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miriam_eOur rapidly aging population has repercussions nobody I've met seems to think about. When the baby-boomers get old there will not be enough young people to look after them. It won't be a matter of families taking care of their own or of nursing homes taking people in. There simply won't be enough carers. We desperately need robots. But more than that, we need androids. This is more important than oil or making war or almost anything else you can imagine. But if you think it's bad for us in the west, imagine the problem to come in China, where under-breeding in an attempt to curb the population explosion has totally altered the age structure of the more than one billion people there.
Only one place will have more young than old -- Africa. AIDS has ripped through the adult population there while the West stood by and hardly lifted a finger in help. In fact the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank consistently worsened the problem by purposefully running down social support systems and forcing idealogically driven privatisation measures so that countries lost what little they already had. They -- we -- turned a tragedy into an incomprehensibly massive disaster.
Now with their youthful population of orphans and our aging population they don't need to do anything to hurt us. In fact that would be the best and most effective way to cripple the West -- to do to us what we have done to them for so long: to ignore us when we begin to plead for help. I almost hope they do. We certainly have it coming.
Of course the people of Africa could break with human tradition, forgive us our evil ways, and partner with the aging countries for mutual benefit and the good of all.
At least I hope they resist the urge to revenge. If they ever raise a hand against us it will be all that is needed by a bunch of crotchety, angry, old white men to go in, destroy everything and take what they want -- a new generation of black slaves. Of course they would be underpaid wage-slaves and it would look completely legal, but they'd still be slaves.
Yeah. I woke up this morning full of fears.
Don't mind me. Go back to work and ignore it.
But in the back of your mind just hope we get robots and androids very soon.
Only one place will have more young than old -- Africa. AIDS has ripped through the adult population there while the West stood by and hardly lifted a finger in help. In fact the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank consistently worsened the problem by purposefully running down social support systems and forcing idealogically driven privatisation measures so that countries lost what little they already had. They -- we -- turned a tragedy into an incomprehensibly massive disaster.
Now with their youthful population of orphans and our aging population they don't need to do anything to hurt us. In fact that would be the best and most effective way to cripple the West -- to do to us what we have done to them for so long: to ignore us when we begin to plead for help. I almost hope they do. We certainly have it coming.
Of course the people of Africa could break with human tradition, forgive us our evil ways, and partner with the aging countries for mutual benefit and the good of all.
At least I hope they resist the urge to revenge. If they ever raise a hand against us it will be all that is needed by a bunch of crotchety, angry, old white men to go in, destroy everything and take what they want -- a new generation of black slaves. Of course they would be underpaid wage-slaves and it would look completely legal, but they'd still be slaves.
Yeah. I woke up this morning full of fears.
Don't mind me. Go back to work and ignore it.
But in the back of your mind just hope we get robots and androids very soon.
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Date: 2006-05-11 11:29 pm (UTC)I seem to recall some effect where Europe has a genetic legacy from bubonic plague and smallpox. Apparently the survivors have peculiar resistance to some other diseases (I can't remember the details just now). I guess the same may well be true of the AIDS survivors. They might have a more resilient makeup. Although there is also the possibility that they might be affected like cats. You know how cats are so obsessively clean? Apparently some time in the distant past an AIDS-like disease gutted their population. Cats now are not very resistant to disease organisms and get sick very easily. I imagine (though I could well be wrong on this) that it may be that a weakened immune system is not as open to cat-AIDS, because AIDS works by infecting the immune system.
I do know that (I think it was in Singapore... or was it Hong Kong) during the height of the SARS crisis patients were put in a terminal ward where the AIDS patients were. Doctors, nurses, and SARS patients who went in there died, but all the AIDS patients survived. Why? Because SARS kills by provoking a massive over-response from your immune system, and that kills you. AIDS patients, with their weakened immune systems were safe.
I was exploring a story idea a while back (and might still try writing this one) of a preventable, not very contagious disease which rarely kills but makes people very sick. The well-off parts of society ensure they remain safe from it. But then another disease strikes not long after, which is a mutated version of the first one and is very dangerous and extremely infectious. It rips through the richer parts of society who have no resistance, leaving only the poor who have acquired immunity from the less dangerous form. Suddenly, as you say, presto-chango, society flipped upside down. I know the poor would deal with discrimination as badly or worse than the rich did, because discrimination tends to make the discriminated-against even more racist, classist, whatever-ist. It would be an interesting base for a story.