"Marriage"

All marriages are spirited but not as dynamic as the world in which we live. Thank God. It is necessary from time to time to retreat from the day’s news and to reflect on what has brought happiness, and to let humor and lightness have their play. In my case, what has brought happiness (and smiles) has been the family Caroline and I raised, and the families being raised by our three children. 

 

The photo was taken after our wedding ceremony and on the way to the reception.

 

...and, by the way, don’t forget that Daylight Savings starts tomorrow. Get to bed early!

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Marriage”

March 7, 2026

 

“A woman’s life is not perfect or whole till she has added herself to a husband.

Nor is a man’s life perfect or whole till he has added to himself a wife.”

                                                                                                                                Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

                                                                                                                                Miss MacKenzie, 1865

 

On April 11 Caroline and I will celebrate our 62^nd wedding anniversary. We have been married longer than either of our parents or grandparents. 

 

The concept of marriage dates back four or five thousand years, but for most of that time it was a contract for managing property. Marriage for love only gained traction in the late 18^th and early 19^th Centuries. Over time, attitudes changed. The courtships described by Jane Austen show partners standing in opposing lines. In 1828 Noah Webster wrote that marriage “was instituted by God himself.” In 1906 in The Devil’s Dictionary the satirist Ambrose Bierce defined the word marriage: “The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.” Our 1964 wedding vows were to last until death do us part. Marriage has always been considered the most stable environment in which to raise children. 

 

However, marriage is not a case of “one size fits all.” First, it is not for everyone, and second, not all marriages work. “Marriage,” the humorist Will Rogers once wrote, “is a habit. Divorce is a necessity.” It is impossible that two people can know all about one another after a few months or even after a couple of years. So luck plays a role. Nevertheless, when a marriage works angels sing.

 

Tens of thousands of books have been written, offering advice for a successful marriage – prioritizing your spouse, practicing forgiveness, maintaining a sense of humor, and committing to navigating both good and bad times together. While those words sound substantive, they sport an institutional tone; they could have been spit out by a ‘bot.’ When asked of lessons learned from our marriage, I demur. But love comes first.

 

“Vive La Différence,” sang Maurice Chevalier. And certainly Caroline and I are different. I am sensitive; she is empathetic. I am short-tempered, especially when interrupted while writing; Caroline is patient. However, like magnets we were attracted. P. G. Wodehouse had a sixty-one-year marriage to Ethyl Wayman. In 1932, eighteen years after he was married, he wrote Doctor Sally. The book includes humorous marital advice: “Chumps make the best husbands. When you marry, Sally, grab a chump. Tap his head first and if it rings solid, don’t hesitate. All unhappy marriages come from husbands having brains.”

 

While I don’t think I am a chump – there, my sensitivity is showing! – Caroline and I have had a good marriage. Besides being lovers, we are good friends. There is no one with whom I would rather take a trip or share a meal. But the glue has been the children we produced, and the children they, with their chosen spouses, have produced. There is something magical in knowing that the genes we inherited from our forefathers and foremothers will live on in generations yet to come. While the future is unknowable, we pray that their lives will be happy ones. And all this because of a young woman my sister introduced me to at a small ski area in New Hampshire more than sixty-four years ago. Fortune has smiled upon us.

"Wolves, Sheep and Shepherds"

 

The photo is from Aesop’s Fables, “The Wolf and the Shepherd.”

 

The essay is my own invention and reflects something about which I have spent many hours thinking. Many of you will disagree with my conclusions, But I have always felt we are best off when we express our opinions...and remembering that they are only opinions.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Wolves, Sheep and Shepherds”

March 6, 2027

 

“The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.”

                                                                                                “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” 1815

                                                                                                Lord Byron (1788-1824)

 

The war in the Middle East pits forces of good – Israel and the U.S. – against forces of evil – Iran and its proxies. With their support of Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and various Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, Iran has been the leading sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East and around the world. For forty-seven years, they and their proxies have waged a relentless war against Israel and have murdered hundreds of Americans, citizens of the “Great Satan,” along with hundreds of Europeans. In providing funding for weapons, training and intelligence, they have destabilized the region. They are part of an Axis of evil that includes China, Russia and North Korea. As a nation, their leaders are wolves. President Biden said “Don’t.” The Mullahs ignored him.

 

Hitler and Tojo were exemplars of evil, and so was the late unlamented Ali Khamenei. They were wolves. Yet the potential for evil resides within all of us, something Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about in The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” It is our moral duty, for the sake of ourselves and those who follow us, to keep evil at bay. How do we in the United States do that? By never losing sight of our Judeo-Christian heritage: honesty, integrity, perseverance, compassion and respect. Retaining our traditional traits: personal responsibility and accountability. In maintaining a strong military. And by refocusing on individualism, self-reliance, thrift and excellence – factors that allowed the United States to become the most powerful, freest and most prosperous nation in history – while avoiding excessive national debt, state-handouts and multiculturalism.

 

In his poem quoted in the epigraph that heads this essay, Byron wrote of the Assyrian king Sennacherib who in 701 BCE besieged Jerusalem to punish King Hezekiah of Judah. Hezekiah, a reformist and religious revivalist, is praised in the Bible as one of its righteous and faithful leaders of the Jewish people. He rebelled against Assyrian rule. With him as a shepherd, the wolf Assyrian Sennacherib failed in his goal to take Jerusalem and its Temple. There is a lesson for us in the fundamental morality of his story.

 

The United States stands today on a precipice. It is mired in debt, with a population – near to declining – that is increasingly dependent on government subsidies, and therefore ripe for pillaging by wolves in Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. We have lost contact with many of those attributes enumerated above that contributed to our economic success and made us a beacon for aspirant and freedom-loving people. 

 

The United States does not seek war. It knows its horrors, from the Civil War, when 360,000 Union soldiers died freeing four million slaves from bondage. In 1917-18, 117,000 Americans died in Europe, helping their allies in France and Britain defeat imperial Germany. Less than a generation later 410,000 American soldiers were killed in Europe and the Pacific, putting an end to the tyranny emanating from Japan and Germany whose armies threatened Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Another 100,000 Americans died in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. America has always been selfless in their sacrifices for freedom. No, the U.S. does not want war, but it knows the same cannot be said for its enemies, which is why it has understood the importance of a strong defense, and it is why the U.S. and Israel acted against Iran when they did. Obviously, I cannot speak for the 93 million Iranian people, but the numbers of protesters against the regime (and despite the murder of 32,000 of them) suggest many see President Trump as a modern-day Hezekiah. Whether the attack was “preventive” or “pre-emptive,” as discussed in last Wednesday editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, I leave for politicians to decide. From my perspective, it was necessary.

 

We must restore our basic beliefs in those self-evident truths given us by Thomas Jefferson – the ones that offer each of us the opportunity to be a shepherd, not a sheep – “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator (not the state) with certain unalienable Rights, that among those are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” We cannot let our defenses down, not unless we choose to be sheep, a target for wolves, with no shepherds to protect us. 

"The Demographic Conundrum - An Existential Threat"

 The photo was taken on Tuesday. While snow can be a nuisance when driving or walking (at my age), it is also beautiful, and when the sun emerged the sky was a delight!

 

Sydney M. Williams

swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“The Demographic Conundrum – An Existential Threat”

February 27, 2026

 

“If we are unable to address our fertility crisis, the U.S. will face an

existential economic crisis driven by a steep decline in fertility rates...”

                                                                                                                                Jesús Fernández-Villaverde

                                                                                                                                Nonresident Senior Fellow

                                                                                                                                The American Enterprise Institute

                                                                                                                                February 11, 2025

 

The term “existential” is used with abandon. Many threats, from global warming to offending transgenders, are deemed existential. They are legitimate concerns but pale to the economic consequences that stem from a decline in birthrates, and an aging population with its attendant healthcare costs.

 

The scale of the threat is larger than most appreciate. The global total fertility rate (TFR)[1] has roughly halved over the past seventy-five years, from five in 1950 to an estimated 2.4 in 2025, according to the International Monetary Fund. In the U.S., the number is expected to be 1.6 for 2025 versus 3.1 in 1950. Europe’s TFR has fallen to 1.43 from 2.7 in 1950. Israel is the only member state of the 38-member OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) with a TFR above replacement. Over the next few decades, populations are set to decline in most of the developed world. It is in sub-Saharan Africa and in Middle East nations like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria where birthrates remain above replacement.

 

As to the causes behind the decline, there are many but two worth mentioning. One reflects progress – improvements in birth control, particularly the oral contraceptive pill first approved by the FDA in June 1960, which allowed women to enjoy sex without the worry of pregnancy. As well, in January 1973, with the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, abortion moved out of the shadows and into legal healthcare. The second cause reflects cultural changes, which include everything from women’s desire to find fulfilling careers, to decisions about family size. As well, in 1968 Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. His popular book warned of a 1970s global crisis driven by over-population. He predicted mass starvation. Instead, as we now know, world population growth peaked five years earlier, and annual global deaths from starvation declined from over a million in 1970 to about 40,000 today.

 

Demographics is a subject I have written on in the past, most recently two years ago. Fewer children and an aging population suggest changes for Social Security and Medicare. In that essay I wrote: “But there is no way to avoid an aging population with ever-higher costs of healthcare for the elderly. Robots and computers do not pay taxes. People do.” According to data from the Mercatus Center, in 1950 there were 16.5 workers for every one person receiving Social Security. Today that ratio is 2.8 to one. In April 1970, Apollo 13 may have had a problem, but today we have a problem, one largely ignored by politicians from both parties. The astronauts on that Apollo flight resolved their problem. Will we solve ours?

 

A few days ago, in a talk about CCRCs (continuing care retirement communities), we were informed that Connecticut’s population ranks as the 7^th oldest in the union, with 19.1% of population over sixty-five. That number, expected to grow by 57% between 2010 and 2040, implies that over 30% of Connecticut’s population will be over 65 in fourteen years. While the numbers suggest increased demand for CCRCs, those numbers scared the hell out of me. Will Social Security recipients equal the numbers of people paying into the system? What do those numbers say about the viability of Social Security and Medicare? Who will support a growing number of senior citizens?

 

There are no clear answers as to how to halt declining birth rates. Pronatalism does not receive wide-spread support. Greece, Poland, Japan, Russia, Germany, Italy, France and China are among more than fifty countries whose populations are expected to decline in 2026. As populations shrink, the median age rises. In China, for example, the median age is double what it was fifty years ago. In the U.S., while our population is still growing, the median age has risen from 30 in 1950 to 39 today.

 

Those trends, both here and abroad, are likely to persist for the next several years. People my age are unlikely to be affected by a declining workplace and a surging retiree base. But unless something drastic is done to address Social Security and Medicare our children and grandchildren will face an existential problem. Starting in 2033, Social Security will not be able to make full retirement payments unless Congress intervenes. Tough choices confront us: raise the age of eligibility, increase taxes, or reduce payments. None are attractive alternatives. As former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors Herb Stein famously said: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Increases in legal immigration may provide a short-term solution – one that should be pursued, in my opinion – but with world population growth slowing, it is not a long-term answer. 

 

Nevertheless, a response to these concerns might well emerge from left field. At the risk of sounding Panglossian, I took comfort in a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by columnist Holman Jenkins. He wrote about some of the foolishness associated with “green” politics. He ended: “A paradox of our time is a media with hair on fire about everything, yet democratic societies so complex, weighty and built on the emergent order of millions of people acting on their own information and initiative...tend to right themselves. They find a sensible course...” His words could apply to this population challenge – that we and the West will find our way out of this demographic maze before it becomes an existential crisis. I pray that we do.

 

---

---

---

[1] The TFR is a measure that represents the average number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime. A number of 2.1 is needed for population stability