This is just another non-PC rant about people who let their emotions totally bury reason.
Since I was born in 1938 the US population has increased 138% (from less than 130 million to 309 million). You would think that almost anyone would be scared, or at least apprehensive, about numbers like that, but no.
The subject of overpopulation is like details of Obama's past life & career, something that is just simply off the approved list to talk about.
This letter did, however, garner at least two responses, one from the writer of the Roe-Wade letter (who I purposely did not name) and who predictably was absolutely, totally aghast at the thought that I so cavalierly dismissed the outright murder of 53 million babies. The second, also a woman, agreed with my overpopulation points but wasn't OK with abortion as a population control measure (so you CAN have your cake & eat it too, I guess).
To: AV Press
Date: 04/20/2011
Re: Too Many Mouths
Frequently I am struck by the synergism arising from seemingly unrelated items in the Opinion section of the paper.
Today’s Opinion featured an anti-women’s rights letter bewailing the fact that, according to the writer, Roe vs. Wade has denied America 53 million new citizens.
Harboring the totally non-PC thought “yeah, just what America needed, 53,000,000 more citizens”, I moved on to columnist Maria Hinojosa’s description of her recent NPR-PBS sponsored assignment in the Dominican Republic (oops, more non-PC thoughts).
Ms. Hinojosa’s article berates the Dominican Republic for not welcoming hundreds of thousands of refugee Haitians into the still-green side of their shared island. I mention still-green because, if you have never been there, the Haitian/Dominican border marks a stark boundary between a still-lovely green tropical island on the Dominican side and an eroded, grossly overpopulated land basically stripped of everything edible or burnable on the other.
The synergistic thread connecting these two items is that the most intractable of our current world social problems are all one way or another related to overpopulation. When there are more bodies than there is work for them the social systems start to fray badly, and when the point is reached where there are more mouths to feed than there are resources to feed them things really go downhill in a hurry.
Just as with our current financial problems, whenever overpopulation is brought up we absolutely lack the will to face the harshness of reality. People delude themselves into thinking it isn’t and never will be a problem here in America, or that technology will pull another Green Revolution rabbit out of the hat, or God will miraculously produce unlimited fishes, or whatever. Yeah, I know. Nag, nag, nag.