Thursday, March 31, 2005
Save Us All
Joe Scarborough said, "Elites have had no problem coming on my show telling me how Terri Schiavo has no quality of life so she would be better off dead.
"Certainly the same holds true of starving children in Africa who are abused, raped, infected, and dying. Using elites' logic, feeding these children only prolong their pain."
Well, Joe, that's right. These people are the unfortunate excess population; they live in poverty, which in itself is a brutal cycle that makes a rut in a country's population to the point that the poor children that are born into poverty can never get out. Poverty raises the death rate of a population and by consequence and because humans have that instinctual, let's keep the population the same as it has always been or continually growing because more is always better! Well it's a horrid positive feedback loop, because when the more powerful countries send food overseas to third world countries, they do prolong suffering, and in a terrible way. Children recieve the food and live, though not a good life by any means, but say they make it to puberty, and immediately get busy reproducing. So now you have even more of a situation because there are people dying right and left, and now there are babies, stomachs swollen with hunger, who are the future, the perpetuation of this poverty. Is that really the moral thing to do?
These global problems are damn tricky, because we know it's wrong to discard morals on a small level ("Do not do unto others as you would not want them to do unto you") because then individuals suffer. We are social animals, and (usually) the sight of our brothers and sisters suffering, be it on the other side of the world, is incredibly powerful and motivating. However, when one completely grasps the idea of "environmental science", one realizes that...it is almost impossible to save humanity from destroying itself while paying attention to individuals. It kills me to have realized this, and I think I've always known it.
Well I don't have any good ideas about what to do, nor do I propose anything less than good. This is a huge issue, and not only for the world powers (and everyone else) to recognize and contribute towards finding an answer, but for us to understand to our complete understanding capacity. Where will we be if politicians in Washington only take the population crisis seriously and implement strict controls (think China), without getting to the bottom of the interwoven problems that plague our planet.
We also cannot forget the other things like global warming, thinning of the ozone layer, an imminent food shortage, war, ineffectual government, genocide, the overuse of already nonrenewable resources, the disgusting air and water qualities in most urban areas, the immense oil and energy consumption by the United States, the water shortage in the Middle East, the destruction of rainforests in Latin America, the damming of rivers all over the world that restricts natural and necessary flow, the dwindling concern by capable Americans of the rest of the world, the horrendous number of automobile accidents in America each year, loss of biodiversity, the rise of genetic mutations in amphibians due to pollutants in rivers, increasing tension between ethnic and religious groups and resulting violence, the overwhelming amount of time and money that is spent by world powers on military expenditures, all types of extinction of species, pesticides that magnify in food chains, the loss of wilderness, the overcrowding of humans in urban areas, the disregard of learning from mistakes in the past, blind religious fundamentalism, the growth of technology to the point that we cannot anticipate an apocalypse that does not concern machines, and the increasing ignorance of humans regarding the world they live in.
I can continue. Would you like me to? ¶ 9:58 PM
"Certainly the same holds true of starving children in Africa who are abused, raped, infected, and dying. Using elites' logic, feeding these children only prolong their pain."
Well, Joe, that's right. These people are the unfortunate excess population; they live in poverty, which in itself is a brutal cycle that makes a rut in a country's population to the point that the poor children that are born into poverty can never get out. Poverty raises the death rate of a population and by consequence and because humans have that instinctual, let's keep the population the same as it has always been or continually growing because more is always better! Well it's a horrid positive feedback loop, because when the more powerful countries send food overseas to third world countries, they do prolong suffering, and in a terrible way. Children recieve the food and live, though not a good life by any means, but say they make it to puberty, and immediately get busy reproducing. So now you have even more of a situation because there are people dying right and left, and now there are babies, stomachs swollen with hunger, who are the future, the perpetuation of this poverty. Is that really the moral thing to do?
These global problems are damn tricky, because we know it's wrong to discard morals on a small level ("Do not do unto others as you would not want them to do unto you") because then individuals suffer. We are social animals, and (usually) the sight of our brothers and sisters suffering, be it on the other side of the world, is incredibly powerful and motivating. However, when one completely grasps the idea of "environmental science", one realizes that...it is almost impossible to save humanity from destroying itself while paying attention to individuals. It kills me to have realized this, and I think I've always known it.
When I was maybe five or eight or eleven, there was a commercial on poverty in third world countries. Being the precocious child I was, I understood the abstract idea of "the good of humanity". One of my parents' asked me (I honestly do not remember which) how I would save the world from this overpopulation crisis. I answered that I would sacrifice people to quickly reduce the population. Need I finish? Now, both my parents were listening and they...either grinned or immediately scheduled a trip to the psychologist, and asked me how I would like being one of the sacrifices. Well, that shut me up.
Well I don't have any good ideas about what to do, nor do I propose anything less than good. This is a huge issue, and not only for the world powers (and everyone else) to recognize and contribute towards finding an answer, but for us to understand to our complete understanding capacity. Where will we be if politicians in Washington only take the population crisis seriously and implement strict controls (think China), without getting to the bottom of the interwoven problems that plague our planet.
We also cannot forget the other things like global warming, thinning of the ozone layer, an imminent food shortage, war, ineffectual government, genocide, the overuse of already nonrenewable resources, the disgusting air and water qualities in most urban areas, the immense oil and energy consumption by the United States, the water shortage in the Middle East, the destruction of rainforests in Latin America, the damming of rivers all over the world that restricts natural and necessary flow, the dwindling concern by capable Americans of the rest of the world, the horrendous number of automobile accidents in America each year, loss of biodiversity, the rise of genetic mutations in amphibians due to pollutants in rivers, increasing tension between ethnic and religious groups and resulting violence, the overwhelming amount of time and money that is spent by world powers on military expenditures, all types of extinction of species, pesticides that magnify in food chains, the loss of wilderness, the overcrowding of humans in urban areas, the disregard of learning from mistakes in the past, blind religious fundamentalism, the growth of technology to the point that we cannot anticipate an apocalypse that does not concern machines, and the increasing ignorance of humans regarding the world they live in.
I can continue. Would you like me to? ¶ 9:58 PM
