The lugubrious time of life

By Donald A. Collins | 11 October 2019
Church and State

(Credit: Say NO – UNiTE / Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

What fun we of the silent generation have had! Many of us including me missed serving in a shooting war as did our children. We grew up in uniformly good economic times.

As the result of the amazing scientific breakthroughs our life expectancies made huge gains compared to just a century ago.

I got to Yale after heroes like George H W Bush had left but our kids didn’t have to go to Vietnam and we got good jobs and produced what is now called the Baby Boomer generation. They then gave us the Gen X and then the Millennials and so on.

So we are now in what we might dub as the lugubrious age—defined here as a sorrowful time for many places in the world as human numbers outstrip resources and many of the powerful ignore the urgent need to supply women with the full right to decide whether or not to bear children!

In just under 90 years since my birth in 1931 the US population has ballooned from 125 million to 330 million and world numbers from 2 billion to almost 8 billion with net (births over deaths) increases every year of 80 million which is the population of Germany!

As my memory and mental agility seem to lessen daily, I continue to find these statistics troubling. We are advised that global warming (GW) constitutes extreme climactic consequences in less than a century, but no urgent attention by the President of the world’s most powerful nation has ensued.

Can’t blame one person, as his indifference is by no means unshared!

Reading the welter of issues so sophisticatedly parsed for intelligent people daily in our newspapers and our other mass media, one would hardly conclude that the alleged perfidy of Trump’s Ukraine transgressions should completely engage both our major parties in a power struggle while ignoring an obvious threat to survival on Planet Earth!

Looking at the oft shown tv pictures from space of our tiny orb doesn’t seem to alter the lack of attention GW is getting from those positioned to take urgent meaningful action.

Every political action group continues to hit on their own agendas but any really coordinated efforts seem derailed by the wars, disputes and power plays of human leaders all over the globe, but certainly centered among rich and powerful people who should know better! Or do they? Guess not.

Since a majority of reputable scientists now know there are no gods looking down upon us, I can only resort to calling up the image of us humans living in an insane asylum, an image which has often been used before!

Humans try but so often fail to sort out solutions, but this GW crisis can’t be dealt with as one of many!

The current utterly engrossing WETA tv presentation about the fate of life on Earth when that giant meteor struck 66 million years ago only reminds us of how fragile our own human future might be!

Of course we humans came afterwards so optimism is possible even in this lugubrious age which after all could be deemed equally as just another time in time so why sweat it and just go on with just doing your best!

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC., has spent over 40 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013.

From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013