The Eternal Baby Boom
by Aaron Worley
Many guys have dated that girl who says she wants to have eight kids when she gets married because she just loves kids. If the girl is pretty enough, the guys will lie and agree that eight kids would be great, while deep down they make a mental note not to marry the girl. Of course, the reverse also occurs--there are some guys who think it would be neat to have a family basketball team. Occasionally, the breeding girl meets the big family wanting guy, and they go on to have seven kids (all with similar names). Those families are called Mormons.
While it would be nice to blame the overpopulation problem solely on Mormons, there's much more to the problem than that, but religion is a good place to start. Catholicism is a probably number one on the list. Catholics beat out Mormons for the simple reason that there are more Catholics around, and the good ones don't use any type of birth control. Somewhere along the way, one of the Popes (who knows which one?) decided that if sperm comes out of a man it better be put to good use. As a result, Catholics are supposed to take a shot at having a baby every time they have sex, and given a loaded gun almost anyone can hit the tree eventually.
Religions also wanted their members to go forth and multiply just so the congregation could get bigger, and the churches would grow. Few went as far as Brigham Young did by having over a dozen wives, but some people still feel the need to create several offspring.
It wouldn't be fair to just blame the large families on just a particular religion or two. There are several other reasons for the massive onslaught of children in the country. One is that many Americans have an agrarian attitude toward life. Only in the last sixty or seventy years has there been more urban population than rural. While that may be a long time in one person's life, it's just a blink of an eye for a family tradition. There was a certain logic behind having many kids on the farm because more kids meant more free labor, and since the closest neighbor might have been miles away, children were good company.
Of course with big families and few neighbors, strange fetishes would spring up like messing with chickens, being a little too friendly with other family members, and basically everything in Wuthering Heights. While those compulsions make for great stories and Tarantino movies, it's not very healthy for the soul.
Those who scoff at the idea that the agrarian mind set is still alive and kicking need only to go to a town of less than thirty thousand people. They marry young and breed early and often. Not because they want to get a head start on family life but more because it's what they are taught to do. Many of the kids who don't go to college stay in the town, get jobs, find a girl, and marry them (sometimes before a conception, sometimes not). Starting a family at a young age greatly increases the chances that there will be three or more kids.
This brings us to the mathematical part of overpopulation. If two people get together and have three or more kids, they are contributing to the overpopulation problem. If two people create more kids than are needed to replace them, the world is going to get a bit more crowded. On a personal level, it may sound trivial to quibble about the number of kids a family should have, but if all of the families that think this is insignificant topic are taken into account, we're talking about millions of families.
We can also look at dogs to see how bad the problem can get. People love dogs. Moreover, people like certain types of dogs which means a lot of breeding for unnecessary puppies. There are so many dogs in the United States that every family could own seven dogs, and there would still be strays wandering around. With that many dogs, they are ultimately killing hundreds a day just to keep the population down. It has not gotten that bad yet with people, but just imagine what we're going to have to do when the stray people start to outnumber the loved.
Then, there are the people who just love kids. I, myself, am one of those people. Children see the world in such a fresh, innocent, distorted way that they can actually teach adults a thing or two. They do, however, grow up to become just another part of a generation with a catchy name. Childhood is only twenty years of a person's life, and new kids shouldn't be brought into the world because a parent wants to experience the first twenty or so years of an offspring's life. On average, a person has fifty more years to deal with in which no one thinks they're cute and cuddly, and during those years they are just trying to survive.
Survival is probably the main reason there is a overpopulation problem in the first place. Darwin said "Only the strong survive," and despite what many football coaches say, the strong meant the people who could reproduce. If genes don't get passed on, they die with that person, and the future of the species has little to do with the dead who don't have offspring. Many people have that revelation during near death experiences. This is why wars, car crashes, heart attacks, turbulence in airplanes, and bear maulings make people want to have kids. Mortality can be the biggest motivater in deciding to have a child.
Little has been said about those who have children by accident. Some conceptions occur because of guys who don't want to wear condoms, and sometimes by the one sperm able to swim through the sponge. Basically, there are lots of ways to have kids intentionally and unintentionally, but there is only one way to control the amount of children had, and that's by planning.
There's probably a lot of people out there who think "Who cares if there are more people in world? We're doing just fine." The truth is that we're not doing fine. With more people comes a greater pull on our resources. Oil, which was supposed to last well beyond our lifetimes, is in increasingly shorter supply. Land that was formally forests and badlands are now being sucked into communities. The rain forests everyone thinks should be left alone aren't being burned for kicks. They're being plowed to make way for industries which service the growing population. With every person born, the resources drop another notch.
Scholars have stated that the real problem with the United States isn't overpopulation but over consumption, and that seems to be a fairly sound argument to counter the depleting resources question. With more people, however, comes more undesirable people. It is understood that there will always be a certain percentage of our population who are insane, crazy, or mentally ill. Crime is worse than it was forty years ago, and with more people, more crazy stunts will be pulled in the name of insanity. With every bomb that explodes and every killing spree, everyone will be looking for someone or something to blame.
It's pointless to condemn the past for overpopulation because they just didn't consider it. That's like charging the past with using up all of the oil. It doesn't do any good now. So, don't go finding fault in Darwin, religions, small towns, wars, and the ignorant for too many people. Don't scorn families with many children. After all, I'm a third son of a third son which means by my own logic I shouldn't exist. We just need to be more conscious of what we are doing.
The only reason I might have three sons is that my third son would be eligible to call on the forces of evil to attempt a takeover of the world. Unless people have an excuse that good to have several children, they should probably limit themselves to one or two.
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