Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET by MARGARET DICKSON In November, we learned that there are now 7 billion — yes, billion with a B — people sharing our planet. For Americans, this astounding number is merely academic, because even in our current gloomy economy, life is still better here than in most places around the world. We do not sleep two or more in a hospital bed as do patients in other countries, and medical care is generally available even if it is wildly expensive and the wait is bothersome. A glance around any public place confi rms that we certainly get enough to eat and then some. In emerging nations in Africa and Asia, the populations are so high that already meager resources simply cannot be stretched far enough, and millions — maybe billions — do without. It is shocking and shameful to me that one of our national problems is obesity when people are literally starving to death in less blessed parts of the world. Even in our bounty, though, we need to know how quickly the world became so crowded and so stressed. Demographers tell us that it took from the beginning of time until 1804 for the world to reach 1 billion people. We hit 2 billion in 1927, 3 billion in 1959, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987 and 6 billion in 1998. No one in his right mind can believe that this level of exponential growth can continue without affecting the United States along with everyone else. It is worth noting, too, that North Carolina gained 1.5 million people between 2000 and 2010 and another 121,000 people last year. This is good news, in my view, because it means that North Carolina is a good place to live, as those of us who have been here already knew. It is also challenging news, because it means we have more people to educate, more people looking to fi nd jobs and become productive, more people to drive on our roads and use our medical services. Let's all cross our fi ngers and toes and send up our prayers that leaders at all levels, particularly in Congress and in the N.C. General Assembly, will realize that growth requires thought, planning and, of course, resources and act accordingly. ••• One more demographic tidbit from the 2010 U.S. Census caught my eye recently, one I had seen before and which I have pondered for some time. The percentage of married adults in America continues to decline, with only 51 percent of us now united in wedlock compared to almost three quarters of us in 1960. In other words, if this keeps up, married Americans are headed toward minority status. Says Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin, "In the 1950s, if you weren't married, people thought you were mentally ill … now it's a cultural option." This is a complicated issue involving fi rst marriages occurring later in all ethnic groups, but there is also a signifi cant educational divide that cannot be positive. For complex reasons that feed on each other, education is becoming a marriage dividing line. Today, nearly two-thirds of college graduates are married, but fewer than half of people with high-school diplomas or less are married. Lesser educated people are also more likely to divorce if they do marry. So what we increasingly have are educated people with higher earning capacities joining both romantic and economic forces and moving up together while less educated people are struggling alone. We will not even go into what effect this marriage divide is having on children, four out of 10 of whom are now born to unmarried women. What we have here, folks, are both a social and an economic problems with no clear solutions in sight as their effects threaten to become more and more profound. Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institute summed it up this way, "Family structure is a new dividing line in American society." Something else to think about in the New Year. ••• My mother and all great practitioners of the English language maintain that English is fl uid, always on the lookout for new words and new usages of old words as others fade into oblivion. I am all about that as they say, too, but some evolutions I can do without. It seems that is true for other people as well. The Marist Poll which polls Americans on all sorts of issues, asks us every year what words or phrases used in casual conversation annoy us the most. My personal list is extensive and includes "actually," "at the end of the day," "being on the same page," "seriously," and the one that really sends me over the edge, "just sayin'." And the winner for the third consecutive year? "Whatever!" 2012! MARGARET DICKSON, Contributing Writer, Up & Coming Weekly, COM- MENTS? Editor@upandcomingweekly.com. 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