Not Even Prayer Will Help, If.

Seems an Online newsletter is making the rounds these days on how to avoid sure-fire castasthophe should climate changes cause the oceans to rise enough to cause shore lines to recede, or cause worldwide starvation.
According to the letter, the answer to any and all ills, both present and future, depends on this: a slew of “if onlys”. If only, human beings would be kind to one another, and, if only they would share what bounties they have with one another and so on. If only. If only. All those “if onlys” looks great—in words on paper. In real life, they just don’t work.
There have always been those who yearned for and envisioned brotherhood among the masses, but so far, I’ve yet to read of any but minor, long-time successes. I have the Quakers in mind and another, almost extinct sect called the “Shakers”.
Some eighty years ago, when I was just nine years old, the daily newspapers printed news such as that found in the Online Newsletter: We are seeing financial markets collapse in a domino-like fashion. We are watching our retirement accounts wither … investments wither … jobs eliminated, worry about sending our children to college … unable to pay our debts …the list of worries go on and on. I remember well the 1930s and its poverty. Men stood placidly in long lines hoping for a job, any job. There was little in the way of welfare and many went to bed hungry. Notwithstanding, few people locked their doors in fear of losing what little they had. Today, instead of patient, placid men standing in line for jobs, we would have riots. Because this country has not taken the stern measures China did to curtail its drug problem, if we have a deep recession, no house will be safe from invasion of drug addicts seeking a “fix”.
We survived the great depression of the twentieth century because the majority of the population in America were descendents of legal immigrants who had deep respect for law and order. Overpopulation of America was not yet a valid reason for cutting back on unrestrained growth. Today? The population, both by birth and immigration, legal and otherwise, is growing a a rate when people will soon far outgrow the available jobs. Unlike nations such as China and India, who have jobs making products for sale here in America, for whom will the people in this country produce products?
Those who believe that each and every fertilized human egg must be compared to, or viewed as a newborn baby, had better begin visualizing this world stripped of its resources while overflowing with hungry, homeless and desparate human beings with nothing left to live for. To date, the Hubble telescope with its ability to probe outer space, has not located so much as one, large or small hospitable planet to which the human race can escape when needed. Unless disease, war and the elements succeed in reducing the population, this planet is in for serious problems: not in the lifetime of most living today, but in too many other lifetimes, such as my grandchildren and all the grandchildren to follow. To get back to the thirtie’s depression. …
Many of those “ifs” mentioned in the online newsletter, were applied to one another by the average citizen in this country during the thirties. That was then: now is now. You’ve only to keep up with the daily news to understand that. America is not the America I remember eighty years ago. As for nations? In all the history of mankind, there appears to be no record of one nation volunteering to “move over and make room” for another, or willing to reduce its standard of living in order to improve that of another.
If the present depression deepens to equal that of the thirties, I fear the consequences. Yes, we had crime during thirties, but when a teenager, I felt no fear walking home from a movie late in the evening, old women needn’t fear being mugged carrying bags of groceries home, and old men could sit in a park late in the evening without fear of being beaten by teenage hoodlums. Situations have a way of getting worse the older a country grows.