Kids, cats and humility

I am looking at a copy of a Sunday cartoon that appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of January 14, 1900. It is called “Woman’s Craze for Animal Pets Versus Babies — what we might expect in the 20th Century.” There are a series of cartoons of stylishly dressed ladies of that bygone and hypothetically happy era walking and cuddling various pets in various years; in 1901, it is a monkey, 1902, a leopard, 1903, a hippopotamus with a blue ribbon tied around its tail, 1904, an alligator on a leash, and 1905, a cuddly giraffe. And finally, there comes “The Rarest and most curious pet of 1920 — a real baby!”

Well, I’m not here to accuse JD Vance of not being original in his warnings of the evils of “childless cat ladies”, but it does seem that this issue has been around long enough to have been beaten to death by now.

The practice of pitting groups of people against each other for political gain is nowhere near new. I do have some advice for people who want to single out a particular group for criticism, make sure that the number of people who share your opinion is larger — a lot larger — than the number of people you are attacking.

Because there are a lot of people with pets in America, and they seem to regard them as a part of the family. Pet owners back up their affection for their pets with hard, cold cash, too. Last year, 2023, they spent $186 billion on their pets, which is more than American spent of childcare. This as reported in the September 24, 2024, edition of The Economist magazine.

Note, by the way, that Vance is not advocating people giving up their pets.

I don’t know that we would be talking about the virtue of having children outside of an election year. The Governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Saunders says that her kids keep her humble, implying that women without children don’t know scat about being humble.

I will hasten to point out that people who brag about their humility aren’t humble, kids notwithstanding.

Have kids, don’t have kids. Sounds like family planning from Communist China which for years restricted families to having only one child and now wants its citizens to “voluntarily” increase the country’s birthrate. Here in America, some people have worries about “replacement” theory in which an increase in non-white births combined with illegal immigration will shove white, native born Americans into a minority status. Well, nothing is forever.

World history is full of cases where one group is politically and physically attacked for not being a member of the majority group—for being different. It is always the same. It is because they are not “us”. And because they are not “us” we can believe anything about them we like. Mostly what we imagine is that they do things that are disgusting by our standards, whether they are true or not.

There has to be a gold mine of things that we can hate other people for and reap some political points into the process. In fact, there are businesses making money by doing research into how we can dislike one another better and more thoroughly.

A friend of mine, the late Jess Nelson of Thompson Falls, told me a story about when in 1942 he was taking the train from Forsyth to Fort Lewis, Washington to report for Army duty. Jess was born in Armell’s Coulee, near Colstrip, where his father was a blacksmith who made rifle barrels out of Model T Ford axles. Jess got on the train to find a group of young Army recruits tormenting a young Black recruit because he was, well, Black.

Jess said, “I told them, ‘Here. Now, leave him alone, he is only a victim of circumstance, and I sat with him all the way to Fort Lewis.”

I don’t know where or how Jess picked up his sense of justice, but we could sure use more people like him today—or any day.

Jim Elliott served sixteen years in the Montana Legislature as a state representative and state senator. He lives on his ranch in Trout Creek.