By Frosty Wooldridge

The first 12 parts of this series sobered countless readers.  It depressed many and caused despair for the faint of heart.  However, most Americans can’t or refuse to grasp our dilemma.  By checking our growth rates, not only will we add 100 million in three decades, we’ll add another 100 million on top of that, and do it again until we become one billion people by the start of the next century. 

No one wants to discuss it.  Everyone hush-hushes about the preacher’s daughter being pregnant.  No one wants to talk about sexual or domestic abuse now epidemic in America.  No one talks about 18 teenagers committing suicide every day in this country.  Better not talk about the 22,000 deaths by drunken drivers annually!  Let’s pretend it’s not happening.

China’s and India’s leaders did the same thing 50 years ago.  They didn’t talk about their exploding populations.   Guess what?   They got what they didn’t talk about.   Can you imagine what it means to the billions of Chinese and Indians now living within the clutches of overpopulation?

Adding 100 million people to the United States in 33 years might not be so bad if there weren’t 300 million already here.  But they are here!  And, if nothing is done, we will add 100 million people to our country in the blink of three decades.

What do you think the newspapers will feature in 2040?  Better news than today?  Perhaps you’ll read flowery reports on human progress.  How about glowing editorials on our expanding “American Dream?”   On the contrary, you’ll read, “Water wars pit farmers against city folks for diminishing supplies.”  “Gas prices hit $12 a gallon. “  “Rolling blackouts can’t save homes from freezing in New York City.”  “Food costs soaring due to transportation and production costs.”  “In Los Angeles today, a 100 vehicle pileup caused the deaths of 40, dozens of injuries and created a 50 mile long gridlock on I-10.”  “Riots in area high school caused by students’ inability to communicate with one another because of language differences.”  “Tuberculosis continues its climb as the worst disease outbreak in decades in the United States.”  “Millions of Americans moving to Montana, Idaho, North and South Dakota to escape overcrowding in Los Angeles, New York and Houston.”

It won’t do them much good because the west is running out of water.  Yet, California expects an added 20 million by 2035.  Arizona expects an added five million.  Texas will add 12 million by 2025.    A sobering report in the New York Times, September 30, 2006, said, “India with 1.1 billion people, is running through its ground water so fast that scarcity could threaten whole regions.  India has 19 million wells, some of them tapping deposits formed at the time of the dinosaurs.”  Some 3.3 billion people live in countries that are over-pumping aquifers, which includes our own. 

Mike Davis wrote in “Planet of Slums” that urbanization of world poverty boils down to this, “Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the 21st century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement and decay.”

Michael Specter, “The Last Drop,” The New Yorker, October 23, 2006, said, “Nearly half the people in the world don’t have the kind of clean water and sanitation services that were available two thousands years ago to the citizens of ancient Rome.  More than a billion people lack access to drinking water, and at least that many have never seen a toilet.  In the past decade, more people have died from diarrhea than people have been killed in all the armed conflicts since World War II.”

China, at 1.3 billion people, numbs my mind’s ability to comprehend their problems. The Wall Street Journal headlined “A Poison Spreads amid China’s Boom” September 30, 2006, “Toxic sludge sinks villages and people die without recourse.  The lack of pollution controls has contaminated China’s soil, water and air with lead, mercury and other pollutants and left millions of children with dangerously high levels of toxic metals in their blood.”

Every consequence experienced by India, China and Bangladesh stems from hyper-overpopulation.  Every aspect of their human suffering stems from too many people.  Every condition heaped upon their citizens stems from disregard of a rational and sustainable population policy.  All the while, the elites live above it while the people sink deeper into its clutches.

As William B. Dickinson said, “Our cavalier attitude toward big population increases never ceases to amaze.  When the U.S. hit 300 million in October, the New York Times concluded in an editorial, October 11, 2006, that, ‘In America, growth and vitality are the same thing…our population issues have mysterious ways of working themselves out.”  That’s like saying if we can put 10 basketball players onto one court to play a game, we surely could put 100 on the court and we’re sure everything will mysteriously work out.”

If the New York Times expresses that kind of stupidity with their statement on “mysterious ways of working themselves out,” we might as well return to the Dark Ages where reason and critical thinking suffered under religious dogma.

E.O. Wilson wrote “The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth.”  He describes humanity as “the giant meteorite of our time…a species blinded by ignorance and self-absorption.”

Which brings me to the question:  Are Americans as dumb and docile as the Chinese and Indians, or citizens of Bangladesh fifty years ago?  How far down the population rabbit hole will we allow our nation to dive?  At what point on the misery scale will we begin to say, “Enough population is enough!”  How far into the negative headlines do we want our children to suffer for our folly?

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