Rig, I'd like to believe white folks have come to their senses and gotten back to making babies instead of worryong only about making money, but I'd hate to believe that any individuals were consciously producing offspring only to avoid "being overrun" by the offspring of other other folks whom they hate and fear.

Kat, you're betraying an overly-defensive attitude in your post of 2:34 pm; John was only saying that "there's always been at least a small but significant number" hoping that ethnic groups other than their own would turn to abortion is large numbers. His historical reference is unassailable, and we all know that "at least a small but significant number" of bigots continue to exist today.

Amos, I've seen Idiocracy, and liked the basic premise when I first heard about the film,, even before I saw it. But the film itself disappointed me; I always hope for more sophisticated humor than I usually get.

If I may digress a bit, there's one aspect of the women's lib movement that has always bothered me, especially when I read commentators who emphasize the women's movement's roots in the overall peace-and-freedom movement of the 1960s. One aspect of the effort to achieve economic equality seems to me to have involved young women stepping into positions in the corporate machine just as large numbers of hopefully-enlightened young men were rejecting them out of hand.

I don't mean to condemn every instance of economic striving, or to "blame" one gender to the complete exclusion of the other for all that's wrong with the world, but the emphasis on "career" among educated upper-middle-class youth strikes me as less than wholesome, and the fact that this phenomenon is not limited to the poor dumb male of the species is especially worrisome.

And isn't it convenient for the multinationals, and for all the smaller businesses who have to supply them and/or complete with them, that contemporary society accepts the precept that both parents in a family be working for a paycheck? They only have to pay each of their employees half the amount necessary to support a family, which is markedly different from the situation for earlier generations.

I'm all for equal-pay-for-equal-work, and I would have been glad to have spent a few years as house-husband and stay-at-home dad, taking turns with my wife as participants in the workforce. I don't want to be misunderstood as sexist, but I think that it's a terrible development that young people have come to equate "success" with such rigid conformity and blind obedience to corporate values, at the expense of domesticity. And it's especailly threatening to our continued existence as a civilization when so many young women feel compelled to dedicate their lives to Mammon in preference to motherhood.