Population Pt. 1: "Life is Sacred"

In daily commutes from this A or to that B, I find my speed sometimes hampered by people. Not always the willful ignorance of some slow-poke or a powerless individual deliberately milking a situation for any control they can temporarily claim. Oftentimes there are simply too many individuals in one space, comprising a teeming mass that expands and contracts at environmental whims. Beyond my arrogant observation that most of these people are likely "just in the way" ,or not hustling off to a task on an equal par with mine, in urban and suburban areas there is the sense that there are too many of us.

As a transportation dork I've come to understand that the capacity for things like roads, sidewalks, traffic signals, public transportation, and to a similar extent public institutions such as schools and courthouses, are built to a precise demand predicted to exist sometime in the future. 20 years is often regarded as a good figure for transportation demands, 5 is more likely for something like a school. The problem with these estimates, one would argue, is that (barring the apocalypse) there may very well not be the funds in the future to make upgrades to match an increasing demand.. Where does this problem come from? The fatal flaw in these predictions is the capriciousness of exponential growth. Without digging too far into the mathematics, suffice it to say that the variables in an exponential formula lend themselves, generally, to a wider range of results than linear relationships. Failing to correctly predict one factor can affect a result by orders of magnitude. Or, in application, lead to a crowded interstate in 10 years rather than 20.

I stated all this, really, to talk about the topic of the title. Population is an issue, whether one opines that every sperm is sacred or condones infanticide. Population was a concern of tribal cultures who were concerned about their ability to balance their responsibility of supporting a member thru gestation and childhood against their own personal needs. People, fully understanding where children came from, often made the undoubtedly life-changing decision to end their child's life, often post-fetal. There was an overwhelming sense of placing the well-being of the tribe or community above the well-being of one's self when the benefits of a "selfish" act failed to outweigh the detriment to the community.

Americans don't do this.

On a large scale we seem to have failed to consider the fact that every birth is not only a death, but 60 Billion calories, thousands of unrequited dollars, several hundred barrels of crude oil, a potential drain on gov't resources (with regard to social security and healthcare and transportation and defense and education and . . .) of millions. Every person added to the mix is a gamble, plain and simple. Some people pay off, some of us do not.

We've been very successful in paying lip service to the concept that life is sacred; celebrating the birth of children under any circumstance, prolonging the inevitable death of the elderly by subjecting them to batteries of treatment to pull them several inches back from the brink, imagining that our lives are so special that they could have only been created in the snap of divine fingers. Anti-choice activists claim that abortion is murder while supporting death in both foreign and penal policy. Eric Robert Rudolph bombed buildings because he believed so much in the sacredness of life.
While I do believe that once a child is born it is absolutely the responsibility of the parent and the community to provide that being with a shot, with as equal circumstances as possible, I must confess that we Americans don't really hold life sacred.

Take, for example, the birth of children in abject poverty in both inner cities and rural communities (I'm thinking here of the unspeakable poverty in parts of Appalachia). We Americans seem to find this life (on the brink of starvation, cold, uneducated, unhappy, unhealthy) so satisfying that it would be a shame not to let another child in on it. We hold the value of that child's life to such a level of import that we are literally willing to subject him or her to the absolute worst life has to offer rather than fix the problems affecting ourselves and those already born. In our refusal to accept the reality of our environment we seem to think that "love" is enough for a child. Unfortunately, Love is a poor substitute for dinner or textbooks or a blanket or vaccinations. Love is important to raising a child (and daunting problems also arise when people have children without love or even worse without evena sense of responsibility, but this topic does not speak to the economics and philosophy of overpopulation that I'm shooting for), but so is having the approriate resources to put that love into affect. Those who bear their children in abject poverty (and I'm not speaking about people who have simply bad credit, or a mediocre job. I'm not relegating the bearing of children to the upper crust) are not holding life sacred, in fact they make a mockery of it everytime they select exaggerating the problem over the simple mathematics that a deer or a fox perform. And because this is America, we can often only think in soundbites that rhyme, I've comprised a piece of verse: "If you can't feed, don't breed."


Another example is the current "healthcare crisis". Our nation is crippled by rising health care costs and their impact on corporate incomes, personal financial security, and what I will call the "emergency infrastructure" (that is our ability to respond to health emergencies such as gunshots, car accidents and fires). While I have equal vitriol for frivolous lawsuits and underhanded drug companies (and the demons in Washington who promote their interests), the topic of this post relegates me to discussing the issue of prolonging the inevitable.
In our relentless pursuit for the sanctity of life we, America, have developed a method of operations with regards to the elderly and the terminally ill that neither holds life sacred nor benefits the community at large. A prime, well-known example of this is the Terri Schaivo case, in which faux-Christians demanded that a woman nature pronounced dead 10 years ago must remain plugged into machines presumably until decay. Rather than facing the sad truth of inevitable death and freeing up resources for an recovering individual who needs it, rather than donating the still vital organs to an 8 year-old girl with a malformed kidney, rather than putting a corpse in the ground where it belongs, our pursuit of sanctity required that Terri Schaivo remain "alive". When the voice of reason finally prevailed, not without a fight, it was discovered Terrie was virtually brain dead with no chance for even marginal recovery using current medical methods.
To a less exaggerrated degree we take this philosophy to the elderly. To 90 year-old women having their chests opened for the 14th time, to 85 year old men confined to a bed for eternity but whose tired heart promises the the financial return of one more surgery. to $100 per day (whether paid by insurance or the gov't) in drug costs to squeeze out a year or two more of unhappiness.

This is not holding life sacred. This is being terrified of death.