The 2020 Census shows more than the scoreboard of the number of congressmen per state. It’s a comprehensive snapshot of the country’s population after 10 years. What does this census tell us about ourselves? Among other things, it told us that there are more people 80 and over than 2 and younger. That’s a catastrophe!
A synopsis of the report can be found here.
If you think it’s great, think again. Who’s going to wheel you out into the sun from your nursing home room? Who’s going to be around in sufficient numbers to pump money into the fund for your Social Security payments and Medicare benefits? Who’s going to man the labs to find a cure for Alzheimer’s? What’ll happen to entrepreneurialism if more and more of it will be expected to be performed by people suffering from age-related memory loss? This is more than a trifling happenstance.
We need kids at more than at replacement levels. So, how did we get here? Two things worked hand-in-glove: (1) the cultural infantilization of adults and (2) the unstated acceptance of the population-bomb myth.
First, mature judgment is hard to achieve when narcissism is a widespread national trait. Today, in my estimation, self-actualization is the hidden goal of far too many Americans. Self-absorption has proceeded apace as religious commitment has reached the event horizon of the cultural black hole. A life of personal fixations doesn’t bode well for thoughts about posterity like family formation.
Second, people seem to recoil at the words “population growth”. Maybe it’s due to too many images of Calcutta or the teeming hordes of Shanghai. Certainly, the notion gets a boost by the writings of popularizing academics like Paul Ehrlich and his 1968 book, The Population Bomb. Sci-fi horror movies and programs fortify the misperception. In my college and high school classes as an instructor, I would ask some form of the question, “Is it worse to have many people or fewer?” Whether I reversed the order or restated it, it made no difference. The vast majority chose many. Something has seeped into the popular imagination that doesn’t bode well for having a robust next generation.
We are about to experience a live-action social experiment. Numbers point to the following shift: today’s scenes of old folks in the care of sons and daughters with the assistance of state programs morphs into the likelihood of the aged herded into state institutions, alone in their isolation, waiting for death. There being no one around to care.
What a self-fulfilling dystopia.
RogerG