TERRARISKS
I would like to introduce a useful word, the one that serves as the title for this set of thoughts.
It came to me while I was listening to an account of the human costs of a car bomb explosion at a Baghdad marketplace. The story had focused on a single family, whose provider, the father, had died—leaving his wife and eight children without a mean of support.
Probably those who put the story together expected me to think, “Oh, the tragedy!” My first thought was, “Eight kids?”
We have terrorists because there are cultures in which life on this earth is considered expendable, and we have cultures with such values because there are simply too many people. Pardon my insensitivity, but for me the newscaster’s human interest story wasn’t “Oh, the humanity!” but rather “Oh, the too much humanity!”
Our task at this juncture of history, with resources clearly finite and endless growth obviously impossible as an ultimate economic goal, is to find ways of life that together are both fully engaging and sustainable. Not exactly a steady-state world, but one in which growth is tantamount to maturation.
But much as people talk about patriotism, they seek their futurity in family. The idea of controlling family size gets put aside before it can be proposed because politically, it would be end the career of anyone who suggested it,
How are we, as a country, to reorganize our economy so everyone can make a living? The old manual labor jobs are either gone or are so poorly paid, for the amount of physical effort, that only emigrants will take them. Not everyone can go to college and get a job helping to lead the Information Age. The only way to make it work is to pay people to live sensibly—welfare contingent on the general welfare. But any such system would be torn apart, just like viable farms in African nations where the land has been split into miniscule allotments—just as European agriculture would have been without primogeniture. All the sensible solutions depend on sharing, but without population control, there can be no sharing.
Any group that proclaims that its rapidly growing size is a key to its future power is guilty of genocide, because what we have called multiplication is in reality division. And the people who want to have more children than is necessary to reproduce their community, while not necessarily terrorists, are at the least terrarisks.
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