Procreation is not a virtue
Homeless young people congregating in park
Please consider supporting The Front Page with a paid subscription: HERE
Once during a back and forth in the comments section of an environmentally oriented website, another commenter accused me of being heedless of the environment and contributing to overpopulation, because I have four children.
It was a ridiculous thing to say and not only because my kids comprise two stepchildren and two children Bella and I adopted.
Kamala Harris has also been criticized in recent weeks, by JD Vance and Sarah Huckabee Sanders and others, for the makeup of her family. Harris has two stepchildren but no biological children, and that, according to her critics, means her experience is somehow emotionally lacking and, in Vance’s conception, that she doesn’t have “as much of an investment in the future of this country.”
I can’t imagine setting up a “biological kids only” standard is good politics, as it offends all sorts of people whose hearts have been opened by children who do not share their genes.
Biological connection doesn’t make you a good mother or father, nor does its absence make you a bad one.
Becoming a step- or adoptive parent requires intention and motivation. Becoming a biological parent is far easier. As numberless men and women have discovered, it can even be accomplished by mistake.
For me, parenthood has been full of challenge and wonder. But many paths can lead to rich and fulfilling lives, with children or without.
A further argument from Vance and others is that we have a duty to our country and even to our species to reproduce. Maybe — if we had just experienced a cataclysm that wiped out 90 percent of the human race. But the world now has no shortage of human beings.
We can always use more good people, however, and we get them from responsible and loving parents. Whether they look like their kids doesn’t matter.
Photos of our kids adorn the wall next to the staircase in our house.
Hanging out
A question has arisen this summer, more pressingly than in previous years because of the larger crowd that has been showing up in City Park and hanging out for hours, talking and eating, walking from spot to spot, vaping and smoking pot and perching on benches with backpacks and sometimes towing suitcases or carts: What should city officials do, if anything, about the young people who appear to have nowhere else to go and who spend all day in the park?
I don’t have an answer. I have heard that city officials are working on some sort of official response. I’ve spoken with Dan Burke, the head of the business improvement district, which maintains the park (and does a fantastic job), and with Kathy Naftali, the librarian at Crandall Public Library, where those who spend their days in the park also go for the comfortable chairs and the bathroom. I’ve spoken with other citizens who walk through the park and have noticed the 10 to 20 folks lounging together on the lawn and benches, but no one has a clear strategy or even a clear idea whether a strategy is needed.
One older woman I spoke with said she has friends who are afraid to walk through the park now. She suggested the park should be policed more strictly, with enforcement of no-smoking and no-littering rules.
Mostly, what the people hanging out in the park are doing is legal. But their appearance can be sloppy — occasionally, a young man will take his shirt off — and people like me, who have spent most of their lives dressing for work and going to work, can have a grumpy reaction to their apparent purposelessness.
If you talk to some of these folks, as I did on Friday, you understand quickly that there are reasons why they’re not in a cubicle somewhere, accomplishing something.
Three young women I spoke with said they find various places to sleep (they’re not allowed to spend the night in the park), including a car, a tent in Cole’s Woods and an abandoned house. One said she’d been pregnant recently but an abusive boyfriend “stamped on my stomach,” and she lost the baby.
“I had a boyfriend, he went to jail and I broke up with him,” said Emily.
She had been homeless for seven months, she said, and had found shelter in “bandos” (abandoned houses) and garages. Over the winter, she and her boyfriend spent four months in an abandoned house in Queensbury, she said — “then it got posted.”
Amanda Bushey, who is 31 and from the Glens Falls area, said she has been hanging out in City Park off and on for about 15 years. She has found help at the behavioral health unit at Glens Falls Hospital, she said, where she is seeing a “wonderful therapist” and getting prescriptions for medication.
“I have an actual diagnosis,” she said, smiling.
Jennifer Tefoe, who is 30, said she came to Glens Falls from Ticonderoga two weeks ago and is returning soon to Ti to live with her mother.
They help each other, they said, and they have found — “for some weird reason” — that local teens who aren’t homeless occasionally come to the park and hang out with them.
“Homeless is scary,” Emily said.
Ballooning
We went to the great balloon festival on Thursday in Crandall Park, and I have never seen it so packed. Here is a short video of the crowd:
And here is a video of the same field the next day. What a fantastic job someone did of cleaning up what I’m sure must have been a mess.
The balloon festival continues to be one of the most fun and magical events I’ve ever attended. The way people stream into the park from all sides and kids run around and families arrange themselves on the lawn — no ticketing, no one telling you what to do — and the dragon roars of the propane burners, spewing flame into the big envelopes of the balloons.
Turtles
Elsewhere in Crandall Park this week, we spotted three turtles perched on logs in the pond. Can you see them?
Also, during a walk on the Feeder Canal trail, heading back from the dam, we came across this little snapping turtle. I don’t know how old it is, but I’ve never seen one so small.
To what end do the likes of JD Vance and Sarah Huckabie Sanders push there views is concerning. Why, to what end?
Help or harm?
I'm local to this region and raised w Christian values. I was taught to love my neighbor as myself.
My wife and I adopted five children.
"They are all our children"
The three magor religions of the world all state the same principle.
The Quran states, "And do good unto your parents, and near of kin, and unto orphans, and the needy, and the neighbor from among your own people, and the neighbor who is a stranger, and the friend by your side, and the wayfarer, and those whom you rightfully possess."
Islam is farthest from my knowing and learning experience. But seems pretty on the spot. Love on another. Even the foreigner, immigrants...Israel is reminded in the old testament of her slavery and to treat foreigners like themselves in the Old and New Testaments.
All this Christian Nationalism is omitting the underlying conversation of race and putrid hate in order to raise ones heritage as some Godly thing. It the farthest from the truth.
Parenthood is not an exclusive club. Mothers whose children are born in their hearts and not under them are mothers too. They love and cherish their children and have the same hopes and aspirations for their children that biological mothers do.