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| The Ominous Conclusion: By Choice Now or a Great Mortality Later |
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| Now, with compassion, or later with violence, population control will come. |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, April 23, 2008. The most ominous story this week – more ominous than the continuation of the primary season, more depressing than the President of the United States appearing on Deal or No Deal to up his ratings after his disapproval numbers became the worst ever, more ominous than Congressman Bob Shaffer’s Jack Abramoff horror – the most ominous story, I thought, was the United Nations World Food Program warning us that millions are about to starve to death. The agency didn’t directly say that, of course, but it is already taking precautionary measures rationing food to address a worldwide shortage and its increasing price, a trend which is expected to continue to 2010. One wonders why it would end then? The brain trusts at the UN, looking at this shortage of increasingly expensive food, concluded that millions of the world's poorest people will buy less food, less nutritious food, or be forced to depend on aid if no action is taken. No slapped foreheads at that. I continue to note that in all the talk about starvation, shortages, Ethanol, and the violence which will ensue, there is no talk about population control. None. Will it have to come down to everyone waiting in line for the daily calories now enjoyed in Bagladesh before the hands are raised? Hold that thought. The other ominous story, not unrelated to the first, is that in several locations in America, women’s life spans have dropped five years between 1983 and today. Life expectancy in this country increased more than seven years for men and more than six years for women between 1960 and 2000, which is pretty good, given we lived longer than most anyway. And, for most Americans that continues. But the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the University of Washington have found that 4% of the male population’s life expectancy and 19% of our female population experienced either decline or stagnation since Reagan took office. In fact, said the lead author of the study, there is evidence “….there are large parts of the population in the United States whose health has been getting worse for about two decades." Predictably, it is in the poor that this mostly occurs. Most of the counties with the worst declines were - go figure - in the Deep South and Appalachia, those comic punch lines for stupidity and poverty for over a century. It also bleeds over into the southern portion of the Midwest and into Texas. In 1983, the wealthier counties in our nation allowed wealthy men to live 9 years longer than those in the poorest counties. By 1999, that gap had increased to 11 years. For women, surprisingly, it wasn’t as bad. In 1983, the life expectancy gap was a mere 6.7 years and it increased only to 7.5 years by 1999. But still, there are areas in this nation, the very definition of the First World, where life spans go down and infant mortality goes up. The diseases that seem to be responsible for this among adults are smoking, high blood pressure, and obesity. Yet, just as population control is not mentioned when discussing food shortages, neither are – as much as I hate this useful but clichéd phrase – ‘life style choices’ when discussing an increasingly physically decrepit population, one that could not at present, even at need, conscript an Army of mere Vietnam proportions from our flabby youth. Hard to imagine in Boulder, unless looking at me, but our nation, in aggregate, could not hold its own today in a physical war for survival. For sure, ethanol is draining corn supplies for notional better mileage, and therefore the price of corn has skyrocketed, a disaster for the continent of Africa, which depends upon it seriously, much as rice is a mainstay in southern Asia. And so, handy for the media political templates emerge: selfish Americans trying for slightly cleaner air while driving their Prius starve children in the Congo and elsewhere. And we rape arable land and bleed it of natural nutrients while trying to feed people well enough to live outside America, and die of obesity and its related horrors of diabetes and arterial sludge in America. There are harsh choices to make, and one of the first had better be made with brains and sensitivity before necessity lets fascists arise and inflict it as China did. Whether Fundamentalist Mormons trying to bleed the beast, macho patriarchs demonstrating their breeding prowess, the very poor who have no clue, or women who feel it’s the planet’s duty to allow their spawn that they be fulfilled as women, population control had better arise willingly soon, or we’ll need a pandemic, or a major war, or great mortality of some sort to set ourselves right with a planet we profess to adore. See an alternative? Really? What is it? |
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