Think how much growing pain grumbling there would be if US population were growing as fast as world population.

World population has doubled since my childhood, but here in the USA, it has not quite doubled. The US population has grown from 200,000,000 to around 325,000,000. Not quite doubling, but still a big jump.

The main point I am making is that we are sure noticing the growing pains, here in USA, yet we still aren't growing as fast as some other parts of the world. Imagine the growing pains we would feel (or at least grumble about) if we were growing as fast as some of the other parts of the world.

One of the most obvious growing pains is the angst about immigration that's mostly expressed on the right side of the political spectrum. Refugees are swelling our ranks, but imagine what it would be like if 1/3 of our population was recent refugees. I hear that was the situation in the small country of Jordan which sits right next door to Syria; a nation which has been crumbling.

We hear growing pains on both the left and the right. Most people, on the left, don't seem to grumble about immigration, but there is a lot of anxiety over new construction and development. There's quite a bit of worry about all the new construction here in Bellingham. I also hear that California is behind by 3 million units in the housing construction it would have needed to keep up with its population growth. Housing costs are at a crisis point in many US cities and towns; at least in desirable locations.

Part of the problem is how we go about developing and accommodating people. I hear that 40% of the land area, in Los Angeles, is devoted to asphalt for parking and driving automobiles. This is not just a problem in Los Angeles. We need to rethink lots of things, including how most people transport themselves in our society at least.

Much of the world is still aspiring to live like we do.

Here in the west, our human rights, gay rights and feminism is pretty good, but we do tend to be consumptive societies. Our population growth is more under control. I think part of that is the success of things like gay rights and feminism. Most of our population growth is due to immigration.

In much of what is called the Third World, attitudes about human rights can be a lot worse. Population is growing faster than in the west while many of the people aspire to have similar material wealth to the west. It's like the worst of both worlds.

I know that population growth is slowing down, all over the world, but not slowing down fast enough; especially if one believes that we are close to the breaking point on climate change.

As for the west, we really need to rethink things like jet travel and automobile dependency unless we can find green alternatives to power these things. We are making progress, but is the progress coming in time?

I like the insightful comments I got to this post on my Facebook wall. One can see most of them, I think, if logged into Facebook tho not necessarily in my friends list.