Cheers

View 716 Thursday, March 08, 2012

My day is being devoured by locusts, and the evening will be as well.

Be of good cheer. The demographics are favorable. That is, the intellectual liberals are not reproducing themselves, while the homeschooler population is growing. A long time ago David Riesman characterized Western nations as those with “incipient population decline.” Actually, though, that holds for just about everyone. The wealthy Muslim nations aren’t expanding. Their per capita income rates are really low, and if they rise the fertility rate drops. The population bomb has hit them and over time it will be more and more difficult to support an aging population that lives longer.

Of course civilizations die for reasons other than lack of population growth. Western cultural weapons of mass destruction work on the West as well as the Middle East. The culture that many of use grew up in has eroded terribly, and is not being transmitted to the next generation through the public schools. The notions that freedom is important, that government ought to be limited, that self government is preferable as well as cheap – these are not being transmitted. Note the health care debate. The idea of freedom and responsibility doesn’t seem to enter it.

But the home school population is growing, and for the most part they do pass along the values that made America what it was.

It is not yet time to give up.