OT: The source of the problem.

Terrierman is right on the money again today! But don't quote him in front of your teachers, teachers don't like it when you outsmart them, and such things tend to rile up those who chant what they believe, instead of thinking about the problem.

Back when I was in high school, several of the teachers liked to talk about social problems, and I generally liked that - not the "this is how it should be, propaganda type", but the "there is a problem with ___".

One day, it suddenly dawned on me that all of these problems had the very same source. We didn't need to think up hundreds of different solutions to hundreds of different problems, because there was one root source to all of these problems.

I assumed this was really going to lead to a good class discussion (not a good assumption on my part).

Thousands of towns with sewage disposal problems? Hundreds of places where sewage is seeping into the ground water? Growing special monoculture crops with intensive farming methods to try to feed an ever growing population?

Pesticides because crops are too needed to tolerate nature taking her cut? Beef being fed up in cramped feedlots? Traffic? No place for more freeways? Gasoline shortages? Housing shortages? etc.

The problem wasn't the lack of resources but the booming rate of population growth.

The teacher looked at me like I had said that I'd seen a herd of pink elephants.

I knew I was right, so why was the teacher so displeased? He didn't even let me finish explaining.

I had opened up a taboo topic, that he was skirting about. So easy to talk over the head of teenager who have never heard the truth.

The kids who had understood what he was talking about were the ones whose churches gave lectures about "Why there is NOT overpopulation'"and "Why overpopulation is impossible".

Friends, quoting from their church, explained [paraphrasing]: "When the population gets too high, the extra starve to death, and aren't a problem anymore. Since overpopulation is more people than we can feed, there is never too many, because if there were too many, the extra would be dead".

The whole point is to keep birth numbers low enough that people aren't starving to death.

And it is easily possible to have a deadly number of people, yet be able to feed them all. (polution kills).

You can probably afford to feed 50 cats (if you feed them cheap food?) but that wouldn't make having 50 cats in your house comfortable would it?

Apologies to those readers with 75 cats in their house. Please don't hiss at me.

Why is the truth taboo? The truth is that our nation has finite resources, and so do other countries.

Our population has passed the point when we can do best on a growth model of economics. We need to have a steady-state system. A matured system. A system not built around the concept of growth.

We need to deal with the plain hard truth that if other countries have raging population growth, they will want the agricultural lands of their neighbors, like Hitler drooling over French farmlands.

We work to help our neighbors with family planning or we end up in war. We help our country with family planning or we deal with poverty on our doorsteps.