Roberta Grimes

Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Posted by Roberta Grimes • April 27, 2024 • 18 Comments
The American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson, Understanding Reality

Raindrops are falling on my head.
And just like the guy whose feet are too big for his bed,
Nothing seems to fit.
Those raindrops are falling on my head, they keep falling.

… So I just did me some talking to the sun,
And I told him I didn’t like the way he got things done.
Sleeping on the job!
Those raindrops are falling on my head, they keep falling.

… But there’s one thing I know.
The blues they send to meet me won’t defeat me,
it won’t be long till happiness steps up to greet me!
– Burt F. Bacharach (1928-2023), from “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” (1969)

I still can remember the banner year of 1970 as if it were yesterday. I was right out of college, living in Boston, and working for a big life insurance company. My job was to program in Cobol an IBM 360 computer that had just a tiny fraction of the power of my modern cellphone, even though that nearly useless early computer took up one entire floor of a downtown office building. There was a war still going on in Vietnam that year, but it never had really hit home for me because the love of my life had not yet been drafted. And besides, what was the point of worrying about a war that was going on half a world away, when here in America we were just becoming aware of a vastly different kind of war that was going to make it impossible for any of us ever to have much of a future? In the spring of 1970, I was something brand-new for my staid old Boston life insurance company. I was then their leading ecological activist. I wrote articles for my company’s internal publication about how to conserve everything, so together we might somehow manage to barely save this planet. And that April, which was fifty-four years ago now, I participated in Boston’s first Earth Day.  

Back then, we did not believe that there ever would be a year 2024. Heck, even a viable year 2000 was hardly conceivable for us. Edward and I wanted children, so we were going to have children but we full-well knew that their lives would be different from and very much less than what we would have wanted for them. My beloved had just finished his residency when he was drafted, and it was a close thing because by then the Vietnam War was winding down. He was one of the last Berry-plan physicians to be caught in the draft, which delayed our wedding by another year.

What brings all of this to mind this week is my having come across a folder of materials from that long-ago time as I was searching through some very old files. And I was struck as I went through that folder by how much what is going on now in this country must be damaging so many of the minds of today’s young people, just as was my own youthful mind distorted by Vietnam, and by the suddenly prominent ecological terrors which were pummeling us with our severely damaged future. Back then, we assumed that the ecological mess that was about to fall on all our heads would be an unavoidable apocalyptic tragedy.

I am going to lay it all out for you now. But first, please allow me this little impassioned digression. I am not taking a political side here. But having found myself briefly back in 1970 has put me again close to the Civil Rights era in the US. Which makes me forcefully realize how terrible it is for today’s young Americans to be raging antisemites now, as so many of them apparently are, to my amazement and to my disgust. Can you believe what you are seeing in the news? Lots of otherwise normal young Americans are suddenly antisemitic Nazi pigs and bullies! Even though soon they will horribly realize that never again in their lives will they be able to bear to be inside any room which contains an uncovered mirror. For them to be shouting some of the things that they are shouting at their Jewish classmates now is the precise equivalent of their shouting “Ni**er!” at black people. How can they not realize that?

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the greatest American of the twentieth century. My high school and college years were the years when he and many less prominent heroes marched for and at last won racial justice. They won racial justice for every American, forevermore! How have all these college students so quickly and easily forgotten that fact? To see precisely the same racial hatred that distorted the faces of nasty racists fifty years ago now on the faces of these viciously antisemitic college students chanting ugly Hamas slogans at their Jewish classmates turns my stomach. It horrifies me. And it breaks my heart. They know not what they do!  

Okay. End of digression. What I want to talk about today, my dear ones, is prophesy, and the wisdom and balance that a little time and distance can provide. I had altogether forgotten that back in 1970, we were certain that there could be no future. Or at least, there could be no possible future in which you and I would want to rear our children. The experts had convinced us of that fact, and who were we to tell them they were wrong? I am going to give you a summary of confident predictions from some of the greatest experts of 1970, the people who truly knew their stuff, and I am going to ask you please to read these items thoughtfully. Pay special attention to the dates by which all of these calamities were certain to happen:

• “The Great Die-Off”! “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years [by 1980].” “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in “the Great Die-Off.”
• Worldwide Famine! Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China, the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
• Air Pollution! In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, [1980] urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….” Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
• Reduced Life Expectancy! Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued, Americans’ life expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is now 76.4 years).
• No More Oil or Minerals! Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000 if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated that humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
• No More Wild Animals! Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years [by 1995], somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so [by 2005], it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
• New Ice Age! Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an Ice Age.”

Even though we were told repeatedly back in 1970 that each of these calamities was absolutely unavoidable, not one of the disasters that haunted our nightmares in 1970 has ever happened. What changed our future so unexpectedly and so wonderfully? Well, a few big miracles rapidly came along. For one thing, considerably improved living conditions in the third world during the seventies and eighties reduced birth rates suddenly and dramatically worldwide. And what was then called “the green revolution” of new and better food-plant species and more advanced growing methods made for much bigger and better-quality harvests, especially of rice, as early as the mid-seventies. And that combination of sharply reduced population growth and much better and more abundant food harvests together averted the worldwide famine conditions that had been so confidently expected. A move away from dictatorships and toward more economic freedoms in some countries helped as well, as did new discoveries of oil and basic minerals that had then been thought to be in very short supply. In the early eighties, Ronald Reagan cut US income taxes substantially, and he thereby began, and Bill Clinton then fostered, what became a twenty-five-year economic boom in America that enabled this nation to spread some of its wealth to the poorer parts of the world. A very happy turn toward global warming kept creeping glaciers from taking over the northern hemisphere, and rain forest conservation efforts, and efforts to reduce air pollution worldwide each also played their respective parts. My goodness, when I was a young child, I can recall that nearly every city in this country could be spotted from a distance because it had a mushroom cloud of smog above it! You know, come to think of it, perhaps we have 1970’s Earth Day clarion calls to thank, at least in part, for many of these miracles after all.

I do think, though, that our having lived through all those strident 1970 alarms has made many of us who remember that year reluctant to worry very much whenever the next big government-touted crisis comes along. We took the coming ice age very seriously back then! But the much later advent of “global warming,” which has apparently saved us from having to open our front doors on some much later morning to find that a creeping glacier has taken over our front yards? Not so much. My generation has already been there. So we assume now that we won’t need to make extreme global-warming-inspired changes to our own lifestyles until those who fly to Davos each year on private jets for their global-warming chats take the threat of global warming seriously enough that they feel the need to start to fly commercial. And maybe we’ll just wait and begin to worry about global warming ourselves when Al Gore and Barack Obama find it necessary to put their oceanfront homes on the market.  

I asked my wonderful Thomas how we might best end this post. And he answered me with a sentence that his earlier incarnation wrote two hundred and eight years ago, almost to the day. These are wise words indeed!

“How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!” Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams in April of 1816, in an extremely long letter on this same topic of doomsayers and prophets of certain catastrophes which then never see the light of day. As Jefferson points out in his letter to Adams that was written barely a decade before his and Adams’s deaths both occurred on the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, he himself was always hopeful, always sanguine and cheerful about the future. As indeed he should have been. After all, it was Thomas Jefferson who penned these sacred words which begin the American Declaration of Independence, and these words have well stood the test of time. Thomas Jefferson wrote these words which every college student in America should be especially keeping in mind this spring: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

… Raindrops keep falling on my head,
But that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turning red.
Crying’s not for me!
‘Cause I’m never gonna stop the rain by complaining.
Because I’m free. Nothing’s worrying me!
– Burt F. Bacharach (1928-2023), from “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” (1969)