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BS ‘n’ About…
Population Control
Let’s face it. Earth will never know peace and stability until humanity learns to quit breeding like rabbits. We are an exponentially breeding organism in a finite space, a rapacious predator in a delicately balanced Life Factory of an environment. We are consuming the Earth in much the same way cancer consumes us, devouring that which gives us sustenance like ants attacking a ripe peach in a sun-baked driveway.
Unless humanity learns to control its numbers, the Earth is going to control them for us. As the global community grows smaller and more interwoven, the dangers we face will dramatically increase. Famine will kill hundreds of thousands instead of hundreds. Pestilence will kill millions instead of thousands. War will kill billions instead of millions. Natural disasters will devastate entire cultures. One madman with his finger on the trigger could doom us all. The choice is simple: We can control our numbers or we can wait for the Four Horsemen to do it for us.
Things have changed drastically this past century. In the old days we needed lots of babies since most of them died in childhood and the rest were needed to bring in the harvest. Most of us died not long after our useful working days were over. There were no teenagers, nor senior citizens. Everyone pulled their weight.
This played into the hands of the kings and popes since every baby popped out was one more taxpayer or tithe-giver: “Be fruitful and multiply my coffers!”
And it was a good thing we wanted so many babies since we started making them about nine and a half months after the onset of puberty and didn’t stop until menopause kicked in. For most of human history making lots of babies, and wanting lots of babies, was a good thing. It no longer is.
In the old days, kids learned life at their parents’ elbows. Except for a few hours a week at the local schoolhouse, children spent most of their waking hours doing their part as essential contributors to the well-being of the family unit. Following in their parents’ footsteps, this continued until the kids were married themselves and had children of their own. Then they took care of their aging parents and the cycle began anew.
In a pastoral society, children were not a burden to the rest of us, nor were the Elderly. The family was a self-contained unit that took care of its own. But that was then and this is now.
For the first time in human history, children spend more time away from their parents than with them. Parents work with people the kids will never meet. The kids go to school with friends the parents are unaware of. We drug up our Elders and stick them in front of a TV, usually a thousand miles away from us.
Rarely these days do kids follow in their parents’ footsteps, often following career paths that were unavailable to their parents just a generation earlier. The infamous Generation Gap of the ‘60’s has become a chasm so deep we no longer even fight to bridge it. We just accept that we have nothing in common with our kids and parents, then log on to something with which we do.
And at what a price: In years past, the ‘footprint’ for a human life having been lived was minimal and mostly positive. A field might have gotten cleared, a stone fence built, or a road paved. But all our leftover food and food by-products would have been fed to the animals or returned to the soil as compost. Natural fiber clothing would have been handed down until it too disintegrated and returned to the earth. Transportation and energy would have been of the four-legged variety and what wasn’t eventually eaten would have ended up at the glue or soap factory. Possessions were few and nothing was disposable. Mankind’s relationship with the earth was, for the most part, a symbiotic one.
The Industrial Age changed all that. These days each of us leaves behind a strip mall sized mountain of rusting appliances, vehicles, and machinery leaking their effluvia to poison the seas, skies, and soil. Each of us is responsible for a tanker truck full of gasoline burnt into the air and another of heating oil. The parking lot of that strip mall is piled past roof level with a stinking pile of plastic candy wrappers, Styrofoam, discarded DVDs, polyester panties, and other garbage that will still be here when the Sun goes dark. These days, each and every one of us leaves a mountain of poisonous garbage as our legacy to our children and grandchildren.
The population issue has changed and so too must the ways we address it. We can no longer afford to impose 12th century needs and solutions on a 21st century problem. We need to start addressing overpopulation with our brains, not our hearts, before the whole Earth turns into a stinking strip mall piled high with garbage.
If we were on a sinking ship and had a lifeboat that held ten of us, but would capsize with the eleventh, how would we address the issue? Our hearts would tell us that everyone deserved a shot to get on board, or even that if there wasn’t enough room for everyone, no one should get a seat. Tradition might tell us ‘women and children first’. Darwin might be brought into play with ‘survival of the fittest’.
Our brains might tell us to save those who might have the most to contribute or even those most likely to survive the grueling lifeboat journey in the first place. But one thing would be clear. A decision would have to be made and it would be a hard one. It would be “unfair”. But no decision would be the wrong decision. It would result in the death of us all.
Earth is our lifeboat: The only one we have. Just letting anyone who wants to jump in do so will surely capsize us someday. That is not science, theology, or philosophy. It’s just basic arithmetic.
But, standing in the way of any kind of sensible population policy is the self-serving Pro-Life/Pro-Choice debate stirred up to benefit the politicians and preachers. We human beings tend to throw God’s name around a lot, especially when we are trying to find purpose in our lives by bending others to our will. ‘God’ is a very effective argument against anything because it requires no logic, no supporting data, nor any hard decisions: “Because it says so in the Bible”. Boom. End of argument. End of discussion.
But we shouldn’t forget that we are a biological organism and that God has created many, many biological organisms. He created the Dodo Bird, the Passenger Pigeon, and the dinosaurs. He is also responsible for cancer and locusts, organisms whose purpose in the grand scheme of things seems to be to die-off after consuming their host organism. And they probably do so with a righteous single-mindedness that wouldn’t be all that foreign to an awful lot of our Holy Men.
If we are to survive and thrive as a species, we must evolve away from quantity and toward quality. Can it be coincidence that the more education we receive, the fewer babies we make? That alone ought to tell us that it is ‘smart’ to make fewer babies.
One Pro-Life argument is that you can’t tell which aborted fetus may have turned into the next Beethoven. To counter that, a good case could be made that there is a Beethoven lurking within each and every one of us, if we only took the time and effort to bring it forth.
Having and raising a child ought to be just about the hardest thing in life to qualify for, not the easiest. It sure as Hell shouldn’t be left to a roll of the hormonal dice by two horny teenagers in a backseat parked somewhere along lovers lane. Nor to a group of non-vested, potluck, do-gooder, busy bodies with protest signs outside an abortion clinic. Nor to a celibate, virgin octogenarian hiding out in the Vatican.
Bringing a child into this world is a highly personal decision that needs to be done with a lot more thought and work behind it than has been the case up to now. We have learned that we are all ‘victims’ of our childhood, serial killers and saints alike. Raising a child is an immense responsibility, so fraught with risk that it is virtually inconceivable that we allow just anyone to do it.
If you want a dog you need a license and, in some places, you are even forced to go to school. But a drooling idiot and a serial molester can get together and make a dozen babies. Then the government will subsidize the travesty while the church will fight for their right to make a thirteenth. Ridiculous.
Victims of our childhood that we are, wouldn’t it make sense to save our protests for those unqualified to be parents in the first place, rather than venting our rage in an attempt to bring another unwanted, unneeded life into the world? It is one thing to be all righteous and march with a sign or try to stack the Supreme Court. It is quite another to take the time and financial responsibility to nurture that life to become a successful adult. Until you are willing to do the latter, you ought to keep your nose out of the former.
Rather than Pro-Life versus Pro-Choice, the debate ought to be Pro-Quality versus Pro-Quantity. We actually throw people in jail for having more cats and dogs than they can care for. Then we turn around and give the Octomom her own TV show. Go figure. We ought to be saving our righteous indignity for those too young, too uneducated, and too unstable to be assuming responsibility for raising a child in the first place.
We love our pets and, in the great majority of cases, put them in our lives as the result of a conscious decision to do so, not to mention having made the household preparations for them. Yet most of the children in our world were “surprises” at best, “mistakes” at worst. There has to be a better way. No child should be entering this world until there is a secure, loving environment waiting to nurture it.
Abortion will never feel right. Nor will breeding ourselves into Four Horsemen territory. Nor can abstinence be the answer. It denies us the most intense physical expression of our emotional and spiritual love for each other, a gift from God truly unique among all living creatures.
As we evolve away from that which is most animal in us, toward something nobler and more divine, so too must we find a way of separating our expression of love for each other from the baser biological reproduction process. We all want to “do it”. Why would God have gifted us with this act of sharing emotion if we weren’t meant to use it, to have mastery over it? If He had meant for it to be just a biological process, He wouldn’t have made it so magical and all-consuming: We need to view this act with the proper God-given awe that it deserves and quit seeing it as something ‘dirty’.
The best way to do so would be to find a way of making men and women fertile only at those times when they are actively trying to conceive a life. Raising one of God’s children ought to be a privilege, not a right, a privilege not easily earned. And raising that child ought to be a responsibility spread out across society. That’s how it worked in Pastoral societies. We need to make it work that way again.
Extended families and close-knit communities have provided the background for raising human children since the dawn of time. Without that nurturing support structure in place, our young people shouldn’t be bringing babies into the world. It is just too overwhelming.
The biological and emotional urges aren’t going to go away. So, as human culture changes, so too must our attitudes toward bringing children into this world.
As modern society shows, one fact seems indisputable: The most effective means of birth control is education. As most of the advanced, industrialized nations struggle to maintain stable populations, it is the poorer, less-educated nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America that are strangling any hopes they might have for a brighter future by bringing into this world more mouths than they can feed. The correlation between birth rates and poverty levels is a hard and fast one.
Even in the advanced countries, it is the poorest and least educated who are having all the babies. Since these are the citizens least qualified and least capable of raising children, their kids too have too many babies, and all three generations become society’s burden. Then the cycle of poverty repeats itself.
For any culture or country to break this cycle, it must start by seeing to it that its young adults spend their time, effort, and resources bettering their lot in life, not raising another generation of themselves. A teen pregnancy is an education lost, a generation lost.
The Third World will never dig its way out of poverty until it brings its population in line with the numbers its land and resources can support. Industrial nations will never eradicate their impoverished, disenfranchised citizens until they replace babies with education. With the advances mankind has made these past couple hundred years, each and every one of us ought to be highly educated, well-fed, and living in relative luxury. It is certainly a goal worth striving for, a something doable worth accepting as a challenge. We ought to be nurturing each and every life brought into this world, bringing forth the Beethoven that lies within.
A drastic reduction in worldwide population would be necessary to achieve such an Eden. It might mean the Popes, Potentates, and CEO’s would have to change the way they do business. Politics, religion, and capitalism might have to change some of the very tenets upon which they are based. But we human beings always did like a good challenge.
All it would take for the Earth to become a Paradise for each and every one of us is to have a lot less of us: We live in a world of plenty. And the means to bring about that reduction are simple and right in front of us, if only we had the will to implement them.
We could halve the population each generation simply by making ‘tying the tubes’ the last surgical procedure in the birthing process.
This is probably the most important sentence in this entire work. Unless we get control of our population, our every future is at risk. Everybody gets to make one baby, then do right by it. Common sense.
Eventually, we would be back to a population level where we could live in harmony with the Earth. Theoretically, we could keep halving things until we were left with a single man and a single woman, descended from all of us. The last time we found ourselves in such a place, we called it Eden.
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