I take exception to “Illegal Immigrants Need Amnesty NOW” written by Mike Renzulli that appeared on this site on April 21, 2009 [Letter to the Editor] which invited a heated reaction from impassioned writers who registered their comments opposing each other.
      The ensuing debate that this written opinion [in favor of granting amnesty to illegal aliens] has created is interesting if only protagonists do not engage themselves in personal mayhem. This is the original caveat, nay, protest-reminder I have posted in FP.com’s open forum since the very beginning when instead of responding to the arguments I have put forward I was personally attacked using words that wouldn’t have really shocked me to death had the attack not been justified by a reward of space and print that constitutes the necessary element of libel. The editorial notice not to resort to personal attacks was simply ignored. In responding, I should not have stepped down to the attackers’ level, a lesson learned the hard way. Once again I want to post it here as a reminder.

    For having the same courage to voice his opinion on the mean-spiritedness of anti-immigration proponents, Renzulli is now in the same predicament as I was when his person was likewise attacked.

    Name-calling speaks of a brain running dry of valid and civil argument. Proponents from both sides of this population and immigration arguments should know better than show their fangs of contempt to the messenger. Here, the bearers of good news and ideas are abused in their person rather than argue on the message they deliver. Brains involved in this debate are not deserted with logic, but by calling one a fool in response to being called a sociopath, the arguments’ intellectual bearing is lost. Animals of reasons which we are, are no different from my Dobermans that bark fiercely at my uncle who was visiting, not on “Why” my relative was visiting.

     Freedom was suggested as a solution to Wooldridge’s nightmare. It is a correct suggestion when it is freedom to solve the problem as Lorber and Hancock argue, but wrong if it is freedom to abuse or destroy, which Wooldridge strongly posited.

       Let’s not forget even for a moment that the right to be stupid in both sides of the debate is also freedom. Either because one sees something when there is none [Wooldridge] or sees nothing when there is something [Lorber et. al.] is freedom of the mind the learned are prone to abuse.

       I have differences of opinion with Wooldridge on issues of population and immigration. I still have our exchanges of e-mails on file. It was a model argument that we have. Never did we call each other names. We just confined our severe and ferocious arguments on our both opposing ideas, using our education and experience as a launching pad in the debate to convince each other to consider the other’s opinion which when thoroughly examined may be right.

      Wooldridge knew very well, that my position in the argument is opposed to anyone who sees overpopulation as the end of mankind. In my experience in the academe, in the UN, in the practice of law, in Literature, mass communication and discipline in journalism, I have searched the answer to this question, and I believed that there is no such thing, viz: the end of the world due to population explosion.

       What I found is that Science confirms Nature’s check-and-balance. Millions are born everyday, and millions die everyday. The human brain can always create any empty space needed, and can produce endless supply of human needs and the needs of any living thing that inhabits this planet. Technological discoveries support this reality, just as some studies point to the cause of fear of doomsday due to overload.

     If you have no study of your own, you tend to agree when overwhelmed with powerful arguments that instill fear in the heart of the weak [Ernest Hancock calls this “propaganda”] that when you wake up in the morning the house will be flooded because you didn’t close the faucet in the kitchen before you went to bed. What you have forgotten out of fear is that the basin where you wash the dishes, that catches the water from the faucet, has a drainage built to respond to such contingency. What should overwhelm you if this faux pas is repeated regularly not only in your kitchen but also in your yard, is your sky-rocketing water bills.

In any event, the fear of a flooded kitchen graduates into a “propaganda” to stop the use of faucets because these could ruin your kitchen. There is always a rival enterprise or undertaking that stands to benefit from any “propaganda” or concocted misinformation in a free market of ideas. But I never thought for a moment that Wooldridge is engaged in a “propaganda” for a sinister purpose. I think his personal crusade against immigration and runaway population growth is founded on a legitimate fear of what havoc an overload could bring to this country he loves so much like most of us if not all of us do.

     To demonstrate the veracity of my hypothesis against this fear of excessive population growth, I wrote a dissertation “Perish As You Grow”, in the study of the rate and volume of population expansion in the 1960s [the first UN 1960 census of population and housing ever conducted in a universal scale] right after modern economists began to question and finally debunked the world-is-flat-kind of Malthusian belief on people overload as a straw of dry grass that farmers use to scare the crows out of the cornfield to protect the harvest.

      Against this discredited Malthusian Theory, I created a model of population growth simply by picturing a man slowly climbing a wooden plank with its right end raised 45 degrees upward and reaching the tip or end of that imaginary flat board, the man falls off as he continues to move forward, and disappears to oblivion [perish as you grow …in short, growth is checked].

     For billions of years even dinosaurs and the great denizens of the deep could not overpopulate Earth, and all the living and growing things put together that are checked and balanced by Nature, could never overcrowd this planet. Balls of fire may rain on the surface of the earth that could make humans evaporate, but humans would disappear not because a woman’s fertility rate has risen to 2.03% [3.0 +% in some countries in the Third World] since the invention of Viagra made men decide to leave their work and do something else to put a smile on women’s face … no, not at all!

         It maybe considered pure nonsense to intimidate anyone to believe that this world will soon run out of H20 because the use of water is not regulated or controlled. Global warming will annihilate humankind with nothing to breathe but carbon dioxide, this we knew decades ago as nothing more than just a political mumbo-jumbo. The scare to elect Al Gore president, the savior of this planet, or else perish, didn’t work, does not work now or will ever work in the future.  The sooner this political excretion is flushed down the toilet, the better for the nation’s health.

       More than 80% of the human body is water. If humans dry up of liquid in their body because of this cherished freedom to abuse the conservation of water, the world will be the largest catacomb of living human beings ever created by the Big Bang. We cannot just take shots of Vodka everyday instead of drinking water to our heart’s content and end up a problem to Alcoholic Anonymous, which reminds me of some emotionally intoxicated Russian delegates I debated with in the UN that argued like a bunch of drunks.

     By the way, check this out:  If the world’s water is poured on the United States, it would be some 326 million cubic miles creating a lake more than 90 miles deep!  In this planet, tomorrow or millions of years from now Man will be gone, and water will still be here.

      The heart of the matter I have always wanted to point out in this protracted debate is that, it is difficult to make a case of doomsday out of population overload by presenting a strong statistical argument only from one side of the coin to support a conclusion and ignore the other side that belies that same argument. This is the ugly hole in this anti-population-immigration position that Wooldridge opponents are taking advantage of including me. I cannot ignore the omission, regardless of whether or not such omission was intentional or accidental.

      On the other hand, to deny that the problem of “overpopulation” exists in one place and “underpopulation” in another is a bad case of myopia. It is as bad a case for those who argue that the demise of mankind is through immigration, which is totally absurd.

       You can scare people of population overload till hell freezes over, but you cannot stop them from becoming cynical if such condescending fixation is so foolish they cannot help but cross the line of name-calling using the word “sociopath”. You will always have this fly in the ointment, which is self-created.

        To cite another example: You make people snicker with mischief if you tell them that when you reach the age of 70, the food you shall have put in your stomach weighs a million ton and you will die.

         At least two things come to mind: One, you would want them to stop eating, in which case they will die just the same. Two, you would want them to quit squatting on the toilet bowl everyday to dislodge the food they eat, in which case you want them to die for not allowing them to load and unload until they reach the age of 70.  The freedom you took away, makes this argument so objectionable. You open your position to public annihilation, not just xenophobic humiliation.

      This is hardly different from the crusades of self-proclaimed religious prophets roaming the streets that urge people to repent for their sins because the end of the world will come only days, weeks, or months from now. Drop a coin in the can, and you will be all right!

      I find “social contract” mentioned in the argument, on the use of property collectively and individually owned, very perceptive but I am afraid it is too deep a metaphor to be understood it somehow beclouded if not lost the point it tried to raise. The presentation is also serpentine it thickens the fog.

         Let me offer an abbreviated imagery which I think is simpler and more effectively picturesque. If I have contracted to deliver to you a bucketful of water everyday, it will always be a bucket full of water no matter how much more fractions of water I want to add because I like you and I am too generous, unless I use another empty bucket for these added fractions of water, which is no longer part of, and therefore we are no longer talking about, the contract.

       This is because the fractions of water I will add will always fall off the top of the bucket filled with water, thus making it an exact bucketful of water all the time ordained in the contract. Increase of population is like this added fraction of water in the bucket, and the bucket is just the right measurement of space to hold the amount of water prescribed in the contract. There is neither “overcrowding”, nor “undercrowding”. The law of nature that creates this contract is unassailable and immutable in designing those things the way it is.

        It is similar to this truism I modeled in “Perish As You Grow” that I have earlier described.

       Finally, the train analogy is a knockout. We should heed the warning and get off the track or else be overran and end up a dead meat.

This metaphor is okay if indeed, there is a coming train on the track that we want to avoid hitting us.  But it does not apply if we see no train dead ahead coming towards us.

       What I see in the track is only everybody’s friend Frosty Wooldridge on his bicycle in a one-man tour around the world. After his world tour, I expect him to tell us more about his global crusade on this subject to enlighten us all -- we ignorant and stubborn Americans who in the mind of those who opposed immigration have not yet seen the light of day.  #

Lolo

04/26/09