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Why Am I Here?
Typed manuscript, publication unspecified, January 9, 1984.
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“Why am I here?” Many of you at this time of life at mid-high school level would answer this question with the statement “Who cares why I am here? I am enjoying myself and I am having a good time. I am doing what comes naturally and I don’t ask such silly questions as ‘Why am I here?’” At this time of your life you are becoming aware of a tremendous interest in sex–the attraction of the male and female to each other. This to the second great appetite of life–the first being that of an appetite for food and the seeking of it at your mother’s breast even before your eyes were opened in the first hours of life.
If you were fortunate enough to live on a farm, everywhere you look you see this sex appetite driving every living creature. You do not recognize it as easily in plant life, but you see it in the domestic animals–the horses, cows, goats, chickens, dogs, cats, rabbits, rats, squirrels, and birds of all kinds. You see the birds build their nests and have their babies every year. You soon come to accept this function of having offspring by the various animals, but you seldom think of yourself in this same category–but exactly the same sex drive that is built into the animals is built into you, and the more you study this subject in your later years of life, the more you will be forced to the conclusion that the answer to the question “Why am I here?” is because you are here to procreate, to have babies.
Many people will question that statement that you are only here to procreate. They think that is too crude. They say that you are here to love one another, and to do good for your friends and community. All of these things are true to some degree, but they still do not answer the basic question of “Why am I here?” and that is only to procreate.
What you do with your body after you are born is an entirely different subject. After you are born it is true that in order to make life more tolerable and to withstand the discomforts, the irritabilities, the pain and disease, we must find something to occupy ourselves, and most of all to do something for others. We must feel that we have accomplished something worthwhile. We must become a part of community life.
When we have children, we suddenly are aware of that wonderful feeling of parental love–particularly a mother’s love for her baby. Here again is something we see built into all animal life, no matter where we find it. It is wonderful to watch an animal-mother raise her babies and teach them how to conduct themselves; how to hunt; and how to fight for their place in life. A picture by Walt Disney called “Bear Country” is a study of two brown bears who mate and bear two cubs. After the cubs are born the father disappears and we watch the mother take care of her two babies and raise them to maturity. She teaches them to fend for themselves and find food to eat. When she has accomplished this job, she spanks them and chases them up a tree–and while they are wondering what happened and why they were sent up the tree, she disappears to find her mate and start the cycle of reproduction all over again.
Living in nature and eating raw food coated with dirt, these animals got a full complement of what we call ‘nutrition’ to accomplish normal procreation. The same thing is true of humans living in an aboriginal state where they eat the more natural things of nature and eat it fresh and coated with dirt. They, too, do not have much trouble with their ability to become pregnant and bear a child–or have any difficulty having a good milk supply to take care of that baby the first day it is born. In aboriginal states, pregnancy is a matter of course, and the mother frequently delivers the baby by herself, almost as easily as having a bowel movement–and may even return to work several hours after the birth of her baby.
In the civilized life in which you people find yourselves, the miracle of childbirth turns out to have many problems. For instance, the Amish people, who are a religious sect, an outgrowth of their Lutheran religion, set themselves apart and try to live according to nature–living on natural foods as much as possible. They do not allow their children to intermingle in the public schools because they do not want them to become ‘contaminated’ with the ideas of the children in the communities around them. They do not own automobiles. They own a horse and buggy and use the horse manure to fertilize and enrich their soil. They feel that if they eat naturally, they will have the best health and a robust life–better than the people around them. I am sure you would believe that this would be true, although you would not want to live the rest of your life as they do–without cars and fast food stores, coca cola, beer, and other drinks that you enjoy, and of course drive your own car.
But alas, this is not the case for them. In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where there is a large colony of this Amish sect, after 100 years or so of this intermarrying and living by nature, they are beginning to produce mentally and physically defective babies. Their young women are losing all of their teeth by the time they are 18 years of age and before they have had a baby. It is well known around the world that women may lose a tooth for each pregnancy. In Ireland, my maternal grandmother had all her teeth extracted when she was 18 years of age, because it was considered better to remove them and wear a plate, than lose them one at a time with each pregnancy. These Amish girls are losing their teeth, however, because they are not healthy; and when they give birth to their babies, the babies are unhealthy and mentally and physically defective. They are now inter-marrying their boys and girls from different sects in the hope that their problem is a genetic pattern in this defective procreation. The tremendous consistency of breakdown in their procreative functioning indicates it is more likely to be a nutritional deficiency, rather than a genetic one that accounts for their problem.
And so when we ask the question “Why am I here?”, we are forced to the conclusion that we are here to procreate in the civilized community in which we live. If a woman has difficulty getting the proper food to meet the needs of her pregnancy, we see defective babies all around us. These babies have all kinds of diseases–being born with defective brains, defective arms and legs, defective hearts and intestinal tracts, and every combination you can think of–and they are appearing at a more rapid rate every day.
Obviously you will ask “What can be done to prevent this catastrophe?” You all want to be good, happy people, with all of the mental and physical qualities to allow you to enjoy life–and more than this, to allow you to pass this excellence of physiology on to your children. You would much rather have a beautiful, talented daughter or son, than one who is crippled in mind and body, who cannot read or write, or know what he or she is doing. We have hospitals all over the country full of these defective children. A few people get great pleasure trying to raise one of them, but generally it is a very boring and thankless chore that few people care to do.
After studying the catastrophes of civilized life for many years, we have learned a great deal that we can do to help you young people have a better life yourself, and pass it on to your children when you are ready to have a family. All of you are aware of the fact that farmers plant their seed only after they have prepared the soil by plowing, harrowing and raking, and then fertilizing and supplying the soil with sufficient water. Without this preparation of the soil, hardly anyone would expect to have a good crop. If they don’t prepare the soil, you can be sure that they won’t have a good crop. In this past year the drought has produced a terrible loss of livestock and feed grains like corn and wheat–and when this passes down into the animal kingdom we find insufficient food to support the lives of the pigs and cattle, as well as the milk from the dairy cows.
Just as the farmer has to fertilize the ground in which he plants the seed, so must a prospective mother prepare her body as the soil of life in which she is going to produce a baby.
Because of the tremendous number of people we have in the world–about 6 billion–we must store some of the food from the crops that we grow, so that we can distribute it throughout the year until the next crop appears. This storage requires heating, sterilizing, and the addition of certain chemicals to prevent the food from becoming spoiled or infected. Many of you have never realized that these foods are grown on a farm–you only know that they come from a large food market in cans, and glass jars. You have not considered the fact that each period of drought lowers the amount of food available, so that many people starve around the world. When you learn to understand the pathway by which we feed the world of 6 billion people, you will begin to realize the potential dangers that are brought on by this forced preservation of food for worldwide distribution.
In this sterilization and preparation of the food for distribution, we find that we remove many important and sensitive elements. They are called vitamins, minerals and iodine. In time you will study this branch of chemistry and understand how these indispensable elements are damaged or destroyed by staleness, heating, sterilizing, and cooking. By supplementing our food with these vitamins, minerals and iodine, we can bring our diet back to such a state that it can support normal procreation.
Now that we know that our main reason for being here is to procreate, what can we say about the present sex drive that you are struggling with? Nature has given you a drive for procreation that is almost insatiable. At every menstrual period a woman produces an egg that can be fertilized. Most mammals on earth are usually pregnant for the first time when they reach their second menstrual period. Experience in the human society teaches young girls that they should not have a baby until they are able to take care of it–roughly around 20 years of age. They have 13 menstrual periods a year–one every 28 days. These periods usually start somewhere around 12 years of age, and so they pass through roughly 100 menstrual cycles before they are supposed to have a baby. In the meantime they are told not to satisfy that sex drive–the very act that nature has endowed them to perform. It is obvious that this is a difficult situation, and we find that many of our young ladies have been indulging in sexual intercourse from the time they were 10 or 12 years old. It may surprise you to know that in one of our girl high schools in Baltimore, 97 per cent of the girls were pregnant at 12 years of age–and half of those were pregnant again by the time they were 14. It is useless to tell a girl that to indulge in sex is wrong. It is time for us to help her understand the beauty and importance for her to have this sex drive and sex response, and yet at the same time help her put off the time when she will bear a child.
We must give her the proper knowledge of contraception and teach her how to use it. If by chance she is unfortunate enough to become pregnant in her early years from 10 to 18 years–it is my opinion that she should be allowed to abort the baby, and give her a second chance to start her life over again. To have a baby in these early years forces her to give up her school and often makes it impossible for her to get married and have a family. A man wiIl give her another baby, but will not help her take care of the one she has.
When an abortion is done, there is no doubt that we are stopping the life of a prospective human being, but when done in the early months of pregnancy–not later than the fourth month–we are removing the fetus at a time when it cannot live outside of the mother’s uterus. It is to be understood that while we are not opposed to abortion, we would prefer not ever having to do an abortion, we must promote contraception and help a girl protect herself at all times. But when an accident occurs and a young girl becomes inadvertently pregnant, it is better for her health and her mentality to abort the baby, rather than have it and give it up for adoption. No matter how young a girl is when she has a baby, she still has that built-in mother love that makes her want to keep the baby. When she gives it up for adoption, she never stops wondering where it is–whether it is being loved and cared for–and what it is doing for its life’s activity. This unceasing searching memory can be devastating. When she has an abortion and is made to understand that she is removing only the foundation of a human being in its early stages, she knows it is through an act of her own and she has no memories to dog her footsteps–and she can try again. It is an act that she can forget because it is finished.
By facing the question of procreation and contraception in this sensible and realistic way, we gain the confidence of our young people and have them as our companions and friends–instead of our opponents and enemies. We cannot control the morals of any person, but we can help guide them and make life more beautiful, with good sense and good understanding. By cooperating with our young people we can easily make life the reality of the beautiful dream we hope it to be.