The Achill Island Essays 4
Welcome
An argument started between them about which one of them was the greatest. Jesus knew what thoughts were going through their minds, and he took a little child whom he set by his side and then he said to them, "Anyone who welcomes this little child in my name welcomes me..."
Luke 9:46-48
Without question, the most awesome event one can witness is the birth of a child. I was present at the births of my two children and found that, in each case, the experience changed my life. I welcomed these two people into my life and made a solemn vow that I would devote much of my life to their welfare.
It is widely held by experts that the population of the earth will increase in the order of two billion people in the next couple of decades. If you assume, for argument's sake, that at least one billion people are going to die in that same period, then we can expect about three billion of these awesome events to occur over the next twenty years. Even if we employ the most heroic of birth control measures, more than a third of the planet's population in 2016 has yet to be born!
How will we welcome the three billion children who will join us on this planet in the next two decades? Will we welcome them as our sons and daughters, or will we regard them as a plague of locusts, consuming our precious resources?
In the Western world, and particularly in North America, we are preoccupied with aging. We watch that demographic bubble called the baby boom generation work its way through the life cycle. By 2016 this group will be starting its retirement. We worry about the ability of our economies to cope with the health care needs and material wants of the most consumer-oriented group of people ever to inhabit the planet. As individuals we squirrel money away into retirement plans and off-shore investments for fear that the public pension plans and government programs that are sustaining our parents go broke. We worry about a drop in our standard of living, of having to cope with old age without the comforts of the modern world.
But our problems in 2016 will be the problems of restless youth and competition for the earth's scarce resources. Our precious pension plans and investments will be ravaged by a world racked by the uncertainties of war, crime, famine and the dislocation of billions of people. No matter who you are, where you are, or what your financial status, you will be affected by the most dramatic influx of humanity this planet has ever experienced. It will be make it or break it time for our species.
Our efforts to deal with this looming crisis have been focused on the to attempt to control the number of people born. This has been somewhat successful in the western world where population growth levels are often at zero or less. But there has been little success in the developing world. While attitudes in all countries are changing, the best we can hope for in the near term is a decline in the exponential growth. Like it or not, two to three billion kids are on the way.
The genetic make-up of those children will determine the future character of our species. The white races that have dominated the globe for a millennium will drift towards irrelevance, if not extinction or assimilation by other races. Our future is the future of the black, oriental, Hispanic or Asian child. How we deal with their needs will be returned in kind when we look to a future society to care for us.
I look with some despair at the way we are preparing for these kids. At home we cutback funds to education, social and welfare programs that provide direct support to families and children, and create low-paying service industry jobs. In foreign affairs we support trade deals that create a climate favourable to exploitation and reduce foreign aid contributions. Politicians and industry leaders espouse lots of rhetoric about cutting the deficit and paying down national debts so future generations aren't saddled with it. But rather than taxing ourselves at levels that pay for our accelerating pace of consumption, we prefer to cutback the very programs needed to launch our children successfully in the world.
Our attempts to return to some utopian age in the past, where everyone shared the same family values and cared for one another without government interference, haven't worked.
There was no utopian age in the past. Our social welfare state was created precisely because many children lived in squalid orphanages, their parents lived in poor houses, and both were exploited by privileged merchant and upper classes. The 1980's demonstrated that in returning to the past, we only reinforced the old power structures and institutions that our grandparent's and great-grandparents fought to change. It was a classic example of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. To top it off, with the way we've mismanaged the planet, the recent past is no example for the future.
As stewards of the earth's resources, our generation and our parent's generation have failed miserably. We pride ourselves on our great advances in science and technology. Yet our legacy to future generations is debt and environmental devastation. In our greed, we give a double message to the youth of today and tomorrow. We don't really want so many people around, but those who are here need to be ravenous consumers. Only through exponential consumption can we sustain our modern economies.
Even if we were to contain the growth of the world's population, the effort would be cancelled out by the increase in consumption as the developing world rises to western standards. The earth will not be able to sustain the human species. For those children with access to wealth, the world will be one big shopping mall. Goods from every part of the globe will be theirs for the taking. They will consume and waste, because that is what we have taught them to do. Those who are poor will live a life of unfulfilled expectations...expectations that we have created through our global advertising media and entertainment industries. These unfulfilled expectations will cause frustration, resentment, anger, and ultimately, revolution.
Our descendents will curse us for what we have done to the environment and for our obscene consumption that has mortgaged their birthright. Yet we continue to promote the emerging global ethic of unrestricted trade, increased consumption and relentless exploitation of the earth's resources that leads to more, and more permanent, destruction.
I recently read a book by the noted economist Peter Drucker, who pointed out that much of the world's financial capital is now held in the pension plans of western workers. It is these institutions, not the old-time capitalist, who will call the shots in our "post-capitalist society". For the moment, no government has attempted to touch these massive pools of capital. But what better source of restitution could a future generation find than the retirement nest egg of those who have ravaged the planet.
I worry about how we will treat the three billion children who are about to be born. As it stands now, we do regard them as a plague of sorts. I fear that if we don't treat them as sons and daughters, they will not treat us like parents or elders. We will be repaid with the contempt worthy towards those who eat their young.
March 1996
About the Photograph: Brenda and Kady – two little girls living in an orphanage in Guatemala.