Saturday, February 14, 2009

Octo-Mom's Strange Associations

And the future of children



I wonder if I'm reading too much into this. Nadya Suleman, dubbed the "Octo-Mom", has a string of strange associations.

Her father is of Iraqi origin, who says he needs to go back to Iraq to work and help his daughter with the new set of kids.

Her mother Angela, who appears to be white, is divorced from her husband (Suleman), though she still lives with him.

Her fertility doctor has been identified as Iranian. I'm not sure if that means that he was born in the US, or immigrated to the US.

Nadya Suleman has an obsession with Angelina Jolie - she of the multicultural brood with no geography and no stable land (I think they're all living in France for now).

Suleman's sperm donor is David Solomon, who will not come forward but who apparently fathered all 14 children. He sounds possibly Middle Eastern to me. Some sources are speculating that they are related (Solomon - Suleman...)

Suleman's previous husband was named Gutierrez - Mexican?

I can make many associations here and speculate that what unites all these people is a unique sense of family, place and even the future. Or more precisely, a unique inability to have a sense of family, place and even a future.

I think this is to do with who they are. They all seem like a ragbag of immigrants, or immigrant-born people. Why should they care about "the future of children"? Children are the future of a country. In every region of the world, there are very strict moral rules and laws as to how they are born, and how they are brought up. Why should these people, given all the adulations immigrants get, become attached to America, her future, and hence her children? I don't even think they see America as a country, but rather as a place where they can get their things done - practice medicine, have children, get a house and a car and even a spouse. But to care about the land? Why should they? They already have one of their own.

In a society of people who live to gratify their needs, and who don't have the wisdom of parents who have a feeling for the future, what Nadya Suleman did is hardly surprising. Children just become another commodity, albeit a hormonally dictated one - as she herself keeps saying that she wanted them since she was a child. In fact, she makes it sound like those pairs of shoes she coveted at 13, and now she can have 140 pairs of them.

Her string of associations just helped her along the way, each with his distorted sense of family and children, and ultimately what it means to live and grow up in America. In fact, their example is a negative one, by which I mean that they have demonstrated to us how not to live and grow up in America.

Her octopus-like ability to reach out and cling to what she wants has made her a formidable personality. But this isn't something she would have made away with only a few short decades ago, and certainly not something she could have done by herself.

I could be speculating here, as I've said before, but I don't think so. This kind of behavior talks of disrespect and disassociation. People who love their country and its future would take better care of how their children are born and eventually raised. Nadya and her conglomerate of characters have failed on all counts.