One of my favorite law blogs, the Wall Street Journal Law blog, had a few entries on the multitude of law suits against Obama stating that he was not a US Citizen. The crux of the issue was a live birth certificate, with, what the observers called, faulty information.
About a year ago, I received a call from my mother, letting me know that on a trip home for a birthday of one of her sibilings (I think it was my second oldest uncle), she went to the house where she was born in Ellisville, GA. My mother, who is younger than Obama, was born in a house. And so were at least 13 of her 14 siblings. And it hit me, in reading this article, that no one knows where Obama was born definitively because, a fact that all such articles don't seem to mention, a great deal of babies weren't born in hospitals. And parents would get certificates of birth months, or even years, later. It does present an interesting conundrum for citizenship. Is my mother really a citizen because she was born in a house, and her birth certificate is strangely silent about many of the facts surrounding her birth (while it does proclaim her colored, and born, that is about it)? For all I know, she was born in Mexico (a few miles away?). If you look at, say my most recent nieces birth certificate (she is 7 months old), it gives so many statistics about her birth it's like information overload, with handprints and footprints, eye color, weight, circumference, and anything else you could possibly want to know about a new born child, including the county and city in the state she was born in. Do we really need all those statistics? By the way, my mother's birth was probably nearly free. Try having a baby for under $5,000 and get back to me.
Why the great increase in cost? And is it really worth it? Salaries have not increased by 1000% since 1959. They average a 100% increase over about 20 years. The cost of child birth, without insurance, prices some people right out of the market. And perhaps explains why so few people are willing to have very many in this day and age. I don't know what is to blame: the astronomical rise in the cost of health care, the tort system that makes insurance so necessary and costly, or the societal belief that we must do all we can, so that we will not feel guilty if things go wrong.
How does this relate to consumerism? I think that, in an attempt to be knowledgeable we pay for excess. And it is the expensive brand of consumerism that Americans are allowed to have. We want to be inundated with knowledge. And safety. Not necessarily the kind we must work for and seek. But the kind that comes with a price tag. Which is another reason I think higher education can be so costly. This type of consumerism is like a right of passage. And I think it is why no one talking about birth certificates is talking about home births, for fear we may wake up and realize that we don't need all the stuff that the media, in the guise of "teaching us" is pushing. Because there was a time when we didn't.
Again, not advocating home births! And this post isn't about Obama, just the things that are left out when people have a discussion.
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