Some things we should think and talk alot more about

 Sam Smith

Overpopulation: The world’s population of 8 billion has increased by nearly a third in just the past century. The UN projects that this population will increase between 1.4 and 2.1 billion by 2050 and between 9.4 and 12.7 billion in 2100. As the Overpopulation Project notes:

The environmental community … has been wary of addressing population, contraception, and abortion because of fears that it would unnecessarily enmesh their programs in controversial topics. Unfortunately, this shyness reinforces the myths from which it shrinks: that attention to population growth is racially motivated, imposes on the poor, or attacks women’s bodily autonomy. The opposite is true. The greatest progress in women’s emancipation and economic development in poor countries has been achieved as a consequence of successful family planning programs.

War: Despite the two major wars of the past century killing some 84 -100 million people even while being a loss to their instigators, we still treat war as a not irregular part of our existence as humans. Thus Putin is an evil downside of our lives, but he performs this evil indifferent to the historic record that it typically doesn’t work all that well.

As one of our presidents put it:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

That was Dwight Eisenhower, the former supreme commander of allied forces in Europe during World War II.

An alternative would be to start to consider war as a historic human failure from which we must start to evolve, just as we did with slavery and some Brits are trying to do now with royalty. We are not prisoners of humanity’s past faults..

Community: As noted here before, humans are the only species that have evolved in a manner that they are now controlled by far distant creatures who do not know them, care about them, or share many of their views. Frogs, for example, do not have to worry about one named Trump damaging their lives again. There is, of course, no way that we will remove presidents, national institutions, mass media and artificial intelligence from our lives, but we can work at rebuilding the role of community and the other relationships help make us human. Having lived just a few blocks from the Capitol during some of the most tumultuous years of the recent past, I learned the capacity of humans to define and deport themselves as decent creatures rather than merely being prisoners of the powerful.

In fact, my adult life has been lived in two DC and one Maine community in which the human still mattered despite efforts of modern organizations and media to move us to a more subservient and less real lives.

But to maintain the human subculture of an institutionalized America we must rescue the good of communities and make them our leaders again.

Multiculturalism as an asset: Because of the necessary efforts to bring decency into our relationship with other genders and ethnicities, we have unconsciously come to regard multiculturalism as a problem more than an asset. The task, though, is not just to do right but to find the pleasure and comfort of living around people who are different than you. Unfortunately, even well meaning parents, schools, and media tend to emphasize social responsibility rather than stories and experiences that can be shared. One of the best classes I took in high school was a ninth grade anthropology course, one of two in the country at the time. The teacher, Mr. Platt, didn’t teach us proper behavior towards others but what it meant to be a human in a varied world. As 9^th graders typically dubious of our own culture, we were more than ready to accept the variety presented to us.