The Great Population Eclipse

A few days ago, from the points of view of what the United States was hoped to be and what it has been and what awaits it the future, the news outlets notified us of the most important development since the British troops finally had to board ships for home, and Adams, Jefferson, and others could put the finishing touches on creating a government that would preside over a new nation dedicated to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and even -- since they never got around to expunging that line from the sacred documents -- the proposition that all men are created equal.

This news item said that just 34 years from now, less than half the time it took it took me to reach this present stage, and maybe sooner, the U.S. Census Bureau will announce that the citizens of European extraction, the so-called "white" people, formerly the dominating majority, will, when pitted against the total of all the other groups currently residing in the country, become a minority.

This is actually old news, and the U.S. is not the only place where the same kind of thing is in the works or feared. Numerous European countries who have brought in -- if that is the right expression -- people of other derivations and mostly of darker hues, such as former colonials, guest workers, war and political refugees, soccer stars, and others -- wonder if the same sort of thing might not happen in their countries in the long term. And they don't even have to look at the U.S. Right next door the Russians, for all their numbers, fear that whatever constitutes their major Slavic stock will, in about the same amount of time as in the U.S., sink to minority status under the greater reproductive "success" of the numerous other ethnic groups that came along willy-nilly with all the territories that their forefathers and mothers, including Catherine the Great, grabbed unto themselves so greedily.

For me, as a lifelong minority in every sense of the word, this raises a long list of questions that I see few people asking, openly, much less coming up with answers. And, unsurprisingly, that is accompanied by the irony that I should be among the very last of those persons who should feel that he has any big stake and therefore should have any great interest in this matter. Yet, the more these questions are considered the clearer it becomes that this development eclipses who will be the latest President, the 9/11 terror attacks, the Great Depression, the outbreaks of all the wars since the Revolutionary one, and everything else since that time. And if I were everybody else, I would start counting all the ways. But I suppose I will do that anyway. This weblog habit encourages such a thing, especially in the early mornings.