Extraordinary! Colleen, you're just as I imagined you would look!
Your delivery is breathy, and the words aren't always as distinct as they should be. Moreover it looked as if, you were reading from a script displayed by the camera, rather than reciting words you had by heart. You also stumbled a couple of times. More training required.
Philip Larkin had the answer - something to do with the Chatterly trial and the Beatles' first LP.
Ann of 200K points sure beats Anne of the Thousand Days - and you get to keep your head! Not that I've noticed you ever losing it, which is more than can be said for some.
I like helping people, if it's not too much effort. I also like showing off. By sharing my thoughts and experiences, I believe I'm doing a little of the former, and a smidge more of the latter.
If you must hold a Nativity Play in a shopping mall, that's fine by me. If you feel like singing adeste fideles very badly, I'm not paying. But yet another plundering and vulgarisation of the Ode to Joy ... too much! I'd say, may the ghosts of Beathoven and Schiller torment them all in the next life - except that there is no next life. Therefore, may they all continue to be exactly what they are, until the music stops.
It's a truism that today you are older than you have ever been before, and younger than you will ever be again. Make the most of what you have left!
In China, the one-child policy has resulted in the abortion/murder of many female embrtos/infants - and the same happens to a greater or less extent in almost every country where amniocentesis is readily available. The effect of this, of course, is to produce a gross imbalance of the sexes in the next generation. When last I checked, the ratio of male/female live births in South Korea was 114/100. In other words, for every seven men, only six women. Because they have such rarity value, for the most attractive young women the rewards of prostitution will be enormous, and extremely safe - which will further reduce the availability of presentable potential wives. Another factor in Korea is the long-standing tradition among successful Japanese men of keeping a Korean mistress alongside his Japanese wife, so there will be a further outflux.
In India in Mrs Ghandi's time, they tried a sterilization program of extreme inefficiency. Because the male operation is so much cheaper and less invasive than the female, that was used exclusively, and inducements were offered - usually a transistor radio. And because the people administering it were Indian bureacrats, it was corruptly applied. So men in their 70s were vasectomied two or three times, and flogged their spare sets for drinking money; while of course, it would have been politically unthinkable to apply it effectively. Can you imagine the outrage if a twelve-year-old girl who had committed no serious crime were to be forcibly dragged from the bosom of her family, even if that family was notoriously criminal and inept, and given a compulsory hysterectomy? Applied on a large scale, that might be effective - but no politician in a nominally democratic country would dare.
There are other factors at work. For instance, the habit of many men, especially in the UK the USA and Australia, of importing Thai or Fillipina 'mail-order brides' will further reduce the availability of presentable women in their countries of origin, with more emotional hardship to their male contemporaries. So, given that there is no obvious way of increasing the female population, the most likely recourse is a spontaneous and unregulated reduction in the number of males. This can be, and is being, achieved by gangsterism and dangerous driving - but only in part. The most effective way of reducing the male population is war.
Grit, the solution towards which you seem to be probing is eugenic legislation, whereby the least desirable elements in the population - i.e., those with serious genetic abnormalities, along with the least intelligent and the most emotionally unstable - should be compulsorily sterilised, by hysterectomy or vasectomy, at an early age. Before World War II, this was very heavily canvassed and widely approved, especially by socialist thinkers such as H G Wells and the Webbs. The US embraced it, as did every Protestant country in Europe except the UK. However, it was also embraced by a socialist thinker called Adolf Hitler, whose take on it was, to put it mildly, rather eccentric. Eugenics has never recovered its respectability.
Interestingly, it looks as if eugenics may be getting back in by the back door, though only on a very small scale. Women who want children, but don't want a husband, or whose husbands are infertile, are resorting to AID - and they're understandably picky about who the donor should be. Apart from having no overt genetic defects, the ideal donor has a good first degree from a top-flight university - bonehead English from 'State' won't do; he should be proficient at a serious musical instrument - bonehead rock guitar won't do; he should be reasonably athletic, between 6'2" and 6'4" tall, and on the lean side without being ectomorphic. Any of you who fit that description, and like the idea of siring a number of children whom you may never meet, see if there's a clinic near YOU!
Anything that goes BOOM!
On the other hand, I suspect what you have in mind is baby-boomers. It's a term coined to describe the very large number of people of both sexes born in the five (or so) years immediately following Hitler's War - especially in the English-speaking world, and especially in Great Britain. Many men came home to wives whom they hadn't seen for literally years, and were keen to make up for lost time. Many others came home single, and found many attractive girls keen to marry them. After all, they were in demand, as there had been far more male than female casualties.
I can speak with some authority about this, because I happen to be one of the very oldest of the baby-boomers (born May 1946). As a group, we tend to be tough, wiry and light. This is because, while we weren't malnourished in childhood, we weren't overfed either. Most of us are still alive, and while ill-health and misfortune have thinned our ranks, and will thin them further, what with improvements in medical science, far more of us will live to be 100 or more than could have been dreamed of when we were born. This is already putting heavy pressure on the pensions/taxation system, which can only get worse if we insist on retiring at 65.
Me, I'm still working full-time. I am paying taxes, and am deferring my future status of 'pensioner' as long as I can - mainly because I want to sustain my current standard of life, but also because I stand to gain an extra £1 per week, for life, for every five weeks of deferment. The thought of £1 per week being important is horrifying, but even more horrifying is the thought of an extra £1 per week being all-important, but unavaiable.
Austerity is good, because it consists of tax-hikes on things you don't want to buy and reductions in benefits for which you don't qualify. Cuts are bad, because they mean that you lose some of your salary, have to pay higher tax on what's left, and won't be getting the gold-plated, taxpayer-guaranteed pension you had been looking forward to.
When you take to the streets, brandishing banners with such slogans as 'Hands off our Pensions!' you can confidently expect all the people who have been contributing to your pensions through general taxation, even to the extent of having to forgo decent pensions of their own, to fall into step and rally behind you. After all, aren't you worth it?