The Culture Wars

They're coming.
The survivors
The refugees
The soldiers
The seducers

They're coming
With their music
With their clothes
With their dances
With their baggage

They're coming
Ready to unload
Ready to share
Ready to shout
Ready to rage

They're coming
For the freedom
For the riches
For the glory
For the fame

They're coming

And they're hungry

How many children is too many?

I did a Google search for this question recently and was stunned by the overwhelming popular answer: two is too many. Or maybe three. Certainly more than that is too many.

Points made in some comments I read:

People with a lot of kids are selfish and irresponsible.

The world is already over populated and people should aim for 0% population growth.

Please, give me a break!

I'll tell you what selfish is. Selfish is blowing your 50k-100k salary on frivolous material possessions. Selfish is having a full freezer and refrigerator while watching starving third-world children on the news.

And how about those starving children? Why are they starving? Because there are too many of them? Or because the the governments of their nations strive to keep the populations uneducated? Maybe because even when first world nations do give charitable donations, those government officials keep most (or all) of the gifts for themselves?

What about the agricultural industry that has managed to place patents on enhanced seed and grain while pushing the original, natural seed and grain almost into extinction? So that if a third world nation wanted or could grow its own grain, they have to purchase the seed from the patent holder? In North America, private farmers are sued all the time when some stray, patented seed migrates to their fields.

Fresh water requires an infrastructure to clean waste and direct the water where it is needed. But it doesn't matter if your nation has one billion people or twenty billion people, if the government does not want to spend money on that system, or they are so corrupt that no private industry can afford to stake a claim, than any number of people becomes too many.

No, parents of large families are not guilty of selfishness (ok, I'm sure some are) but rather they are guilty of living a fantasy where people are free to live how they want to live.

Land of the free? More like, land of the gotta-have-it-alls and want-mores.

What these population control freaks often neglect to share in their published comments or articles is the number of parents who look back and wish they had dared to produce more children.

Even church is not a safe harbor for Christian families who would like to have more children. But the number of Christians who wish they could have more is steadily growing.

The truth is, having a large family is time-consuming. Do you have hobbies and self interests? A pile of kids is going to change that. You can still have hobbies, you can even get away once in a while for some quiet time. The problem is that many parents just can't fathom sacrificing for a family and when they see another set of parents who appear to be successfully raising lots of kids, jealousy abounds.

It's funny how all these educated people say we need to control the population and reduce growth. Vasectomies should be handed out to everyone. What a bunch of slackers. Here's some science for you, straight out of the Theory of Evolution, if you don't use it, you lose it.

Acceleration

A C C E L E R A T I O N

How quickly can society advance? Can knowledge keep up with technology? What can we afford to leave behind and forget to reach our goals more efficiently?

Morals are open to debate, they are inefficient and bog down progress; they are costly. The Constitution of the United States of America is filled with laws steeped in morals. For the sake of progress the Fore Fathers are being silenced.

Progress = profit.

The more quickly progress can be attained, the faster our gratification can be realized.

If a few people die on the job, their deaths are an acceptable cost to so long as productivity output has not been significantly affected; the work force is designed to quickly fill gaps in production lines where needed. It is better to allow lower-class workforce participants to succumb to illness or legal prosecution rather than the upper echelons of a corporation because of the ease of replacement. The corporate chairmen are able to push progression ever faster while the average worker has little influence over economical and societal events.

It makes sense that the elite in society can provide for themselves and are sustained by the highest medical treatments in the world while the average worker who becomes ill will be allowed to suffer. The elite cannot be so easily replaced as the worker. The elite have knowledge and influence, power to control events, and easy access to world governments. The worker on the other hand has nothing substantial in comparison; debt, sickness, and complaints. The worker is apt to debate morals, the elite would rather make laws.

Laws circumvent the moral debate. While there are instances where laws have caused some debate, it is largely accurate to say that laws are preferred for lack of discussion. Gun control is a very good example that illustrates the issue. Between federal, state, and local jurisdictions, there are several thousand individually different laws to circumvent the very simple moral that people should not kill each other. The moral taken by itself allows for endless debate; maybe there is a time to kill, perhaps only certain people should be allowed to do the killing; what if certain people need to die? Then there is the question of how and where killing should be done; should people be allowed to use guns to kill with? What about defending a home? Perhaps anyone can kill, but only certain people should do so with guns. Should every home be armed with guns or only certain qualifying people?

The debate can go on and on, slowing any progress that might be influenced by the discussion.

The thousands of laws speed up the process tremendously. By law, a person knows if they can have a gun and where they can use it. By law, a person knows whom they can use a gun against and when to do so. There is no debate. The law answers all questions. The law speeds up all discourse about a subject or ideal so that a society can move on.

The speed at which a society can progress is currently only slowed by the development process of technology. Acceleration of technological development has been increasing for decades at the loss of many simple morals in favor of so many laws even the law makers require entire rooms full of legal books.

We have lost much in the name of progress, seemingly for little gain. Much of our modern technology is only the acceleration of progress; faster communications, faster transportation, and faster labor. In the United States of America we are now seeing some of the cost of this progress.

Our infrastructure has suffered tremendously, education is failing at all levels, and the family construct is fractured.

Is there a goal to this mad rush for progress? How much longer can we endure this reckless, breakneck pace? How much more are we willing to give up for it?

Free

F R E E

These days, everyone is looking for free stuff; free energy, free healthcare, free food, free sex….the list goes on. Yet, everyone knows and agrees that nothing is actually free. People are stealing man-hole covers to sell the metal, they are stripping abandoned homes of copper pipes and have even gone so far as to steal the fittings off of fire hydrants. In the middle of winter every year, someone freezes to death because their gas or electricity was turned off. Even your organs are not safe these days; if you go on a leisurely walk you could return home missing a kidney.

Cars are sinking into house-sized pot holes on the highways, bridges are collapsing, sewers are leaking into fresh-water rivers. The disruption of ecosystems is causing plants and animals to go extinct. We are running out of all sorts of stuff, individual elements from the periodic table are dwindling fast: copper, zinc, and other lesser-known elements that are necessary for environmentally-friendly (green) technologies. Even elements used in computers and solar panels are evaporating.

Sick people are being removed from hospitals and dropped onto streets blocks away for lack of insurance; some are dying because their provider has refused to pay for expensive treatment. Swat teams are breaking down the doors of innocent people and sometimes someone gets shot, even killed. Children are being labeled sex-offenders if they send nude photos to each other on their cell phones, getting expelled for playing cops-and-robbers as early as 10yrs old, and God help the parent who has a child removed by child welfare services over a misunderstanding.

Far too many wars are being fought on the U.S.A. soil: we have a war on drugs, war on pollution, war on religion, war on parents, war on “domestic terror”; everyone seems to be after someone for something. Scald yourself with hot coffee from a drive-through? Sue them! Trip on a broken sidewalk on a commercial property? Sue them! Bitten by dog in home you were about to rob? Sue them! This trend of suing anyone over anything is a war on common sense.

It’s no wonder we have an obesity problem in America; if you can survive your daily transit to and from work, if you can make it through your work day and not lose your self control, then you’ve survived yet another day, why bother with anything else? You’ve got your own battle to fight, anyone else’s problem is theirs alone.

Nothing is free, and least of all freedom. In a nation with a population that is indebted, incarcerated, impoverished, and sickly; freedom is hard to come by. Politicians have bred a nation of ignorance and apathy and confusion. People who have some knowledge of what to do, are scared or powerless or can’t agree on the best “fix”. Some say the police state that we have become is our just reward for tolerating political corruption. It’s difficult to argue that point. We can point fingers at the politicians all day long, but at the end of the day, WE put them there.

Nothing is free. Thomas Jefferson said that every once in awhile the patriots have to rise up in arms and shake down the government, put them in their place. He knew freedom could not last forever, it’s not free, it needs to be maintained. Maintenance of our freedom is a dangerous job, it requires brave patriots. Freedom requires the blood of those patriots, there is no safe way to go about it. Freedom demands blood in the streets. It’s a messy job, but someone has to do it.