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How Many More Baby Booms? [1]

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Date: 2022-10-18

“By the end of the fifties, the United States birthrate was overtaking India’s.”

Betty Friedan, THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE

“My advice to the women of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias.”

William Allen White

Since my birth into this India-rivaling population bounce known historically and statistically as the “postwar baby boom,” the world’s population has tripled, with two billions more predicted in the next thirty years. India (along with most other countries) more than met the challenge, and is now predicted to overtake China (whose population is stabilizing) within a short time. Still, my notorious generation has been criticized by pundits since the eighties for not keeping that boom going; we are accused of burdening younger Americans as we age. Personally I believe we baby-boomers not only did the right thing by having fewer children than the “greatest generation”—we had scant choice. This is not to blame our parents’ generation for siring all of us “kids;” the future looked pretty rosy for Americans right after WWII. But as time went by, the perilous realities of living under a dog-eat-dog social and economic system became obvious and unavoidable once more, and most of us boomers chose to have children when we thought we could adequately provide—meaning most baby-boomer women had considerable choice in the matter. With Earth’s population reaching unsustainable numbers, Americans could not have helped our shrinking world by keeping up with India.

For two centuries, people have been moving from farms to cities. Farmers need as many helping hands as they can get, but urbanized industry will feed only those who can turn out products and services at levels the machine’s owners can sell for profit. To increase their profits, the owners are constantly looking to cut labor costs, handsomely paying scientists, engineers, and other experts to find new ways to streamline operations so that factories can produce more goods with fewer workers. The unstated result of this ongoing trend is already well under way: full automation of the world’s industry, leaving a tiny upper crust with all the money in the world, and billions without jobs, food, shelter, clothing, or a place in society. Usually, the more desperate people inhabit a society, the more advantageous conditions are for that society’s upper classes. But in these times so many people are doing without that the elites must take notice, and do something. The last time the world’s capitalist economy reached a similar saturation point was 1914, when the bourgeoisie reduced the labor glut by coaxing proles into killing each other.

Homeless camps overrunning the industrialized world; an estimated eighty-million-plus political and economic refugees worldwide; a seventh of Ukraine’s people now in exile; are but a few examples of overcrowding in today’s world. With authoritarian rulers having no practical solutions, mass genocide is suggested and entertained with increasing frequency, as exemplified by happenings in Ukraine, Rwanda, Syria, Myanmar, and elsewhere. Could genocide again become routinely mundane, as it was for millennia, until the end of the nineteenth century? With the planet’s ruling oligarchs single-mindedly determined to grab more power while vanquishing all who oppose them, now might be time for us commoners to change the way business is done. The news shows a lot of misery worldwide, and the world is so closely connected that what happens to others can happen to any of us. On television we see that foreigners react the same way Americans do when their loved ones are hurt or killed. Our common similarity: love for our families, is a staring point for building a peaceful world based on meeting everyone’s needs.

Family love, however, seems to be a lesser concern to the planet’s rulers—even though it is arguably humanity’s deepest and most universally shared instinct. In the eyes of modern oligarchs, profits—not providing for the needs of the people—is society’s responsibility. In the still industrializing world: Latin America, Africa, Southern and Western Asia, and much of the Pacific—population growth remains desperately out of control. Religious men dominate economics, politics, and society in the still industrializing areas (and apparently, are well-started toward seizing absolute power in the United States) leaving women with little, if any, input over their personal affairs, including childbirth. While dominating up to conception, alpha males do leave having and raising children to the women.

Many countries in the developing world retain farming birthrates in overcrowded urban centers, where even kind, caring fathers are seldom able to properly feed, house, and protect large families. Some young men, feeling useless because employment is scarce, are drawn to religious clubs devoted to violence. And since more children are living to childbearing age, farmers the world over are running out of land, while also being driven (with their large families) into cities by agri-business factory farms. Under current conditions, the world has run out of room. As a race, we have one way or another reached the stopping point of runaway childbirth. If humans cannot or will not limit our population growth, Mother Nature will, through illness, starvation and the ravages of climate change. These frightening scenarios are already happening; left uncontrolled, they will get worse.

And of course there is always war, which has so far actually proved ineffectual at reducing overcrowding (unless we resort to nuclear war) but is, as always, the only answer that plutocrats can deliver. The prospect of nuclear holocaust is once again being viewed as not entirely beyond the realm of possibility. In fact, many Americans, of considerable social, political, and religious influence, look on nuclear war as a fulfillment of divine prophecy. We Americans have always prided ourselves on being at the forefront of rational, scientific achievement, having invented much of the modern world, which solved many problems of the ancient world, and in the process created the problems we now have. Yet many of our countrymen now spurn science and technology, those proven rational solutions to our current problems, turning instead to ancient religious dogma. Frighteningly, the religious fundamentalists who look forward to nuclear annihilation as heavenly intervention are the same ones who promote the ancient practice of forcing women in our modern, rational country to give birth every time they are impregnated. It somehow makes sense to some Americans to chart a course of State action enforcing population growth, at the same time anticipating the State’s waging of nuclear war—which would reduce the planet’s population to nothing.

Can anyone who looks closely at our current problems, and the solutions proposed by some people in leadership positions, view our path as anything less than insanity? Since self-preservation is instinctive in all living things, this rush toward obliteration of the human race is an unnatural, even psychopathic, trend, which those of us who are still mildly sane have no choice but to challenge. Men are in charge of most of the world, and many of them seem to be unwilling to allow women any control whatever over their lives—including whether to have children and how many. Put bluntly, the global disaster caused by exploding population is directly connected to the determination by much of Earth’s male population to maintain control over women by keeping them busy bearing and rearing children—regardless of the consequences. Doing what we have been doing for centuries has brought us to a dangerous crossroads. Is there a better time for women to take over?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/18/2129755/-How-Many-More-Baby-Booms

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