Donald A. Collins

More People Equals Less Chance For Democratic Government

By Donald A. Collins | 3 June 2020
Church and State

As we see Vladimir Putin and China’s Chi getting extended terms with more absolute power one can only wonder how the individuals’ desire for more personal freedoms can be delivered by US kind of governments that exists here and in only a few other nations.

The loss of freedoms in Hong Kong shows further evidence of personal freedom loss as does the current racial turmoil here over the George Floyd murder by police and the escalation of police force to stop the resulting looting. See June 2nd Wall Street Journal article about Hong Kong here.

We see the absence of sensible US environmental actions like our failure to clean up sewage flow from Mexico into California as 60 Minutes showed us on its episode on Sunday May 31st.

Watch this disgusting lapse of government action here: “Raw sewage flowing into the Tijuana River brings toxic sludge to California.”

We now are home to 340 million humans, at least 10 or 12 million of them here illegally, up from about the 130 million legal citizens who were living in the US at the time of my birth in 1931.

To expect more freedom and less turmoil as we added more and more of humans who had to find less and less livable places here and worldwide is a ridiculous expectation and a forlorn hope.

That the USA is in really deep trouble with Trump as President is perhaps best symbolized by conservative columnist George Will’s June 2nd piece in the Washington Post which you can read here!

When George Will, arch conservative, writes something like this, it’s a good idea to listen.”Trump must be removed. So must his congressional enablers”. https://t.co/WKQxHa85jL

— Tom Peters (@tom_peters) June 2, 2020

For George Will to call Trump “unhinged” and the Republican Senators his weak vassals suggests there may be a vast swing of media approbation away from Trump. Will writes, “Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration.”

I had to look up his word “condign” which means fitting or deserved. Thanks, George!

Could the few remaining moderate Republicans—could there be a hundred or so left—reasonably ask if it is time for the first open (it would have to be electronic) Republican convention since 1992? Don’t count on it.

The George Floyd murder has exposed Trump’s dangerous self-love better than the pandemic.

Whether the minuscule distance between now and November will dilute and change this apparent media swing remains unanswered but as my two recent columns argue, the power of Trump’s incumbency is still huge. And without the onset of the Coronavirus and this police murder of George Floyd to spotlight Trump’s ego focused incompetence a 2nd term might have been a certainty.

Back to the numbers. By 2025 experts forecast there will be 8 billion humans living on earth, 6 billion more than when I was born in 1931. One of my several earlier columns on the subject can be read here.

With personal freedoms hanging in the balance in so many places including in the US, the surfeit of human numbers should give us all reason to recognize Mother Earth’s urgent messages about more pressures on our environment and her underlying main message that the planet can’t comfortably sustain present human numbers of almost 8 billion now, let alone the prospect of another 2 billion added by the 2050s which experts predict. Human freedoms are not expanding, they are contracting!

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