But for all intents and purposes, my generation is done having children. The great demographic pig-in-the-python has moved on to running for president and worrying about Social Security. Those of us who are white weren‘t much on breeding anyway.
We had fewer babies than most other generations, with the result that while there are still 75 million of us in this country, there are only about 40 million or so members of Generation X.
I hope President Obama or Clinton pushes through a Constitutional Amendment both doubling and protecting our Social Security and Medicare before the younger generations replace us in Congress. John McCain is too old to be a boomer, and as a mere former POW, can have no idea how hard our lives could be.
Seriously, though - population trends have fluctuated greatly throughout history. There are relatively few native-born members of John McCain’s generation, kids born between 1930 and 1945.
They came into a world in the grip of our nation’s worst economic depression, followed by the world’s most terrible war.
First daddy had too little money, and then he was gone for four years. Now, once again, we seem to be barely replacing ourselves, especially in Michigan. But I am not all that worried about the numbers themselves. True, there is reason to be concerned about the steep drop in the number of very young children in Michigan.
Frankly, they aren’t here because the jobs aren’t here. If we employed their parents, they would come. I haven’t looked up statistics for Detroit in 1930, but I’ll bet the demographics are way out of whack. It was a good old medium-sized town in 1900, with about 285,000 people - a little smaller than Toledo today. Then the auto factories arrived. Thirty years later, the Motor City had more than six times as many people - well over a million and a half.
That’s not because the population took fertility drugs. It is because people poured in from the rural South and Eastern Europe. They wanted good jobs working in the plants.
Those jobs are disappearing now, and people by the hundred thousands have been drifting away. That’s left us with empty buildings and too many sprawling and now unnecessary schools.
There’s no doubt that we need to get our groove back. Some would say we do that by slashing tax rates to the bone to lure businesses in. That might have worked in 1908.
Worked to attract unskilled laborers, that is. The high-tech, highly skilled jobs of the future will be created by people who demand a decent infrastructure. We have to spend the money to build it, before they will come. Henry Ford knew that.
I wish those running our state today knew it too.
The teacher told us that by the time we grew up, our cars would be powered by these. I think the electric battery was supposed to get us through cloudy days. Sounded great to me. However, that was in the fall of ... 1963, and I have yet to see a solar-powered car.
As far as the solar powered future is concerned, I am running out of time to enjoy it.
The fact of the matter is that we still don’t have an agreed-upon replacement for gasoline. General Motors is once again working hard on an electric car. All the automakers are working on hybrids of some kind. Stan Ovshinsky, the now-retired founder of Energy Conversion Devices in Troy, is betting the future will be hydrogen. Others are betting on corn-based ethanol – at least as a transitional fuel. Then there is so-called cellulosic ethanol, which we first heard about when George W. Bush suggested making fuel out of switch grass.
In Illinois, a company called Coskata says it can make ethanol out of everything from table scraps to old tires. And their arguments were convincing enough to get General Motors to invest. The one thing all these people have in common is that they know the world’s fossil fuel reserves are running out.
Gas and oil are getting more and more costly, and nobody has a clear-cut solution as to what to do next. Actually, these are things we’ve known for decades, but never did anything about them.
Some say the oil and automotive industries did their best to make sure nobody did anything about them. Well, that’s changing now. We may not have one common fuel, at least not for awhile.
And we do need to experiment with as many alternatives as possible. But while I am no engineer, I have serious doubts as to whether corn-based ethanol makes sense.
Our sensible neighbors to the north get it. Monday, the Ottawa Citizen ran an editorial highly critical of the whole idea.
Noting that rising global prices and increasing food shortages have sparked recent riots in Haiti, the newspaper said “Food supply is a complex thing. But it is becoming clear biofuel production is playing a role in shrinking that supply.”
The image of peasants starving so we can fill up our Lincoln Navigators with ethanol-based fuel is not charming. The Ottawa paper suggests refocusing biofuel research towards algae. That sounds good. Making gasoline out of mosquitoes would sound good, too, But whatever we do has to pass two tests:
Will it work? And perhaps more importantly, what damage would it do to the environment and the ecosystem?
We are in a process of transition, and here’s something else they didn’t tell us back in seventh grade.
Whatever we do, it won’t be easy.
And I would be happy to do that too, but, well, it’s hard to keep sweating down on the farm after you’ve seen the wonders of climate control. Which is why efforts at conservation are always a hard sell, as long as we can easily afford to be comfortable.
However, the environmentalists have made progress, at least to this extent: Nowadays, many of us now think we should at least feel guilty about adding to that immense hole in the ozone layer.
We like to feel that we are doing our part for the environment, as long as it isn’t very painful. For example, virtuous little me carried a bin with all my cans and plastic bottles out to the curb this morning.
I’ll bet Al Gore would be proud.
Seriously, I am skeptical about the current package of energy bills, partly for that reason. Renewable energy sounds great. But as my research assistant Emmarie points out, other states that have set renewable energy targets are failing to meet them, because of a lack of technology, a lack of money to overhaul systems, or both.
And there are a lot of other things in this package that ought to raise a few eyebrows. For example, these bills would mean that residential electric rates would go up, while businesses would pay lower rates. My guess is that most voters wouldn’t like that idea.
That is, if they knew about it. Funny, I don’t recall the politicians telling us about this. These bills also would allow proposed rate increases to take effect automatically, if not acted on by the Michigan Public Service Commission. For people on fixed incomes, that may be scarier than living next to a nuclear power plant.
But what bothers me most of all is that it is designed to destroy competition, and give the state’s two dominant utilities a guaranteed customer base and near-monopoly status. That would be fine if we were in the business of promoting Soviet-style state socialism.
However, I thought what we wanted was good old capitalist competition. Giving the utilities a monopoly has been a particular passion of Speaker of the House Andy Dillon, an alleged Democrat.
He even suggested solving last year’s budget crisis by giving one utility guaranteed monopoly status in exchange for a lot of cash.
You may think all that is a great idea. But the fact is, these bills were rushed through the House without most voters knowing what was in them. Now, they are before the Senate. If you trust the utilities to have your best interests in mind, there’s nothing to worry about.
However, you might want to think about it, read the fine print first, and let your own state senator know how you feel. Especially because this just might be your last chance.
Ernie’s car was a vast brown thing which handled somewhat like a power boat on choppy waters. It belched thick blue smoke, and consumed prodigious quantities of oil and gas. As far as fuel efficiency was concerned, I seem to remember that it got about eight miles to a gallon, though he now swears it was ten.
The thing was, nobody I knew really cared about gas mileage, even though none of us had much money. When I first started driving, I remember gasoline as being 29.9 cents a gallon.
Then came the Yom Kippur war, in October 1973, and the first oil shock. Gasoline rose to nearly fifty cents a gallon. “You’ll live to see gas cost more than a dollar a gallon,” an old man told me.
That sounded fantastic, though I dimly feared he was right. Now, you need to realize that when you take inflation into account, a dollar in November 1973 in today’s money would be … $3.59 cents.
Which is exactly what I paid for gas this morning. Now, that is still a strain on the pocketbook, especially since I normally drive more than a hundred miles a day. But the reason I can do this and still eat is that the car I drive now gets nearly thirty miles to a gallon. If I were driving the first car I ever owned, a 1968 Chevy Biscayne that got 12 mpg, I would be in debtor’s prison.
That is, if the world’s entire oil reserves hadn’t been exhausted by two hundred million “gas guzzling dinosaurs,” which is what old George Romney used to call the cars Detroit made.
Fuel economy standards may be resented by laissez-faire capitalists. But together with the pressure of Japanese competition, café standards have been responsible for most of the dramatic improvements in quality in American vehicles since 1973.
The new standards announced this week aren’t going to be wildly popular in Detroit. But I think there is a new spirit of realism in the automakers’ boardrooms. They know they have lost clout on Capitol Hill. Here’s what that aging lion John Dingell, their longtime protector, told the Big Three privately last year.
“Work with me on this and be grownups, and I may be able to get you a café bill you will hate – but which you can live with.
“Be unreasonable, and you may get a bill that will put you out of business.” The automakers know that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi isn’t sympathetic. Plus, the odds of getting a better deal from the next President are none too good.
Detroit is being eased, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century world of increasing fossil fuel scarcity.
The cars are getting better however, and the kicks and screams more muted. And that, you might say, is a sign of progress.
Yet there is also an element of Victorian romance here. My guess is that most of the people fighting over the issue don’t know much about the man behind it.
John Nellis Klock lived a classic Horatio Alger story. He was born in upstate New York the year the Civil War ended, into a family so poor he had to go to work full-time as a typesetter at age eleven.
But he was driven. When he was 22 he founded his own newspaper, built it up, sold it, and moved to Benton Harbor, a little town in Michigan‘s southwest corner. There he bought two newspapers, combined them, and became rich.
He married a local girl named Carrie, and the two lived happily ever after. Except for one great tragedy.
They had one child, a daughter named Jean, who died when she was still a baby.
The Klocks never got over their loss. By 1917, the boy who was once poor could buy anything he wanted. But he had a sense of perspective. He devoted himself to philanthropy.
“There is little joy in piling up money that one does not need,” he said. John and Carrie bought ninety acres of prime property on the Lake Michigan shoreline, land that would be near-priceless today.
The month after America entered World War I, they donated this land in memory of their daughter, saying the park “shall forever be used for bathing beach, park purposes, other public purposes, and all time shall be open for the use and benefit of the public.”
The grateful city named the park after the lost little girl. Benton Harbor was bustling place back then, important enough for Jack Dempsey to successfully defend his heavyweight championship here in 1920. But recent years have been hard.
The affluent white people have moved to nearby St. Joseph. Today, Benton Harbor is the poorest city in Michigan, a place of boarded up storefronts. John Klock’s Benton Harbor was 97 percent white. Today’s city is 95 percent black.
There are those who say the Harbor Shores development is Benton Harbor’s last best hope. They say it will boost the local economy. That rich people will come to play golf and frolic on the beach, and their dollars will trickle down to benefit the poor.
Maybe, but I doubt it. What I do know is that the property belonged to John Nellis Klock, who died seventy years ago this month. If he had wanted it to be a golf course, he would have said so.
He once had been a very poor kid, who had never been able to take his only daughter to the beach. He wanted to make it possible for other poor kids to do what he couldn’t. I think there is little doubt as to what the park’s future should be.
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