July 11 is World Population Day, declared in 1989 by the United Nations Organization. Days like this, as we have written over and over again, are like TV commercials. They are of no use whatsoever. Most of the time they irritate. Many of you ask bewilderedly, “Why?” and others blurt out, “What the heck!” But just like advertising, which is useless for directing people (people are not just “consumers”), it informs, it thrills, it reminds.
We certainly do not need this Day to remind us that the world’s population is at risk. And even more so in some geo-cultural areas of the world than in others. Actually this is old news, outdated by facts. The “demographic winter” is now present everywhere, with devastating effects. In different forms, yes, but the result is always a zero.
The serious demographic problem is more than evident in countries like Italy, where people are not having children and starting families in a resounding way for a huge number of reasons, first however, because of the cultural weakness of the Italians themselves. Italians no longer believe in family, in the future, in themselves. Yes, there is also the crisis, there are also taxes and there is the caravan. All of it very true, every one of us who keeps a family and pays taxes knows this. But everyone, the chronically disappointed Italians first, knows that the problem lies upstream. So governments’ policies to relieve the family of burdens are welcome, but the point lies elsewhere. The distrust of self and the future, which results in the “demographic winter,” owes everything first and foremost to the culture of death that surrounds us and of which we are often open advocates.
So this Day is and remains useless. Certainly it will remain useless for as long as people around the world continue not to believe that life is the fundamental and ineradicable human right, the one from which all other freedoms derive, and that there is no future without family. Unfortunately, on July 11, 2023, we will still be here saying the same things if man–not the state, not the government, not the neighbor, but each one of us–does not radically change his perspective on himself and the world.
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