Cruel Population Control

In broadest terms, there are two methods of effectively controlling population levels. One can prevent excess population by producing fewer offspring, or kill them off after they are born.

I find the first option to be much the kinder, particularly with modern medical options. Religiously,  however, many object to the first method, citing such things as religious texts which reinforce the order from their deity for population increases to spread their particular brand of religion throughout the land. Might it not be time to acknowledge that going forth and multiplying has been accomplished?

Historically, there have been  many ways of reducing excess population. Define "excess" any way you want, but keep in mind there is a limit to what the land can support. Food, water, space, waste control - all the things we need to survive are finite. All manners of natural disasters have taken their tolls on population numbers. What nature hasn't culled, man will. We call it war. Or slavery. Even genocide. None of those ways are kind. All involve suffering, both from the people being killed off and those left behind to mourn.

While one can impose the concept of Darwinism, aka survival of the fittest, over the results in terms of who survives, that principle is imperfect at best. Natural disasters do not sort out their victims for the best ones surviving, and humans impose their own will over the results.

So why is this the topic of the day? Measles. It's coming back, and it's our own fault.

I go back far enough to remember when "everybody" caught the measles, both kinds, as well as chicken pox, mumps, and whatever. Populations exposed to millennia of disease eventually developed some level of resistance, at least to the point where not everybody died. Scientists postulate it's not so much that we evolved, but that the microbes did. If they were so successful that they killed off everyone infected, they themselves would die off. Regardless of how you assign cause and effect, immunities developed.

Just, not perfectly.

Measles were such a common part of my childhood that it was a shock to be informed of consequences like deafness or even death. I have the indelibly imprinted memory while reading James Michner's "Hawaii" of finding out how the introduction of what I had brushed off as harmless into heretofore isolated, unexposed populations decimated them almost to extinction. But unless you have been exposed to the actual  history of such diseases, the modern concept of measles is of something nonexistent and harmless. We just haven't witnessed the consequences.

Blame the scientists. Rather, credit the scientists, for they have done a great boon to mankind. But with all the diseases they can prevent or cure with modern medicine, there still is no cure for "stupid". We have somehow  managed to raise a generation of parents who think the cure/prevention is worse than the disease. Fearmongering gets their attention when the demands on their time seemingly do not allow for gleaning genuine facts. Some idiot somewhere whispers "autism" or something else in connection with immunizations and - just to be polite here, I'll characterize it as well-meaning, though that is far from my real feelings on the matter - negligence spreads. Children are left unnecessarily vulnerable to a potential killer. We have forgotten how vicious it is, how fast it spreads, how long the virus remains potent with no one nearby to infect next.

We compound the problem by allowing so-called religious exemptions for immunizations of children before allowing them into public schools to spread their damage. There are children who genuinely can not be immunized due to compromised immune systems, and one family's failure to vaccinate means another's tragedy.

It's not just measles, either. If you want to know what whooping cough can do to a child, go to YouTube and watch and listen to as much of the torture you can stomach. Research life in an iron lung for those who survived polio. Talk to somebody whose childhood chicken pox has now morphed to shingles, now that so many of us are living long enough to experience it. Find somebody with cervical cancer from the HPV virus which we now, finally, can immunize against before sexual activity starts and perhaps realize that immunization is not an assumption of immorality in children. Remind yourself that there was an actual reason doctors worked so long and hard to develop means to prevent all those illnesses.

Yes. all these diseases are contributions to population control. They don't strike as quickly as, say, a volcano, flood, fire or hurricane. No, they are much crueler. Where they don't kill, they linger. They are also, unlike those disasters, mostly avoidable. Since you have a choice, would you really want to inflict them on your children?

Really?