There is a scene in the movie Annie Hall that depicts a flashback that Woody Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, has in which he is anxiously pacing around his bedroom obsessing over details of the JFK assassination while his girlfriend Allison Portchnik, played by Carol Kane, is sitting cross-legged on the bed, smoking a cigarette and visibly frustrated with his neurotic behavior. The scene culminates with Allison blurting out, “You’re using this conspiracy theory as an excuse to avoid sex with me.” Alvy then turns to the camera addressing the audience and says “Oh, my God! She’s right! Why did I turn off Allison Portchnik? She was — she was beautiful. She was willing. She was real … intelligent.”

This scene came to mind when I read a quote from a recent speech of Kamala Harris at a Women’s Gala in which she talked about reports of young women being reluctant to have children because of anxiety they were experiencing over climate change.

Via Breitbart:

‘They are experiencing what they’ve coined ‘climate anxiety,’ which is their fear that because of changing in extreme weather that the future of their lives is very much at stake,’ Harris went on saying, ‘My goddaughter, who’s a junior in college right now, was crying to me just two days ago, worried about ‘what is the world gonna be for me, auntie, when I want to have kids. Should I even be thinking about having children?’ That’s on top of unaffordable — not for her but for so many in that generation, they don’t aspire to own a home. They don’t believe it’s within their reach.’

Leaving aside the disturbing knowledge that the woman who spoke those words might have been president and that the conversation with her goddaughter was no doubt completely fabricated, Kamala is parroting an opinion voiced widely by liberal young women. However, just as Alvy was using his JFK conspiracy obsession as an excuse to avoid facing a decision about his relationship with Allison, so too are these young women using their climate change obsession as an excuse to put off taking on the challenge of being a parent. As a parent, children would take center stage in their lives, something these narcissistic neurotics cannot accommodate. They are afraid that they may falter or fail in this role and judging by their frail temperament, that is a real possibility. It is interesting that they would bother with an excuse. Our culture has been drifting in this direction for some time, but the need for an excuse is obviously still needed.

One can see this steady drift reflected in popular TV shows from the ‘60s to present. There was a popular TV show in the mid-‘60s called That Girl with Marlo Thomas. The premise of the show was that Marlo’s character, Anne Marie, was enjoying a period of self-discovery in her twenties in New York City, but the show writers left no doubt that she would settle down soon in the suburbs with Donald, her loyal boyfriend.

With the advent of the feminist in the early ‘70s, the Mary Tyler Moore Show TV series hit the airwaves, showing a not-so-young single woman navigating her way through a career in a Minneapolis TV newsroom. Although the show portrayed Mary in romantic dalliances, there was no indication given by the writers that she would ever settle down in a domestic suburban setting with kids, soccer games, and parent-teacher conferences.

Then in the ‘90s, the TV shows, Seinfeld and Friends, came out showing that it was fun to waste away your twenties, thirties, and even forties in a frivolous manner. To see how popular these shows were, they must have reflected the zeitgeist and cultural norms of the time.

Now, we have young adults using climate change as an excuse to not have children and I am surprised that some enterprising writer has not yet woven it into a storyline. Society employs many excuses to justify cultural norms and climate change is just one of them.

Image from Grok.