World’s Population

While digging around for some information recently, what was accidentally unearthed was a list of nations of the world lined up according to population.  It has long been an assumption that such knowledge carefully noted at least in passing for nearly seventy years was relatively substantial.  It was another blow to the ego when a fast look down the list prompted mostly by curiosity showed a woeful lack of knowledge.  There were once geography, history and political science classes as well as the kind of odd bits of information people remember.  There was once a bit of smug pride in being able to name all fifty U.S. States in less than fifty seconds….  Well, no more.   

Someone once said something about the older one gets the more one realizes how little one knows.  Rarely has it been truer than with that list.  It was never fully realized that, population-wise, the United States is the third largest nation in the world.  It’s of course far smaller than China and India, but in today’s world number three is not the likes of “England” or Russia.  Both Russia and the United Kingdom (taken apart from The Commonwealth, and it is) have far less population.  A second surprise there was that Brazil is fifth on the list.  For the record:  China, India, United States, Indonesia, Brazil.  The rest are under two hundred million people. 

It was, of course, known that there are tiny countries, such as Monaco, that no nation seems to bother with for conquest.  Among other things one might reasonably ask, well, what natural resources are there that might be exploited on a large scale or the like.  But, what is surprising in that respect is the actual number of such tiny nations.  Nearly eighty places on the list have less than a million people.  Again, for the record, the bottom of the list says Pitcairn Islands, population forty-eight (48) in 2012.  That one is kind of hard to imagine as a nation, although there are quite a number with a claim of only a few thousand people.  

If one lives long enough, one may have to admit to knowing nothing. 

It’s “Social Shift” Time

What’s happening “out there somewhere” right now has repercussions all through an ordinary day for maybe everyone indirectly.  It doesn’t affect everyone directly, but there are repercussions throughout society day by day or inch by inch.  What it boils down to is this:   school is starting and families with students (especially those with mothers who hold jobs and have small children) are changing their routines.  Case in point:  if there’s no school, working mothers need reliable baby-sitters.  When there is school, they don’t need the baby-sitters when the children are in school.  Grandparents and the like are free to do other things when the kids are in school. 

The shift goes all the way through the college level in different ways and one need not be related to any student.  The high school student who ran errands for the neighbor is not going to be running errands.  The college student from down the street wanting to earn a few dollars painting the garage is not going to be around to do any more of it at the present time.  Anyone who made a deal for any such thing has to find someone else to do the whatever.  And, the shift is fairly permanent.  There will be a sort of shift back when school let’s out come summer, but it’s likely to be different people around as everyone is about a year older. 

An old folks’ home may not house any children, but it may very well house a couple of needed grandparents.  Even when the management frowns on baby-sitting activities (and they do), angles will be figured out whereby parents will be able to go do things.  Although the shift is particularly noticeable among contract workers (work when you want to work), understandably the individuals most determined to figure out an angle are those with a substantial and concrete set up.  In other words, it also doesn’t pay to say much about visiting grandchildren if it leads to personal annoyance if there be any expectation of seeing the people again. 

There are many undercurrents in life.