A view of the world changes when one realizes there aren’t anymore children
No kids anywhere. Took a walk thru my neighborhood on a Monday afternoon. A random stroll to get out and enjoy the pleasant spring weather and smell the burgeoning of life after a long winter. It was late afternoon, the time children should be home from school and team sports and music lessons. I’m rambling around in Shoreline, a small satellite town on the north border of Seattle, Washington.
Where are the children? It was quiet, so quiet, too quiet, but not serene. Something felt ominous in a peacefully insidious way. I began to stop here and there on my way to look around. Wow. There weren’t any kids anywhere. They were not outside playing in the yards or running around in the woods and fields back of their houses. They weren’t inside watching television or listening to the radio or chatting on the telefone, things the youngest generations don’t really do anyway, yes? Nor were any children inside glued to laptops and old desktops or glommed to their smartfones playing games and lost in the banal labyrinths of social media. Yes, it wasn’t just children’s obsession with technology or a retro efforts to play outdoors in nature, but there were not any children anywhere to be seen.
The United States of America was undergoing population decline bordering on demographic collapse. Our saving grace, and the same is true of both Canada and Mexico, is massive immigration, both legal and illegal. China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Russia, Europe, and the Middle East were also in demographic collapse. India was not. The data on South America and Sub-Saharan Africa is incomplete. Not sure of Australia and New Zealand or Southeast Asia, but they’re heading towards that cliff. One thing to note is when immigration occurs in waves, most of the immigrants often come as refugees fleeing war, poverty, and oppression. They seek peace and new opportunities for themselves and their children.
Demographic collapse is slow. Takes place generationally across a 20 to 30 year period. Different nation-states with different population shifts collapse (or grow) at different rates. Sometimes there seems to be a cascade effect. We do live in an age where globalization, as we understand it, has been growing nonstop since at least the Second World War. Most scholars and analysts expected increasing integration with economic and financial integration leading, eventually, hopefully, to peaceful political integration, a reformed or ramped up United Nations. Didn’t happen. The Cold War raged for decades, and then it ended. Globalization expanded at the cost of labor, the environment, and local democracy. The Anti-Globalization Revolts broke out around the world. The Battle of Seattle in November-December of 1999 was one of the early conflicts in that war of sorts. The Global Long War on Terror went on and on as well. One can say it started in 1979 long before 9/11 occurred in 2001, but that’s another topic for another time. The Great Recession occurred and went on long after the statistical experts said it ended. Then we slid into Cold War 2.0. Then along came the COVID-19 Pandemic that kept going even after governments ended their restrictions so business could restart.
Because of those factors, Earth human civilization quickly entered into a disruptive age of deglobalization. Yes, there are still people automatically saying “with globalization blah blah blah,” and globalization is over. We’re in deglobalization now, and I’ve no idea how long it’ll last. Countries as big as the USA and as geographically isolated desire to become self-reliant.
Meanwhile, ever since the Industrial Revolution, tribes fractured and faded and clans shrunk. Families became smaller. Nowadays each generation has become smaller and smaller and more technofocused. The nature of work, of family, and of education has changed. We humans are too busy to have nuclear families, too busy to reproduce.
My grandparents and theirs came from large families. My parents from smaller families. I’m a Boomer, and have fathered one child of my own and raised two others, one whom I adopted. The other I attempted to adopt but, complicated long story short, was unable to do so. My parents and grandparents came from nuclear families. Mine was polyamorous and communal, a product of the 1960s. I see my kids going a different route. All in all, seems many simply stopped having children. But now the youngest may have kids again. Who knows? Culture has a strange, twisting inertia of its own.
Walked on home in silence. I marveled at the lack of even signs of children. Not anything apparent was remotely visible. Reminded me of a spooky Star Trek melodrama where all the adults died of some bizarre, hideous disease, and then, eventually, all the children, too.
Staying busy was the key to avoiding boredom, loneliness, and in old age, feebleness. Once had a firecracker of a hyperactive elderly rancher lady in remote Texas tell a group of us young adults about to paddle the Lower Canyons of the Rio Grande to “stay busy” to live a long, productive life. Her name was Hallie C. Stillwell, and she was nearly 93 then. That was in October of 1990. Now in the Spring and Summer of 2024 we all seem to be “too busy.” No, we ARE all TOO busy, too damn busy to live with conscious intention and purpose. People are too busy to have children and raise families. The world has changed, is changing already, and shall change yet again and again. Civilizations, even the best and most powerful, will sooner or later ebb into decline and fall. Some transform themselves into new entities. Others vanish so completely even their names are long gone and forgotten. What of the children of tomorrow?
Wrote down a few observations of the neighborhood on my iPhone into my Notes, then emailed the notes to me to later compose this article. So am I just as “bad” as the rest of the neighborhood as I’m also “too busy” doing whatever on my smartfone? After all, the last phrase in the email I sent myself is, “Sent from my iPhone,” and without even a period.
William Dudley Bass
Monday 15 April 2024
Saturday 27 July 2024
Shoreline/Seattle, Washington
USA
Copyright © 2024 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.