wretchard:

According to Australia’s Daily Telegraph, babies are a burden on the economy.

You are touching on one of the most sensitive topics of the war we are fighting in the Middle East, for there are some aspects of western culture that are downright repulsive and nauseating to traditional societies, particularly to Middle Easterners. Our ability to fight this war depends upon not insisting on exporting the worst of our culture to theirs, and that includes the nursing home. It is really difficult to understate the horror Arabs feel when they become aware of the nursing home. Even when these institutions are clean and well-staffed, they strike at the heart of any traditionalist’s fears about America.

American society loves to vilify the son who lives in his mother’s basement, yet it also celebrates the RV with the bumper sticker saying “We’re spending our children’s inheritance”. This juxtaposition is toxic. Where is the sneering against the child who seizes the inheritance and shuts his parent into a nursing home, ignoring his mother for the rest of her life? This secret horror happens in family after family, with elderly parents thrown into de facto prisons that stink. I know people who would rather die than get stuffed into a nursing home.

If we really seek to win against the terrorists, we need to promote a vision of the future that is substantially better than either our enemy’s vision or the status quo. Secular hedonism (of either socialist or capitalist varieties) cannot and will not win against any form of Islam, for a vision of the future symbolized by the nursing home makes Arabs run the other way.

It may seem difficult for many westerners to comprehend, but a world where children love their parents and parents love their children is not only important in its own right, but also as a vision of the future that can appeal to a conservative traditionalist.