Birth rates continue to plunge not only in the Western world but also globally. What happens when the world gets smaller?
There was a very big rabbi who moved at a young age from New York to Jerusalem. He established a yeshiva and had a reputation as a brilliant Torah scholar and a very friendly person. Even with all of the trappings of Orthodox life and being a highly-respected sage, he once commented, “My heart still flutters when I hear someone mention the Yankees.” I had some similar feelings in seeing so many pictures of Chicago in light of the Democratic National Convention currently running there. The diverse architecture, the bridges across the Chicago River, the endless miles of beachfront on Lake Michigan—it all brought back wonderful memories from a bygone era. When I grew up north of the city, there were no weekend shooting reports or BLM riots. Whatever Democrats touch turns from gold to lead.
The Democrats this week are actively and publicly celebrating their support for bringing fewer human beings into the world. The entrance to the convention has a large inflatable birth control device. Supporters dressed up as abortion pills. Planned Parenthood offered and completely booked up both abortions and vasectomies on site. The party that once represented the family does not want families any more. Throw in support for gay marriage and trans mania and we may be witnessing the last generation of families born to Democratic voters.
It was reported that the world birth rates actually went under the accepted 2.1 breakeven cutoff for the first time. Western countries other than Israel have been well under that number for years. Now, the mass producing non-advanced countries have gotten into the act. Their numbers have gone down enough to bring the world birth situation into reverse. It’s like being on that roller coaster that takes you to the top and holds you there for one second before taking you flying back down. The world has reached its maximum number of souls. Now, we start going down. Japan and Italy have already experienced serious losses in citizenry. Shortly, the rest of the world is going to join the ride.
One question that could be asked is whether having fewer people is such a bad thing. The simple answer is that it can be a disaster for a country. Look at the US. The population is growing, but only because of the uncontrolled entries at the southern border. Without enough people, you do not have workers to pick the crops, work the factories or take care of the aged, who live longer and longer these days. Countries like Japan that have the double whammy of not enough births (1.30 births per woman) and no appreciable immigration are turning to robots to replace the humans that nobody bothered to create. There are places in Italy giving away houses for 1 Euro in the hope of staving off becoming ghost towns. When the guns fall silent, Ukraine and Russia will realize that they will never replace the youth they lost to war (1.16 and 1.49 births per woman, respectively).
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The lack of enough children is definitely aided and abetted by the left’s demonic love of abortive child prevention. They scream that it’s their bodies and they’ll do what they want. But when others screamed the same slogan about not taking experimental vaccines, they were bullied into either taking them or being fired and ostracized from society. But abortion is a side-show relative to the bigger trends of women simply not having children. As women pursue higher education and careers, bearing children is usually pushed off and highly limited. Bringing up children today is very expensive, from clothes to food to education. Also, it means that one’s life revolves around the kids and their needs and desires. In a narcissistic age, I don’t want to give up my travel and leisure in order to change diapers at 3 in the morning and sit for 2 hours in the emergency room to deal with the marble the kid swallowed. Balancing family and career is not impossible, but career advancement can often go faster without a family anchor.
The biggest driver for fewer kids in the West is the weakening of religious life. Having kids is a commandment, and in religious families the children are at the center. As people become less religious, they see less of a need to have children and realize that by not having or by having a dog in their place, they can save a good deal of money and open up a lot of personal opportunities for travel and other activities. While many Western governments try to bribe their citizens into having more kids, I don’t think that such an approach will ever really work. If people do not feel an obligation to bring children into the world or feel that children are a blessing rather than a financial drain, no postpartum check for a few thousand Euros will save the day. There is no easy fix to the problem, and yes, having fewer people means fewer workers contributing to Social Security for those millions of 90-year-olds who wait for their monthly checks. Many don’t realize that today’s workers pay for the Social Security checks received by our elders. There was no savings account set up 80 years ago. It’s a pay as you go system that without new members will simply go bankrupt.
General Curtis LeMay once made a very interesting observation. He burned over 60 Japanese cities to the ground with incendiaries dropped from low-flying B-29 bombers. Once while speaking with an aide, he stated, “If we lose the war, then we are war criminals.” In point of fact, he and the US won the war, and he was considered a major player in getting Japan to surrender. Even in later years, Japan gave him a medal for his wartime service. The Democrats believe that they are winning the culture wars and can push their anti-family policies as long as the human train continues to roll through the porous southern border. But when the border is closed and immigration becomes controlled, they will be seen for the destruction they have wrought. The nuclear family has been the historical core of American success at home and abroad. The destruction of the family by the secularist policies that Democrats have pushed for years truly is the moral equivalent of a war crime.
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