Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Georgia Guidestones

Last Sunday’s “60 Minutes” began with a story about how the epidemic of heroin addiction, that is sweeping our country, is playing out in the state of Ohio. It featured a judge who adopted a rehabilitation approach instead of prison time for heroin felonies. A high proportion of people report to the court after saying clean for a year and have their records cleared. Several other judges are beginning this approach. In contrast, a hard-nosed district attorney opposes this, “they have broken the law and they need to be punished.” The last story was of a young man who returned home clean after prison and overdosed on the first night in his parents’ house. 

What lies behind these stories and other types of societal failure? For just one example—many young muslins return, disillusioned, from ISIS, telling how they went in the first place because they felt isolated, marginalized, had nothing to do in the European countries they grew up in. Other cases of war around the world stem from religious conflicts, starvation, or squeezed for land to cultivate because of rising seas, droughts and unusually strong wind storms. Behind all these factors is global warming and all its dread effects.

Far back behind all these problems is the problem of world overpopulation. Why do I put that as the ultimate cause of all these calamities? Global heating, religious wars, spreading starvation, untreated diseases, the threat of nuclear war—result basically from overpopulation.

How so? Start with global warming, the biggest immediate threat to the survival of the human race. Over the last century world population has grown from under to two billion to over seven billion and growing. That means five billion more people driving cars, demanding electricity and wanted air conditioning in summer, as well as needing more food produced from the world’s shrinking farms. 

Think how many fewer people would be driving cars, using electricity (for all its various reasons), needing to be fed, less prone to disease epidemics, if world population were still around two billion instead of the present seven billion? 

In this connection I want to draw attention to the Georgia Guidestones. It seems that some group of (apparently) powerful and intellectual people saw all of this coming and began to prepare for the survival of a sustainable world population. They subsidized a set of six pillars, 19 feet high, giving, in six of the world’s main languages a table of ten commandments for a future world civilization. First, they stipulated that world population should be maintained at about half a billion people. 

How would this reduction in world population take place? The people who created the guide-stones don’t say, but I think it is becoming clear that they had concluded that the people on earth will do it to themselves. Consider the horrendous losses of life from the wars taking place around the globe. Add to that the billions who will die of heat and billions who will starve to death because the powers currently running the world will not take the needed remedial steps. Maybe they too are overwhelmed.

 If you know more about the Georgia Guidestones I’d like to hear about it. In general, what do you think about the populations problem?