Blue State Blues: Never Mind Fauci; Kiss Someone Nice at Midnight

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the coronavirus hero of the political left, advised Americans this week not to attend New Year’s Eve parties where everyone would be “hugging and kissing and wishing each other a happy new year.”

Perhaps it might be wise to avoid large, crowded, indoor gatherings, or orgies in New Zealand. But if you are already at a party, and counting down to 2022, you ought to find someone attractive and amenable — especially if they are the person you came with — to kiss at the stroke of midnight.

Fauci’s advice is perhaps well-intended, but the last thing Americans needed, after nearly two years of “social distancing,” is another reason to avoid getting it on — particular among men and women of the cisgender, heterosexual variety, who might actually have some hope of reproducing.

The U.S. population grew by only 0.1% in 2021, the slowest growth rate ever. And though the pandemic is largely to blame, it merely accelerated a demographic crash already two decades in the making.

We need to find a way to revive love, and romance, and — yes — sex, preferably but not exclusively within the holy bonds of matrimony and so on, or else our civilization is doomed.

At the turn of the millennium, the U.S. was still an outlier among industrialized nations, in that we had relatively high fertility. It was a sign of our hope for the future. Today, we have joined post-communist Europe in choosing not to have children, leaving population growth to the teeming masses at the borders.

But it’s worse than not having children. Americans are getting married later, and even single people are having less sex than before.

That is not because we have some cultural aversion to sex; pornography is one of our more dubious cultural exports to the world. Rather, it is because we have allowed a bunch of miserable people to convince us that love is fraught with danger, that sex is usually a form of abuse, and that having children means the end of everything you once enjoyed in your life.

I am writing this column on my 12th wedding anniversary, and my spectacular wife has popped into my home quarantine office to point out that since this is, ahem, our anniversary and all, we should start, ahem, getting things going before we collapse from the sheer exhaustion of the day — which involved comforting a teething infant, shlepping kids to and fro in a driving rain, and enduring several hours of a power outage that threatened to melt every last carton of ice cream we have.

I agree, dear, and I am on my way upstairs, but first I have a point to make. And that is this: we, as Americans, need to do a better job of encouraging one another to take the risk of love and marriage and family.

Because while relationships can be fragile, they are also the only things of enduring value that we ordinary mortals have any hope of creating in this world. And there are far too few of us making the effort to enjoy one another, despite all the Fauci-endorsed dating apps and the rest of it.

This morning, I attended memorial prayers for a woman named Karen Avrech, the wife of screenwriter Robert Avrech, who succumbed to pancreatic cancer this week. Karen and Robert not only had an exemplary marriage for 44 years, but they also had an inspiring love — a love so passionate that Robert wrote an e-book about it in 2012, How I Married Karen. They had great successes together, and endured great losses, including the passing of a beloved son, Ariel, at 22, after his own illness.

It was George Orwell who once observed that every love is destined to end in heartbreak — whether through a separation, or through death. So love might seem futile from the outset. But when I consider the love Karen and Robert created, and shared with the world, it seems to me to have an enduring and transcendent quality.

One does not enter into love looking for happy endings; there are only — if we are lucky — happy beginnings. It’s what we do before the ending that makes it all worthwhile.

We’re all coming out of this pandemic soon, more or less — though the left can’t seem to figure out if they want to keep the panic porn going, or to downplay the fact that more people have died under President Joe Biden than his predecessor.

The point is that men and women want to connect with one another, and the last thing we need is Dr. Fauci — ironically, some kind of sex symbol to those on the left — telling us not to hug and kiss each other and feel hopeful about the year to come.

If you haven’t found that special someone yet, make that your mission in 2022. And talk to them. Put down the phone, and try what we men had to learn in the old days: how to talk to a woman, even though she might reject you, even though you may be so attracted to her that you can barely remember what your own name is.

Look past the flaws, find something in common, and give love a shot. Or lust, for that matter.

You never know where even that might lead — and we need the babies.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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