Free verse № 147188
Timing
In another age,
I would have married young,
To a pre-selected man from my village,
had too many children,
broken my back with my hands,
died early,
rested beneath the second of three crosses
behind his house,
while our hated king lived on a far away hill.
I would have believed in servitude
and done what the priest said,
until my husband came home drunk,
layed me and fell asleep.
Then I would have hung a red lantern
for seafare to Paris.
37 comments
Of course, I'm not saying that women should be treated as objects. But if you don't want nine billion people on the planet, absolute liberty isn't the solution.
If you say everyone should be totally free, you can't then limit the number of children they can have. You can't even set an unofficial 'target', because that's doing pretty much the same thing as enforcing a strict limit, except it's being done through emotional blackmail rather than armed troops. And hasn't China proven that even if you do set a child cap, the population will still swell uncontrollably?
As for the rising population, well we're going to reach the limit one day unless natural forces intervene, aren't we? And when we do, war, famine or plague will keep the numbers in check. It's ironic that you call the mentality one from the Middle Ages (which is true enough) but look for a reduction in numbers, because the only thing which can drastically diminish the number of human beings on the planet (aside from a good ol' epidemic) is a social return to the Middle Ages. While we continue to attempt to create an entire first world planet, we will create more problems of space and resources. After all, the whole point of first world society is to be populous and prosperous. But are there enough world resources for Earth to be totally first world?
I don't think any of my comment made sense.
The thing is, if we have to afford potential human beings equal (or nearly equal) consideration, as you seem to be saying, is it not more immoral to deprive them of the chance to live than it is to let them come into a world where their chances of a high quality of life are slim? I guess it's an extension of the abortion issue. And anyway, if modern humanity was bright enough to be able to agree on this, surely we wouldn't need to instigate any action? People would work it out for theirselves.
Rather than leap into action against the ordinary people (quite literally) on the street, I'd rather see some sort of advancement take place in the higher echelonsof government; i.e. less corruption and more looking after the people they're supposed to represent. Naive of me to say this, I'm sure, but at present the lifestyle many impoverished families lead is the only one which is going to allow them to see tomorrow. I don't think that any change of attitudes, however noble and right, will remedy the situation one little bit. Unfortunately the West, who has the potential to make changes happen, has been neutralised in the regime-altering department after Afghanistan and Iraq. America might get away with going into Iran, but beyond that what political clout will you be left with? We already have none, and I don't see that improving for a long while.
Oh, by the way, typos = theirselves, echelonsof. :)
You say that women in this sort of situation would prefer to have fewer children. That may well be true at present, but it's a potentially cyclic desire. We're seeing it happen here; women wanted, and to an extent got, the power to have their own careers, lives, freedom and something vaguely approaching equality with men. And it's backfired spectacularly for some, who've got to the point where they've decided they now want a family, but can't have one. A rising number of women are now eschewing the career opportunities in order to return to having a traditional family. That's how I was brought up so my view is probably blinkered, certainly, but in 5 or 10 years we could be seeing a large percentage of women actually wanting to be housewives with 3 or 4 kids. And the same could easily happen in the parts of the world we've been discussing; after a decade or two of liberty, women may begin to actively want to return to being mothers-of-many. In which case, won't we be back to where we started?
As for the typos, I'll admit to the second, should have had a space, but 'themselves' really annoys me. 'Work it out for them selves' doesn't make sense to me. The self is the possession of the individual, right? So 'my self' and 'your self' should in the plural become 'their selves', surely?
If the worldâs population grows at its current rate, then within a hundred years or so, the planet cannot support all the people, or at best, it cannot give them any minimum quality of life. The obvious solution is fewer births. Other solutions like allowing war and disease to do the job are as inappropriate as ignoring the smallpox vaccine would have been. Relying on future technology to support more people is not going to work in the long run.
If you will grant me that, I will grant you âtheirselves.â
So the world's population is going to outgrow the planet's means of supporting it. That's true enough, but while the human race is prosperous it will always grow, and that cutoff point will be reached one day regardless of how long it's put it off. I don't believe it could ever be practically possible to keep the earth's population static. If you only want to look fifty or a hundred years into the future, then fine. Your argument is valid, regardless of whether it can be successfully implemented. But this is immediately either giving a greater moral status to the children of the next 50-100 years than to those born after, or it's saying that we have a diminished responsibility towards those born after the cutoff point.
Unless, of course, you are just going for buying us a bit more time in which to find a complete answer. That's fine by me. And I'll grant that the obvious solution is fewer births...plus social change which makes it unnecessary to have many children. But, if you accept that we're going to max out the planet sooner or later, you've also got to accept that we need a more permanent solution as well. Maybe we could populate Mars.
Please grant me 'theirselves'. It'll make my day.
Most of the men in developing countries agree that the one with the most children wins; and that is the major source of the problem. I presume you were kidding.
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