogether (an impossibility, but that's what they think) and one's only "option" is to carry the baby to term, regardless of the baby's health, that's really not a choice.
Or the anti-abortion folks who had a choice themselves, they just don't trust anyone else to make the "moral" choice they did. Sarah Palin once famously said (I'm paraphrasing here) that she had made the difficult choice to carry her Down's Syndrome baby and she was glad she had. Reading between the lines, she made a conscious decision to have her baby, but other women wouldn't have the same courage to make that choice as well. Ergo, they shouldn't have a choice.
I heard somewhere that we make an average of 70 choices per day. Now, most of those are trivia: what should I wear to work, should I go out to lunch or carry it, what will I have for dinner? But some of them are life-changing. Sometimes our "choices" are the result of dithering and not making a choice, which is in itself a choice.
This week's Time Magazine has an article about people who choose not to have children. I remember leaving my kids' with a childless couple up my street while on a work-related trip. When I returned home, Terry confided in me that they saw this as an opportunity to decide for good whether or not to have children and they had confirmed their latent desire to remain childless.
I was horrified, thinking that the boys had been so bad, they had perhaps pushed Terry and Dan over the childless edge. No, she hastened to reassure me, they hadn't been bad. It was just that they had taken so much time from her home-based business. She had had no idea that she couldn't just park my kids in front of a TV and go about her business.
Many childless couples receive the label of "selfish" when they say that they have chosen to be childless. Sympathies abound for those sad couples who don't choose to be childless but who nevertheless are. But perish the thought that some couples choose for whatever reason to not have kids. They are truly being selfless, not bringing a baby into this world, overpopulated as it is, to a family that doesn't want them, or wants them just to keep Grandma happy or due to societal pressure or because all their friends are doing it. (We all remember our mothers' answer to that excuse. Some variation of "If all your friends jump off a cliff...")
I moved to North Carolina on a split second decision, thinking as I did so that many of my life-changing decisions, made with a lot of thought and prayer, turned out to be so abysmal, so I should try making a life-changing decision on a whim.
I haven't yet decided whether this post makes any sense, so I'll just post it anyway. Maybe all of us should make decisions with the clear understanding that we really don't have unlimited choices and sometimes, it's a mere choice between two evils. And never, ever judge anyone else's choice.
