Room at the Inn?
I was trying to decide what I wanted to write here when God came up behind me, leaned down close to my ear and whispered a number. Seven billion. And of course she was right, that’s what I’ve got to talk about.
According to some of the best projections and analyses, on Halloween this year, the human population of the Earth reached seven billion. It’s a staggering number. And out of those billions, sixty-percent are in Asia. Is there something about Asia that makes people especially fertile? Living in the U.S., as I do, it’s pretty easy to be egotistical and boast about all of our accomplishments and superlatives, both real and those merely jingoistically tossed out by our frenzied media, but when it comes to population, we’re merely third. And not just barely edged out by numbers one and two but soundly crushed. Number one, China, has more than four times our population, and number two, India, has more than three times the number of people that we do.
Carbon emissions are one thing, but I’ve got to figure that just the heat given off by seven billion people is making a contribution to global warming. Well, maybe not enough to measure but still, I wouldn’t want all of us stuck together in one room without some pretty good air conditioning.
Seven billion. Wow. I just can’t really get my mind around that. I’m pretty sure that it’s more than we need, but then, we’ve never really been big on having just what we need, have we?
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