如果你没有孩子，你就是个失败者【英语学习】

信达

Political Success Can Be Measured By Just One Societal Imperative

政治成功可以用一个社会要务来衡量

by INGERSOLL 作者：英格索尔

Greetings, Dear Reader, 亲爱的读者，您好！

I’m going to do something I pretty much never do outside of my close family members.

我打算做一件除了至亲之外，我几乎从不做的事情。

Shall we? 我们可以？

THE SOLE SOCIETAL IMPERATIVE

唯一的社会要务

I’m 44 today, which means I’m optimistically a little more than half dead.

我今天44岁了，乐观地说，这意味着我已经活了一半多了。

My staff here will be surprised to read this. I’ve never disclosed my birthday to anyone and have asked every operations manager not to staff-wide email well wishes when Feb. 4 rolls around on the calendar.

我的员工看到这条消息肯定会很惊讶。我从未向任何人透露过我的生日，而且我已经要求所有运营经理在2月4日生日当天不要群发生日祝福邮件。

We all have our little peccadilloes, and for me, the ritual seems so arbitrary. Fielding all the attention is a distraction, frankly. When people would ask me directly, I’d usually just say my birthday was in 1982 and leave it at that.

我们每个人都有一些小毛病，对我来说，这种仪式感显得毫无意义。坦白说，承受所有这些关注反而让我分心。如果有人直接问我，我通常只会说我的生日是1982年，然后就此打住。

If it weren’t for the women in my life, I’d likely breeze right by it. I once spent an entire year thinking I was 37 until one day my wife was telling people I had just turned 37. Apparently news to me.

如果不是生命中那些女性，我可能早就忘了自己37岁了。我曾经整整一年都以为自己37岁，直到有一天我妻子告诉别人我刚满37岁。显然，我对此毫不知情。

Yes, I’ve been somewhat of a birthday grinch. As far as I’m concerned, after the discovery of antibiotics and the advancement of modern dentistry, birthdays are basically meaningless outside of Sub-Saharan Africa.

是的，我有点像个生日扫兴鬼。在我看来，自从抗生素被发现和现代牙科技术进步之后，除了撒哈拉以南非洲地区以外，生日基本上已经没什么意义了。

Perhaps if I were a fisherman off the coast of Alaska, I’d take a beat when the anniversary comes. But I have a laptop job in Northern Virginia in 2026 America. Should anyone be surprised I survived yet another year? Shocker!

如果我是阿拉斯加海岸的渔民，周年纪念日到来时，我或许会稍作感慨。但我2026年在美国弗吉尼亚州北部有一份用笔记本电脑办公的工作。我又活过了一年，这有什么好惊讶的？真是令人震惊！

This morning, as I was in a daycare classroom saying goodbye to my daughter, who is about to turn four this upcoming March, she ran up to a complete stranger who was also dropping off her kid.

今天早上，我在托儿所教室里和即将于三月满四岁的女儿道别时，她跑向了一位同样送孩子来的陌生人。

“My daddy’s birthday is today and we’re going to the bakery!”

“今天是我爸爸的生日，我们要去面包店！”

Her joy was so undeniable that she couldn’t help herself. Others must know the news.

她喜悦之情溢于言表，忍不住想要告诉其他人。

The complete stranger smiled at her and looked up at me.

这个完全陌生的人朝她笑了笑，然后抬头看向我。

“Happy birthday!” “生日快乐！”

Having children is a radicalizing experience. In modern America, it’s also increasingly an act of rebellion. In terms of culture, nation, the human race, and the very cosmos, having children is not just an existential imperative, but an act of persistence, patriotism, optimism, and service.

生育子女是一种颠覆性的体验。在现代美国，它也日益成为一种反叛行为。就文化、国家、人类乃至整个宇宙而言，生育子女不仅是一种生存的必然要求，更是一种坚持、爱国、乐观和服务精神的体现。

On an individual level, I frankly don’t care who you are or what you’ve achieved in life, if you never had kids, you are a failure. (It really puts into perspective the tragedy and heartbreak of being born sterile.)

就个人而言，坦白说，我不在乎你是谁，也不在乎你人生取得了什么成就，如果你没有孩子，你就是个失败者。（这真的让人深刻体会到先天性不育的悲剧和心碎。）

On a societal or group level, there is no more acute measure of spirit and health than the birth rate.

从社会或群体层面来看，衡量精神和健康的最佳指标莫过于出生率。

But Geoff, you say, the aforementioned Sub-Saharans have tons of kids. So do people facing poverty historically.

但是杰夫，你说，前面提到的撒哈拉以南非洲地区有很多孩子。历史上一直生活在贫困中的人们也是如此。

Sadly, in that context, kids are commodities and insurance policies. The more you have, the more opportunity for the family. Kids age. They eventually work. They’re useful. Plus, when infant mortality is so high, couples tend to roll the dice much more often.

可悲的是，在这种背景下，孩子成了商品和保险。孩子越多，家庭的机会就越多。孩子会长大，最终会工作，会变得有用。此外，在婴儿死亡率如此之高的当下，夫妇们往往会更频繁地冒险生育。

Just as one extreme can be an indication of poor health and spirit, the other can be as well.

正如一种极端情况可能表明健康状况和精神状态不佳一样，另一种极端情况也可能如此。

In a stable, prosperous society, it’s a real problem when human beings take on the discordant sexual disposition of both pandas, who won’t procreate to save their species, and the unbridled hedonism of bonobo chimpanzees, who will have sexual relations with just about anything — objects, friends, same sex, even their own adolescents.

在一个稳定繁荣的社会里，如果人类同时表现出熊猫为了拯救物种而不生育的矛盾性倾向，以及倭黑猩猩肆无忌惮的享乐主义（几乎会与任何东西发生性关系——物体、朋友、同性，甚至自己的青少年），那将是一个真正的问题。

If my worldview on life and society and our place in it was somewhat formed prior to having children, the experience after having children rapidly hardened it into a spearpoint of progress.

如果说我在生孩子之前对生活、社会以及我们在其中的地位的世界观已经有所形成，那么生孩子之后的经历则迅速将其固化为进步的先锋。

The point of that spear is simple and brutal.

那支矛的矛尖简单而残酷。

What is good? Things that help families.

什么才是好的？对家庭有益的事物。

What is bad? Things that don’t.

什么是坏事？不做事的事。

It’s not entirely accurate to look at most people in the modern left wing and say “they” don’t value families. Some do. Most do. I have tons of liberal friends who have tons of children. Their individual beliefs also reflect that value.

如果只看现代左翼人士就说他们“不重视家庭”，这并不完全准确。有些人重视家庭，大多数人也重视家庭。我有很多自由派朋友，他们有很多孩子。他们的个人信仰也体现了这种价值观。

As a group, however, it’s hard to divorce group results from group values.

然而，作为一个群体，很难将群体成果与群体价值观割裂开来。

Looking at images of 1950s and ‘60s black families, for example, can be similarly radicalizing. It’s clear as day to anyone paying attention that whatever policies America pushed since then have not helped black families, regardless of stated intent.

例如，看看20世纪五六十年代黑人家庭的照片，也会让人产生类似的激进情绪。任何稍加留意的人都会清楚地看到，无论美国当时宣称的初衷如何，此后推行的任何政策都未能帮助到黑人家庭。

Famed economist Thomas Sowell puts it fairly bluntly.

著名经济学家托马斯·索维尔对此直言不讳。

“The cold historical fact is that most blacks did lift themselves out of poverty by their own bootstraps — before their political rescuers arrived on the scene with civil rights legislation in the 1960s or affirmative action policies in the 1970s,” Sowell wrote about LBJ’s great civil rights initiative, which gave birth to the modern welfare state.

索维尔在谈到约翰逊总统伟大的民权运动时写道：“残酷的历史事实是，大多数黑人都是靠自己的努力摆脱贫困的——在20世纪60年代民权立法或70年代平权行动政策出现之前。”这项运动催生了现代福利国家。

The effect of the welfare state on black people was dire, according to Sowell.

索维尔认为，福利国家对黑人的影响是灾难性的。

“It is clear that broken homes were far more common among blacks at the end of the twentieth century than they were in the middle of that century … even though blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century were just one generation out of slavery.”

“很明显，20 世纪末黑人家庭的破碎现象比 20 世纪中叶要普遍得多……尽管 20 世纪初的黑人仅仅摆脱奴隶制一代而已。”

“The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state,” he concluded.

他总结道：“黑人家庭经历了几个世纪的奴隶制和几代人的种族隔离，但在自由主义者扩大福利国家之后，黑人家庭却分崩离析了。”

Obviously this is not the stated intent of individuals within the group. Liberals frequently howl about overworked black mothers when conservatives consider restrictions on welfare programs.

显然，这并非该群体成员的本意。当保守派考虑限制福利项目时，自由派人士常常会大肆抨击黑人母亲过度劳累的问题。

We must separate the emotions of the individual, however, from the practical effect of the group.

然而，我们必须将个人的情感与群体的实际效果区分开来。

Raising children in the digital age presents a whole host of problems, mostly to do with the internet, easy access to it, and information that is predatory, toxic, and flat-out gross.

在数字时代养育孩子会面临一系列问题，这些问题大多与互联网、便捷的互联网访问以及其中存在的掠夺性、有害和令人作呕的信息有关。

One enlightening element of the internet is just how perverse the results have been for women decades out from third-wave feminism.

互联网带来的一个令人深思的方面是，它给女性带来了多么扭曲的结果，而这与第三波女权主义运动已经相隔数十年。

The compulsion of people to disclose their every thought to their phones, and therefore to the public, has yielded a constructive peek at the state of female mental well-being. In short, it’s never been worse.

人们不由自主地将自己的每一个想法都倾诉给手机，进而公之于众，这让我们得以窥见女性心理健康状况的冰山一角。简而言之，情况从未如此糟糕。

Adolescent females basically should never be on social media. None of it is good for them.

青春期女孩基本上不应该使用社交媒体。这对她们没有任何好处。

The adults are particularly tragic. For every 100 nurses or middle school teachers who reveal their predominant mental illness by recording themselves shrieking or scream-crying by themselves in their cars — over one conservative thing or another — there’s a handful that sadly and soberly reveal an inner monologue entirely at odds with the modern left’s worldview.

成年人的情况尤其令人悲哀。每有100名护士或中学教师，因为这样那样保守的事情，在车里录制自己尖叫或嚎啕大哭的视频，以此暴露他们主要的心理疾病；而令人悲哀的是，也有少数人冷静地揭示出一种与现代左派世界观完全相反的内心独白。

These have frequently made for news stories and content pegs on the political right. A hipster, beatnik trust fund girl who always thought she was a lesbian lefty until she dated a traditional man and felt something “feral” rise up in her. The dozens of women openly saying they want a male who looks conservative but is progressive. These crop up almost cyclically at this point.

这些事经常成为右翼新闻报道和内容素材。比如，一个嬉皮士、嬉皮士风格的富家女，一直以为自己是左翼女同性恋，直到她和一个传统男性交往后，感觉自己内心深处某种“野性”被唤醒。还有几十位女性公开表示，她们想要一个外表保守但思想进步的男性。这些事现在几乎每周都会出现。

Then there’s the ones who waited too long for one reason or another, usually for one or another stated imperative of the left. They wanted to be “independent.” They wanted careers and believed, inaccurately, family formation to be an obstacle. They don’t need no man!

还有一些人因为这样那样的原因等待了太久，通常是因为左派提出的某种要求。她们想要“独立”。她们想要事业，并且错误地认为组建家庭会成为障碍。她们不需要男人！

The Free Press recently did a long piece about these kinds of women.

《自由报》最近发表了一篇关于这类女性的长篇报道。

To cut it short, the practical result of leftism on the female brain is women waking up in their late 30s or early 40s realizing they’ve made a huge mistake.

简而言之，左翼思想对女性大脑的实际影响是，女性在 30 多岁或 40 岁出头时醒悟过来，意识到自己犯了一个巨大的错误。

Nothing could be more grotesque than the recent results of leftism on children. The most acute and disgusting of these is the institutional push to castrate confused young people and chemically malform them into something they are not and will never be.

没有什么比左翼思想近期对儿童造成的后果更令人作呕的了。其中最恶劣、最令人作呕的是，政府竟然试图阉割那些迷茫的年轻人，用化学药物把他们变成他们原本不是、也永远不可能成为的样子。

We’re now thankfully rolling back a lot of these policies. The American Medical Association recently caved and said surgeons should “generally” stop mutilating confused children.

值得庆幸的是，我们现在正在逐步取消许多此类政策。美国医学会最近也做出了让步，表示外科医生“通常”应该停止对神志不清的儿童进行残害手术。

Progress! 进步！

In a stunning shift, now the American Medical Association has said it concurs with the American Society of Plastic Surgeons that gender-transition surgeries should at least “generally” not be conducted on minors. https://t.co/rhLeMANxqB

令人震惊的是，美国医学会现在表示，它同意美国整形外科医师协会的观点，即变性手术至少“通常”不应在未成年人身上进行。https ://t.co/rhLeMANxqB

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) February 4, 2026

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) 2026 年 2 月 4 日

There are many poor results for children and young people under the yoke of “empathic” leftism. One is the crushing debt of useless “free” education. The other “free” education, that being public primary and secondary school, has never been worse.

在“同情心”左翼思想的枷锁下，儿童和青少年遭受了诸多不良后果。其中之一是无用的“免费”教育带来的沉重债务。而另一种“免费”教育——公立中小学教育——也从未像现在这样糟糕。

As I covered recently, it has in many places turned into a vehicle of the political whims of the left. Children are secondary to union dues, ruthless indoctrination, and achieving domestic political goals. Forget about literacy, kids, get out there and protest ICE!

正如我最近报道的那样，在很多地方，它已经沦为左翼政治异想天开的工具。 孩子们的利益远不如工会会费、残酷的灌输和实现国内政治目标重要。孩子们，别管什么识字了，赶紧去抗议美国移民及海关执法局（ICE）吧！

(It figures that the party that disincentivizes procreation would require corrupt institutions to spread their ideologies to other people’s children.)

（想想也对，一个反对生育的政党，必然需要通过腐败的机构来传播其意识形态，让其他人的孩子也染上这种恶习。）

If we’re to dial in solely on the stated paradigm — good for family is good, bad for family is bad — there is no one thing that could be worse than castrating children.

如果我们仅仅按照既定的范式——对家庭有益的就是有益的，对家庭有害的就是有害的——那么没有什么事情比阉割孩子更糟糕的了。

Leor Sapir, who has been tracking sex changes for minors for years, estimates that more than 5,000 young girls will never breastfeed their children, if they can even have them now.

多年来一直追踪未成年人变性情况的利奥尔·萨皮尔估计，超过 5000 名年轻女孩将永远不会给她们的孩子哺乳，即使她们现在能够生育。

This is the result of our data analysis of U.S. insurance claims. A bare minimum of 5,200 teen girls had their breasts amputated as part of a “gender-affirming” procedure between 2017 and 2023.

这是我们对美国保险索赔数据进行分析的结果。2017年至2023年间，至少有5200名少女因“性别肯定”手术而接受了乳房切除手术。

The true number is likely quite a bit higher. pic.twitter.com/4sQAQF5lJH

实际数字可能要高得多。pic.twitter.com /4sQAQF5lJH

— Leor Sapir (@LeorSapir) February 2, 2026

— Leor Sapir (@LeorSapir) 2026 年 2 月 2 日

These are the practical effects of the one group whose explicitly stated purpose ad nauseam is to care for marginalized people, specifically minorities, women and children.

这就是一个团体所取得的实际成果，该团体反复明确表示其宗旨是照顾边缘群体，特别是少数族裔、妇女和儿童。

The result couldn’t be any more obvious: You’ve destroyed their capacity to form families.

结果再明显不过了：你摧毁了他们组建家庭的能力。

For years, my standard line on Santa Claus was that I would eventually sit my kids down and tell them the reality is that Daddy Claus is why you have gifts under the tree. Daddy works really hard to provide for you, that’s why.

多年来，我对圣诞老人的说法一直都是，我最终会和孩子们坐下来，告诉他们真相：圣诞树下有礼物，其实是爸爸在工作。爸爸辛勤工作，供养你们，就是这样。

Then I had a little girl who was filled with wonder and imagination and optimism and an evolutionary compulsion to believe in something greater.

然后我生了一个小女孩，她充满了好奇心、想象力和乐观精神，并且有一种与生俱来的本能，那就是相信存在着更伟大的事物。

For most Western kids, the first thing is the infallibility of their parents. The second is Santa Claus.

对大多数西方孩子来说，第一层含义是父母永远不会犯错。第二层含义是圣诞老人。

So now every year, I go outside with 1,000 red lights that blink in funny patterns and I spell SANTA in the front lawn in giant capital letters.

所以现在每年，我都会带着 1000 个闪烁着滑稽图案的红灯到外面，在前院草坪上用巨大的大写字母拼出“圣诞老人”的字样。

She can’t quite read as of yet, but she knows what it says. She knows Daddy won’t run the risk that Santa misses her house.

她现在还不识字，但她知道上面写的是什么。她知道爸爸不会冒着圣诞老人错过她家的风险。

There is no sole societal imperative greater than family formation and childbearing.

没有任何一项社会义务比组建家庭和生育子女更为重要。

The actions of the contemporary left wing have shown their results. Individuals on every level are overwhelmingly wedded to the state, the party, and hollow institutions. Those are your new family.

当代左翼的行动已经显露出其后果。各个阶层的人们都极度依附于国家、政党和空洞的体制。这些就是你们的新家庭。

Kids become lifelong wards of wayward medicine, exhausted black mothers betroth themselves to the nanny state, and childless women who pass the Rubicon spin further into mental illness only to take criminals, illegals, and plundering Somalis as adopted children.

孩子们终生受制于不负责任的医疗，疲惫不堪的黑人母亲被迫接受保姆式国家的照顾，而那些跨越卢比孔河的无子女妇女则进一步陷入精神疾病，最终收养了罪犯、非法移民和掠夺成性的索马里人作为孩子。

For the right’s part, every policy — and I mean every one, even renditioning Maduro — needs to be measured against one metric.

右翼方面认为，每一项政策——我是指每一项政策，甚至包括引渡马杜罗——都需要用一个标准来衡量。

Not America First, American Families First. Will this help Jane and John Q. Public raise kids?

不是美国优先，而是美国家庭优先。这能帮助普通民众（比如简和约翰·Q·普莱西）养育孩子吗？

Yes? It’s good. 是的？很好。

No? It’s bad. 不？那就糟了。

读者的评论

@vks

Not sure what other metric could top "family formation" for sustaining a traditional civilization.

对于维系传统文明而言，还有什么指标能比“家庭的形成”更重要呢？

@sherlock1889prot

"I frankly don’t care who you are or what you’ve achieved in life, if you never had kids, you are a failure." ~ And, just like the Left, sir, you are a self-righteous ass.

“坦白说，我不在乎你是谁，也不在乎你人生中取得了什么成就，如果你没有孩子，你就是个失败者。” ~ 而且，先生，你和左派一样，是个自以为是的蠢货。

@WeirdRash

Before doing something stupid, I always think to myself, "If this ends poorly, at least I produced a child and once had a job."

在做蠢事之前，我总是会想：“如果结果不好，至少我生了个孩子，也曾经有过一份工作。”

@TuNombreOtraVez

I aged another year trying to finish this long ass story.

为了看完这个冗长的故事，我又老了一岁。