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| AS THE WORLD TURNS | |
 June 25, 2001 
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RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: "Of every hue and cast am I," sang Walt Whitman in 19th-century America. Nowadays when we hear America described, it is not usually by the poet, but by statisticians at the census bureau. We hear about a segmented America. Millions of Hispanics are distinguished from millions of African Americans; whites from non-whites; Asians from pacific islanders. In truth, America exists entire despite the segmented descriptions offered by our Census Bureau, and a far more interesting numerical portrait of America was recently made by United Nations' demographers. In a study this spring, the U.N. predicted that America's population would continue to grow, grow so markedly that by 2050, America would be the only developed economy within the 20 most populous nations on earth. The easy explanation for this growth is immigration. So many of the faces one sees in the crowd, suddenly, now, are from the world's every corner. The new American city, Dallas or Chicago or Boston, resembles the world. Here in California, the state with the nation's largest immigrant population, whenever anything goes wrong, the easiest explanation among nativists is that California is becoming a third-world country. The commonplace is that third- world despair and high mortality rates create large families, but what we do not understand so well is how optimism creates large families. The middle-class Asian American with a large family lives in a spanking-new house in suburban Virginia. Indeed, Americans who trace their ancestry back to Europe tend to have more children than their European cousins. German Americans in Chicago have more children than their cousins in Munich. And while America keeps growing, Europe is shrinking. More interesting than why and when a country has so many children is why a nation begins to have a negative birth rate. Why is Spain giving birth to fewer children now? And Italy, and Austria? Were it not for immigrants, Europe would be disappearing. There are, doubtless, some Americans who will look fondly, look greenly toward Europe, but our destiny lies in another direction. We find ourselves no longer a green exception, but within the great brown world, and our lessons for survival will come within the experience of density. A few years ago here on Market Street in San Francisco, from a block away you could hear a blaring boom box carried by a teenager, the boom proclaiming his presence. Now kids pass wearing discreet Sony walkmans invented in Tokyo. Tokyo has become a model for living in San Francisco. The Japanese skill of living within crowded cities, in small spaces, is becoming a California skill after heedless generations of boom. The most interesting speculation I've heard about America's numerical place in this new world comes from Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute. In a newspaper interview, Eberstadt wonders if there might not be some correlation between America's high fertility rate and our nation's religiosity. After all, the churches of Europe are cold, empty. Cathedrals have become tourist attractions. In Rome, the Pope scolds Europeans for becoming too secular. In Salt Lake City, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a church famous for large families, is now the fastest-growing religion in the country. In this new century, the earth's energies, its despair and ambitions and hopes, its hungry children and dreaming poets will belong more to the Southern Hemisphere than the North. Increasingly in the 21st century the United States will find itself uniquely positioned. As the wealthiest nation on earth we will find ourselves in Davos, in Paris, in Tokyo, sitting with government ministers of prosperous nations of the North; but as a country of great population, we will be linked by common concerns, common solutions, preoccupations, fictions, songs, and linked by common prayers with the vast new cities of the South: Bombay, Lagos, Sao Paolo, sister cities indeed. O, brave new world. I'm Richard Rodriguez. |
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