Anarchy abroad and at home

We don't have to go to Bangkok to find visible evidence of tension, confrontation, even conflict, between factions in society. There's visible evidence a few hundred meters from our home, at the branch of the Royal Bank of Canada on the corner of First Avenue and Bank Street -- Wendy's bank. Several days ago this bank was fire-bombed. About 3 am, two men were seen in the entrance where automated banking machines are accessible 24/7. They evidently tossed a Molotov cocktail or two through the glass partition into the bank itself, started a fire that did about $500,000 damage before it was extinguished by the firemen from the local fire brigade station less than half a kilometer away. Today a shadowy anarchist group posted their own video of the event, and claimed responsibility for it, apparently the same anarchist group that attempts violently to disrupt meetings of the G8 and G20 when these are held in Canada. I'm neither shocked nor surprised by this action or this claim. We live in a world that is increasingly overcrowded beyond sustainable levels, in which there are widening gaps between the haves and the have-nots. I've been watching this world and as much as I can of what goes on in it for more than 70 years; I began a life-long habit of reading newspapers and listening to radio news broadcasts in the 1930s, when the Spanish civil war was raging, the Nazis were expanding their regime from Germany into Austria and Czechoslovakia, and on the other side of the world, the Japanese had invaded Manchuria and were committing rapine and slaughter in Nanking and attacking Shanghai. The domestic front was uneasy too, with massive unemployment lingering as the great depression of the early 1930s slowly faded, and labour disputes on the waterfront and in coal mines often got violent and bloody. It seems to me that throughout my entire lifetime there has been a rising tide of social unrest that often ends in violence, punctuated of course by the world war of 1939-45, and innumerable smaller, more or less localized and increasingly barbaric wars since then. When there is no actual violent armed conflict, tiny explosions of violence like the fire-bombing of our neighbourhood bank, are less dramatic signs of the same underlying causes for unrest and discontent. Whatever the economic or political 'cause' of the conflicts and lesser forms of violence, I believe the real underlying cause is that too many people have been competing for a share of the world's shrinking supply of essential resources; and inevitably there are some who have plenty, including a few who have an obscenely large share, and others who do not have enough. I'm quite sure there are too many people to allow an equitable share for everybody. I was worried about population pressure long ago, when I was a medical student: in 1949, a few months before I graduated from medical school, our student magazine published my first-ever 'professional' paper. Among other things I thought the world's population was increasing too rapidly to be sustainable; it was increasing then by about 20 million a year and the world was carrying less than 2 billion people. At its peak in the early 1990s, the population was increasing by about 85 million a year; now, as the total approaches 7 billion, it's slackened off a bit, to about 60 million a year. In my lifetime, the world's population has increased more than threefold. As I've traveled about the world I've seen with my own eyes enough convincing evidence of population pressure to trouble me. I have no idea how or when all this will end. I hope for all our sakes that it all ends happily, but I'm not very hopeful about this.