Letters to the Editor
alarajrogers
Published Letters: 440 Editor's Choice: 86
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Nope, sorry
[Read the article: "One sick child away from being fired"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Your free time is not as valuable as helping another human being. Full stop. It doesn't have to be a child -- it can be an elderly person, a homeless person, a person in a foreign country, it can be someone stopped on the side of the road who needs a tire change. But you having fun is simply not morally or socially as valuable as you helping another human being, and no matter how much you hate kids you simply can't change that fact. It's in basically every religion known to man *and* a fundamental tenet of secular morality.
This isn't to say you're wrong to want to have fun, and I certainly do not consider childfree people selfish for not wanting children -- most of the time I think it's an incredibly responsible and self-aware choice *not* to have children when it's deliberately chosen by the childfree, showing a good understanding of their own capabilities. If more people who wouldn't be good with kids chose not to have them the world would probably be a better place. And everyone should have opportunities to do the things they enjoy. But you cannot put a personal desire for enjoyment or artistic fulfillment on a par with doing anything that directly contributes to the well-being of a person less capable or less fortunate than you. And whatever your personal moral beliefs about helping humanity, you *certainly* can't expect society to cut you the same slack for having fun that it cuts a person who helps others.
Parents are engaged in helping and caring for human beings who need it. It's irrelevant whether they created that person or not, the point is, they are helping and caring. So are people who care for their elderly parents, their disabled brother, their best friend with the flu, their gay partner with cancer, who build homes for the homeless, who man suicide hotlines and rape crisis lines, who hand out food at soup kitchens, who join the Peace Corps... there are a *lot* of activities in this world that involve helping and caring for others, and some of them actually involve tax breaks (donating money, mostly... the IRS doesn't think our time is worth much.) It's not just parents. (It *should* be all of these things, and that's worth fighting for, but your right to take off work to go have fun or get a tax break to collect stamps with simply isn't in the ballpark of the right to take off work to tend someone with Alzheimer's or get a tax break to help feed children with.)
You have a right to be selfish, but you can't really expect society to give you a break for it.
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It would be nice...
[Read the article: Remembering Octavia Butler]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...to be able to ignore Octavia Butler's race in favor of simply talking about her work, because there would be so many black people writing science fiction that it wouldn't be particularly relevant what her race was.
Unfortunately, there are very few blacks writing science fiction, and all the others I know of are male. So Ms. Butler's race is relevant to her accomplishments because she was *rare.* Rarity is worth talking about. We talk about female science fiction authors from the early days of SF like CL Moore or Judith Merril or James Tiptree Jr/Alice Sheldon, because then female SF writers were rare, but it's not relevant to talk about the gender of a modern fantasy writer as important because the genre's now about 60% female written. Even modern SF writers aren't really worth talking about in terms of their gender unless their gender is unusual for the subgenre they work in (are there any female cyberpunk writers?)
Octavia Butler's race was relevant because in a genre overwhelmingly dominated by white people, white characters, and the concerns of white people, she offered a different perspective and a different voice. She would have been an important and valuable writer regardless, if there had been many black women SF writers, but as it happens, there weren't (and still aren't), so pointing out that she offered a rare point of view is certainly relevant.