Civil Defense: On What the Future of Civilization Depends

Civil defense depends on civilization.

Civilization, in turn, depends on married couples co-creating children with God.

For American civilization, this is especially true.

Below is my poem, On What the Future of Civilization Depends, and the story behind the poem, to encourage young people to marry and have children.

Many, many years ago a Nor' Easterner tore up the East Coast doing it's usual catastrophic damage to cities, towns, and neighborhoods.

Always eager to see a disaster up-close and how Americans responded to it, I drove down to Ocean City, MD. The Nor' Easterner had swept away most of the beach there. Always searching for civil defense lessons from natural and manmade disasters, I wanted to view the damage and how Americans were recovering from it.

When I taught Emergency Management at the Emergency Management Institute in Emmitsburg, MD in the late 1980's, I first learned that Ocean City never should have been located where it was. Basically a floating island covering and surrounded by an ocean and bay that regularly floods, it was a poor choice for where to locate a city.

But like many American cities built near flood zones, like Pittsburgh, PA for example where the mighty Monongahela and Susquehanna rivers collide in their downtown area, it was built near water because of all the advantages water offers.

But because Ocean City, NJ is basically a floating island, when huge water events like a Nor' Easterner strike, millions of tons of sand are swept away along with any houses, businesses or buildings on that sand.

"Build not your house on sand!" the Bible tells us, and Ocean City is an example. It is why the state of Maryland spends hundreds of millions of dollars pumping sand from the Atlantic Ocean back onto the beaches there. If they did not do so, nature would reclaim the city into the Atlantic Ocean before too long.

As I drove around Ocean City that day, the damage to the beach and beach houses and businesses was extensive, almost breathtaking. The tons of incoming ocean water combined with the backflow from the bay water had created a pincer movement that took out millions of tons of beach front and properties to the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

Then, in those moments God blesses us with when our awareness is at its peak as when viewing massive storm damage I saw a stunning site. A group of teen age guys were circling a block trying to get the attention of several teen age girls who were laughing and flirting back and forth with them.

I flashed back on my own teen age years doing the same in Wildwood, Ocean City, Barnegat, Brigantine, Cape May and other New Jersey vacation spots. Having grown up in Philadelphia I regularly went "down the shore" and engaged in the same flirting, romance and fun with girls that these guys were doing.

Instead of concentrating on the heart-breaking disaster damage that was all around that I came down to see and analyze, I was amazed at the teen agers ability to ignore the horror and instead laugh, romance and have fun.

That Holy Spirit inspiration struck hard, I pulled the car over, grabbed some scrap paper from the glove box, and wrote the following poem: "On What the Future of Civilization Depends."

When painting houses in high school, before the electrical accident that changed my life, I painted the house of a brilliant alcoholic. He was kind enough to let me borrow from his extensive library as I worked for him. 

I was fortunate at 16 to be able to read their Eleven Volume Story of Civilization, and especially the final 102 page Lessons of History where they summarized the lessons they learned from their study of mankind and the civilizations he created. I say fortunate because that book eventually led me to write the poem On What the Future of Civilization Depends.

Will and Ariel Durant in their epic Lessons of History note that although history is the study of the lives of the kings and queens, it is more important that the peasants down by the water continue to procreate if civilization is to continue.

I see so many young people who have, sadly, given up on romancing, marrying and having children. Yet, the American Civilization, especially now, can only survive and grow strong if they do marry and have children.

I include my poem, On What the Future of Civilization Depends, in this post in hopes it inspires some young Americans to marry and procreate beautiful children. Otherwise, our great American Experiment is history. 

On What the Future of Civilization Depends

The third of the summer blondes
Asks the streetcornered muscled boys.
"Right here, baby!  Get outta dat car
And come over here! 
We'll show youse how ta party!"
Smiles Tenderness Tony to his friends
First, and then to the summer blondes,
Fully aware of what hangs in the balance.
 
"Well, we're kinda lookin' for real men.
Youse guys don't look old enough
Ta drive our cars or even work on our engines!
Wheel it Angela!" laughs Marie.
 
They cruise around the Wildwood block,
Circle and return, compelled by a mating ceremony
As old as any migrating naked rhizopod's
As insistent as any remoras on a tiger shark
As powerful as any copulating American saddle horses.
 
At the same time Tenderness Tony and Angela circle each other warily,
Hundreds of thousands of others dance the same dance floor
To repeat ancient and glorious tribal mating rites
Less understood than the circling rites of shark whales off Tahiti.
 I know many who do not see the wonder of this.
Instead, they spend their days saying to whoever will listen,
"See!  See there!  This life is only abuse, death, destruction,
Hate and finally pain, pain, pain and cruelty!"
And it is not just journalists saying this these days.
 

Perhaps such as these have never visited Wildwood, NJ
At the height of the mating season.
For there, on any given sultry summer night
When the air is as thick with mating pheromones
As the Brazilian rain forest, everything is possible.
 
"Youse guys still where the party is tonight?"
Now it is Maria talking, newly revealed as the princes in waiting
Who throws out the challenge to all willing to chance the future.
All three boys respond by raising themselves high
To preen their feathered haircuts like cocks
About to meet their flaring hens.
 
"Yeah, Baby!  I'm here for youse only tonight!
He's "VAA VAA VOOOMM Vic!  I'm Tenderness Tony
Dis here's happiness itself,
Whose otherwise known as Loverboy Louie."
 
This night laden with romance and possibility,
Despite the miles of backed up traffic
Tens of thousands in cars, clubs, bars,
All along these dazzling street-lit courting avenues
Rhythmically step to this genetically programmed dance
Unbothered by anything but the moment of contact.
 

Like a novice nun fingering her rosary,
Theresa brushes her hair with tender strokes
As Maria parks the car in one swift motion.
All three watch the boys in the car mirror,
Well aware of what their charged rituals
Are producing in the awaiting Tony, Vic, and Louie.
Each reapplies her love-red glossy candy flavored lipstick,
Sprays wave after wave of perfume on her neck and breasts
And saunters over to her instant date for that night.
 
For those who snootily laugh at these young people,
Who dismiss their substandard English or their different ways,
I ask youse to please consider the following.
 
It is on the perpetual success of such everyday rituals
Far more than on what laws Congress passes,
Or what breakthroughs our medical schools make,
Or what discount rate the Fed establishes,
Or what new worlds the Hubbell discovers,
Or what programs the President proposes,
That the future of civilization depends.
 
"Youse guys ready to party?" Shouts Marie.
"Yooooooooo!!! Honey!  The party's just begun!"
Answers Tenderness Tony.  "The party's just begun!"
 

Seventeen years later,
Within a mile of where her parents met,
The oldest of Tony and Marie's girls'
Drives by some guys on the corner of 58th and Atlantic
In "Wildwood by the Sea,"
And shouts, "YO! Youse guys know where the party is tonight?"
When she does, on the successful answer to her question,
Will the future of civilization depend.
"YO! Youse guys know where the party is tonight?"

On What the Future of Civilization was first published in Under a Gull's Wing: Poems and Photographs of the Jersey Shore, Edited by Rich Youmans and Frank Finale, by Down The Shore Publishing, Harvey Cedars, NJ, 08008, First Printing 1996. You may order a copy here.

Here is a fuller explanation of the Durant's fertility lesson.

4. Life must breed. 

Nature has no use for anything that cannot reproduce abundantly.

“The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed. Nature has no use for organisms, variations, or groups that cannot reproduce abundantly. 

She has a passion for quantity as prerequisite to the selection of quality; she likes large litters, and relishes the struggle that picks the surviving few; doubtless she looks on approvingly at the upstream race of a thousand sperms to fertilize one ovum. 

She is more interested in the species than in the individual, and makes little difference between civilization and barbarism. She does not care that a high birth rate has usually accompanied a culturally low civilization, and a low birth rate a civilization culturally high; and she (here meaning Nature as the process of birth, variation, competition, selection, and survival) sees to it that a nation with a low birth rate shall be periodically chastened by some more virile and fertile group.” 

(Think Red China over the United States.)

“If the human brood is too numerous for the food supply, Nature has three agents for restoring the balance: famine, pestilence, and war.”

“Naturally, you would expect that the educated would inherit the Earth. The fertile inherit the Earth…it teaches the law of biology that you have to breed as well as breathe.”