If we’ve learned anything over the last half century it is that when people get some prosperity and hope they have fewer kids.
The population bomb has been defused throughout the west. Populations are shrinking in some places.
Just not in the global south.
If you lack hope, if you’re living hand to mouth and have no kind of security, that’s when you have lots of kids. You hope that those who survive into adulthood will take care of you.
It’s something few mention when discussing the Israel-Hamas war. Israel’s median age is 29. That’s nearly a decade more than the U.S., or China. But it has been climbing steadily since 1970.
Babies have become terror’s weapon of choice. Deny people hope, they have lots of kids to preserve hope, then they use those kids both to gain sympathy and to raise cannon fodder.
I hear a lot of people damning Gazans for doing this, but it’s the most human response to terror. Wherever leaders care nothing for the lives of their people they make more people.
The only way to defuse this bomb is through peace and prosperity. Israel has offered Gaza neither, so Gaza is responding the only way it knows how. Now Israel will kill a whole host of young people, and those who survive will make more.
The population bomb is the natural response to hopelessness, and it’s ticking for all of us.
