The Economic Summit

Listening to the President and the assembled dignitaries today, took me back to our greatest problem—overpopulation—and the only solution I can see to it. There is no other answer than to reduce our numbers, whether by will or by force. President Obama started things off today by talking about health care, which took me off, unexpectedly, to another direction.

We, like all creatures on this earth, past, present, or future, arrived here through the forces of Nature, and we will leave by the same means at a time unknown. What all creatures have in common is that the life spans differ according to what kind of creatures they are, and each creature has a particular life span on earth. Within that span, some of the young die early as a result of vulnerability to other creatures and forces. The middle group is fairly stable with its regard to its relationship to the forces of nature and the span of its existence. And the old, once again, become vulnerable to the forces of nature and their ability to outlive their time here.

Man, through his wonderful ability to invent new ways to keep the halt and the lame of each group alive, is now able to keep humans who would otherwise have perished still alive and breathing. In some cases, people who were badly wounded by injury or disease have recovered to a level where they have continued to contribute to mankind. But they are outumbered by those who exist only with continued care and fading contribution as normal human beings.

And the old, with relatively few exceptions, begin to sink into the ravages of old age, particularly with regard to mental capacity for everyday thinking. I have been very fortunate to have been nurtured by the computer to be able to write articles which I hope contribute to and share with the thinking of others of normal intellectual capacity. Next week, however, I will be 86 years old, and I can feel my everyday mind slipping away. I tend to sit for long periods of time thinking of nothing, I have a hard time thinking of ordinary words when I am writing, and I have recently started saying words inside out, to name a few of the problems currently bothering me.

The old used to die of old-age diseases, poverty, and neglect. Those of us who can afford excellent health-care can live on into the future without continuing to contribute to mankind as a whole, our only contribution being to ourselves, at great cost to the rest of mankind. We simply cannot continue to encourage more population at the beginning of life and then continue to support it at the useless end of life. Many of us who have reached this stage of life deserve to choose when and how they wish to end it.

ARW
2/23/09