Naively Clinging to Hope
Thoughts at the beginning of a new millenium
I WOKE UP THIS MORNING slightly intimidated. The news was very disheartening. There are roughly twice as many people on earth today as on the day I was born. Naturally getting to know everyone on a first name basis is going to be next to impossible. It's one of my lifetime goals I guess I will have to abandon. Of course, the fact that we've managed to double our numbers in a little less than 40 years also is quite amazing considering AIDS, cancer, heart disease, war, and various Fox Television specials like When Good Pets Go Bad and Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?
Even more amazing is the fact that we've been able to stretch the limited resources of this planet to feed a good many of these new residents. Farm production in the United States has indeed increased during the last 40 years while the total number of acres available for farming has decreased due to urban sprawl, highway construction, and the obsessive desire to turn your neighborhood supermarket into the one-stop shopping center from cradle to grave. Who, seriously, needs to be able to buy tires for your 1987 Honda Civic one aisle over from the frozen food section? Or better yet, when a recent study concluded that American children spend more time at the mall than doing their homework, why didn't anyone factor in the sheer size of these shopping behemoths as a reason for the discrepancy? It takes no rocket scientist to figure out that negotiating your way in and out of a mall-which sometimes is spread out over two zip codes- can cause serious damage to your schedule.
It is, of course, a side-effect to the burgeoning population, and it is evident everywhere as we plow down rainforests, dig up, fill in, and overrun the countryside in our vain attempts to homogenize and civilize all four corners of the globe. In this zeal to expand, there seems to be very little thought to what our children and grandchildren will be faced with in the future as we decimate every square inch of land in our attempt to provide housing, shopping and cyber-cafes for the expanding population. Indeed, there seems to be no thought about the future at all - just the desire to build and the need to provide more and more of what we have no idea until we're told what the hot new trend is by Newsweek, Time, and a host of other corporate magazines.
Lest this sound like the rambling of an aging tree-hugger, let me confess right away that I subscribe to Time and Newsweek and have written for People and Playboy magazines. I am a true believer in the economic right to make as much money as Greed will allow and spend it lavishly on tennis shoes that are called "cross-trainers," toothbrushes that offer bent stems and the ability with their new bristles to scrub my lungs with one deep motion, and above all, being able to spoil my children with every gadget and article of clothing ill-conceived by the mind of man, including the all-pervasive need to spend unlimited funds on my children's shallow desire to own every Pokémon card in existence.
But has anyone thought, truly thought, about what happens in the future? I'm not talking about economic or political collapse, nuclear conflagration, the melting of the polar ice caps, nor of the disappearing ozone layer- although someone should probably be paying a little more attention to all of those cataclysmic changes as well. As John Lennon said, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." So, while the world is planning on fighting, selling, praying, partying, reading, bending over, ripping someone off, whoring, sleeping, spending fifteen dollars on a toothbrush, walking in the rain, burning Barry Manilow records, putting on pointy-headed bed sheets in the name of racial purity, preaching love, preaching hate, preaching spirituality, and day trading online, the thing we seem to be doing best is doing as the Good Book says and being fruitful and multiplying. Where, in the next 30 or 40 years, do we intend to put all of these billions of new people? I've got space at my house for about two, so obviously we're ali going to have to double up on our sleeping arrangements. Still, I suspect that won't solve the problem. My mother, for example, won' put anyone up at her place even if she has the room - she is such a neatfreak she can't stand anyone messing up her place.
This causes no end to problems when my wife and our three children visit for the holidays. So, I'm reasonably sure complete strangers don't stand a chance with her. I suspect there are many more like my mother out there. You've seen them. They are the people who vacuum their living rooms when they want to relax, pull out a 50-gallon barrel of weed killer to zap one stray dandelion in their lawn, and spend 30 minutes in front of the makeup mirror every morning gagging as they brush their tongue.
The question remains: what do we do with all of these people that are coming? Condoms, planned parenthood, and the desires of the state aside, there seems to be no stopping the coming population explosion. People just enjoy unprotected sex too damn much. It's cheap, it's easy, and thanks to prime time television, HBO, and the Internet, just about anyone can do it. Rumors are the Catholic Church used to have a patent on the process simply for procreation purposes, but the information age has brought the monopoly to a devastating end.
We are therefore left with a huge procreative force that is threatening to overrun the planet, much like unchecked bacteria in a test tube. And we all should know what happens when the bacteria population reaches a certain point. The bacteria use all of their resources in the test tube and then begin dying off, unable to sustain themselves. Will the same thing happen to the human race? Is AIDS, the Plague, heart disease, cancer, and a host of other diseases and conditions simply nature's way of playing Scrooge and killing off the surplus population?
More importantly, is the human race the multi-cellular equivalent of simple bacteria? Can we not control our destiny any better?
Fortunately, all of these questions have been answered in the upcoming book, Die You Zayon Pig, by Dr. Leonard McCoy, who proposes that everyone simply masturbate twice a day, thereby eliminating the need to procreate. While a noble concept, I doubt it will enjoy much success.
Generations of parents telling their children to "stop it or you will go blind," coupled with the old stand-by, "you'll grow hair on your palms," Will, 1 surmise, be much too much to overcome, and the procreative arts will continue to flourish.
Which leaves us back at the fundamental problem of not enough space and too many people in the coming future. It is inevitable, and there will have to be many hard decisions made, if not by us, then by our children. In as much as our parents handed us this problem, perhaps without knowing it was a problem themselves, this does not give us the right to hand the problem down to our children. Let' face it. World War I and World War II, which gave rise to the existential movement among other absurdities, also brought to our parents the overwhelming notion that overpopulation would never be a big problem because we could be relatively assured that every 25 years or so the world would kill off as many people as possible in a massive display of genocide, violent war, and bad war slogans. Alas, nothing in this world is assured, so here we are.
After much humor, vacillation, and ignorance, there really is only one solution to the problem - at least as many science fictions writers tell us - we must leave the nest. This isn’t an Isaac Asimov short story.
Space travel has captured the nation's attention and imagination ever since John Kennedy challenged the nation to get to the Moon and return safely in perhaps the most tumultuous decade of the 20th Century. We did, too, and pinned to the wall in my home office is a constant reminder as to why I am no longer enthusiastic about American presidential politics.
It is a piece of needle-point that I crafted for a third grade project.
Our teacher at the time, Mrs. Blount, thought it would be good if boys and girls learned a little about stitches. Perhaps she thought we would all become doctors or needlepoint artists. Who knows? But she did teach us a few stitches and then gave us some wildly colored yarn, a light bluish-green piece of what looked like burlap, and turned us loose.
I remember getting a "B" on the project and was admonished for rushing through the effort. But I couldn't help myself. I'm sure Mrs.Blount, with her astute knowledge of obscure stitching patterns, wanted us to come up with something beautiful and amazing in our effort.
Indeed, some children tried to stitch a swan, a mountain range, a dog, or a bird or something equally beautiful inspired by the artist and poet in all of us. I wasn't so inspired. For the only thing that I could think about in the fall of 1969 was NASA. I was too young to worry about the wrong colored acid at Woodstock, John McCain's Vietnam or Richard Nixon's Dirty Tricks Club Band. In fact, nothing much of the outside world seemed to penetrate the smell of school paste and games like kickball which seemed imminently important to me and most of us at Goldsmith Elementary School in Louisville, Kentucky.
The one single exception was NASA. Neil Armstrong. Buzz Aldrin. Michael Collins. Apollo 11. The Eagle has landed. Columbia was in orbit. I and most of my friends had been enamored of the Space Program and NASA since we had been able to breathe. I collected every stray clipping from the newspaper that I could, back to late Mercury and early Gemini missions. Some of my earliest memories were of shut downs on the launch pad, docking with the Agena rocket, space walks, and the untimely launch pad fire and loss of my favorite astronaut, Gus Grissom, along with Roger Chaffee and Ed White. With blue construction paper, I had fashioned several files into which I dropped all of the articles I found on NASA's space flights. I even had allocated flight numbers and affixed the official flight insignia to each file I created and put them all together in one large binder. It was all about the romance, as I saw it, of Space Travel and the hope it gave me for our future. It was a future where people lived on the moon, colonized Mars and traveled to the stars. It was a future where you didn't have to worry about a stray asteroid wiping out the entire human race, for there would always be more than one rock in the solar system where people could and would live.
NASA gave me dreams that I had never fathomed before or since.
Which brings me back to the needle-point project. Mine depicted the Apollo Command module separating from the Service Module for re-entry after a moon flight. Mrs. Blount, upon receiving it from me, asked if I knew who had gotten the space program started. I admitted I did not and that's when she told me my father's hero, John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president, had challenged the nation to get to the moon before the end of the decade, and we had done it.
I marveled then and now at the fact that words could be used to move people so forcefully and along such monumentally noble paths.
I don't think it's an overstatement to say the best and most impressive thing Kennedy did for this country and the world was to give birth to the Space Program and its byproducts, which include computers and the Internet Revolution. There really hasn't been anyone since Kennedy that could move a crowd the way he did and I haven't
witnessed, since his time, a politician that could unite as he could. I never saw my father once cry for any man, let alone a politician, the way he cried when Kennedy died. I became proud of politicians because of Kennedy and that pride grew as I realized my grandfather and an uncle were circuit court judges while my other uncle was a state senator.
And as I watched launch after launch of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft on television- and collected my newspaper clippings- I became inspired not only by the politicians, but by the press which reported on everything about NASA and kept me informed via Walter Cronkite's ringside seat to history.
But over the years, I lost my files of newspaper articles and forgot the naive enthusiasm I held in my childhood. The nation too seems to have forgotten its own past. Who could conceive of a politician in his day and age inspiring anyone the way Kennedy did? Reporters of the caliber of Geraldo Rivera have replaced the trusted Walter Cronkite.
On the whole, politicians and the press alike seem to be nothing more than sideshow barkers hawking cheap remedies and snake oil as salves for our jaded American psyche.
Looking at the needle-point that served as a symbol of my inspiration as a child, I wonder who will inspire us now. I look at my own sons and wonder if there are any leaders, journalists, or noble causes like the Space Race left for them. Our race with the Soviet Union to get a man on the moon was choreographed by a generation whose ingenuity had already been tested and tempered by the suffering of a depression and the fires of the worst war ever waged on the planet.
The world is now run by us, the sons and daughters of that generation: the baby boomers. We have met the enemy and they are us, to paraphrase Pogo. Our parents, never wanting us to suffer as they did, gave us a world where the possibilities are limitless, and we waste our time with diversions derived from the ancillary technology that took us to the moon - Play Stations and computer games. Yet, a look at that needle point on my wall, I still from time to time naively hold out the hope that we will one day find a politician who inspires rather than divides. I look forward to someone who will share a vision and challenge us to reach it. Then I turn around at my neighbors and look myself in the mirror and realize that it must come from us now.
I naïvely cling to the hope that in my lifetime I can visit the moon, that politicians will spend less time talking about stained dresses and more time talking and doing something about education and poverty, and I pray every night that the profession that I joined some 20 years ago will rebound from the carnival sideshow antics now rampant in the industry and provide people with useful and incisive information.
I continue to hope all of this, because if the statisticians are right, the world population is going to double again within my lifetime, and I believe the only hope for the human race is to expand off of this one globe to the Moon, to Mars, and eventually to the stars.
The alternative is tight quarters and starvation for everyone. Either that or you're going to have to persuade my mother to put up a few houseguests at her house, and I know for a fact she's not going for that.