What About Tomorrow

Do you think about tomorrow? Do you think about the world and how it would be tomorrow? How about the world in 10 years, 25 years, 50 years? Are you concerned about the world that you are leaving behind? I am someone who wears many hats, defines myself according to many things. And I am worried. Society has changed so much in the last five years alone. What will our society be when my brother's children are my age? What will the legacy be that my generation leaves behind? And, most importantly, is there still time to fix that which is broken?

Our world used to have a poverty rate of almost 80%. Back in the early 1800s it was believed that poverty for most was inevitable. Since then, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, increases in the rate of education, new discoveries and improvements in modern medicine, and ultimately, the impact of the technological boom that we have been in for the past 50 years, the poverty rate has gone down to less than 10%. To be clear, when I speak of poverty, I am speaking of people that live on less than two US dollars a day. We have come a long way.

We have had so many developments in how we see each other, men and woman of various races, coming from different faiths, creeds, and belief systems. The invention of flight has made it possible for people to migrate across the globe in search of a better life for themselves and their families. Satellite technology and the ease at which we can disseminate television programming has meant that ideas can be shared like never before. So why, then, would this be a problem for me I hear you thinking?

Well, the rates at which we are populating the planet differ from place to place, from one demographic to another. As a white, conservative, Christian male, I find myself holding to a value system that is under threat purely by virtue of the fact that we are being out bred by other groups from around the world who are now, more and more, making their way into societies that up until now have looked like me, sounded a lot like me, and, perhaps most importantly, thought like me. But how about exactly is it?

In 2019, the number of Christians in the world edged past 2.5 billion. This accounted for roughly 31.2% of the world's population. This can be compared to the number of Muslims in the world, for example, which in 2017 were estimated to be about 1.8 billion. The problem however is that it is estimated that by 2070, Islam will overtake Christianity due to faster birth rates among those communities around the world – 2.7 children per Muslim family versus 2.2 for Christian families. Please don't misunderstand me. This is not me being Islamophobic. However, the lifestyle of the average Moslem person is vastly different from anyone who identifies as being Christian. And my fear is this – that they are wholly incompatible.

If you look at where people, over the last 50 years, have migrated from and where they have migrated to, a large percentage comes from countries such as Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, et cetera. These nations all have one thing in common. Almost their entire populations are Muslim. Yet, they find themselves in war zones, in conflict with regimes that oppress them and limit their opportunities to thrive rather than just to survive. And so they move to countries in Europe, North America, Australia et cetera who welcome them with open arms, but also take in part of the reason that they were oppressed in the first place, that is to say, a wholly hostile culture which does not integrate with others, or practice tolerance as we do.

How then can we sit idly by and allow the destruction of that which we hold most sacred, our cultures, our way of life – do we simply forfeit these things in the name of being, ironically, good Christians? It seems to me that we have to ask ourselves a few very difficult questions. For example, at what point do we say that this is an acceptable, that our right to exist as a group, a society, a faith, a culture isn't just as sacred to us as allowing them to be the people that they are? And, once we have reached this point of no return, what then? Will we do what we have always done? Well we go to war with ourselves where there are no winners or losers, simply death, despair, and extinction for the losing side? I am not sure I have the answers. It will more than likely fall to my descendants to come up with them but, if I am going to call myself a champion for that which I hold most dear, we have to start that discussion today, those of us who are soon to depart this world as well as those of us who will remain.