Oh My God. It’s All Going To Hell

Actu­ally… no it’s not.

It’s amaz­ing how eas­ily we all (yes you do) fall into this trap. The media feeds it of course with their 24 hour dis­as­ter obses­sion (com­ing to you live from…) but that’s not the only source.

Social media is ter­ri­ble for mag­ni­fy­ing this by a huge degree.  Even the small­est of griev­ances (Glee may have used a song with­out credit) is repeated an repeated until the out­rage is pal­pa­ble. Every nasty lit­tle thing that peo­ple did or said is broad­cast to the world and peo­ple shake their heads won­der­ing how the world could be so beastly.

It’s not. It’s bet­ter than it has ever been. Admit­tedly how much bet­ter depends on what part of the world you live in, but look­ing at things as a whole, it’s so so much better.

Every coun­try in the world has an increased life expectancy over 50 years ago

There’s less vio­lence than at any other time in human history

Net National Income has grown con­sis­tently for the last 40 years and even in coun­tries where there have been dips the trend remains upwards.

Infant mor­tal­ity rates are down

Lit­er­acy rates are up. Edu­ca­tion rates are up

The pro­por­tion of seats held by women in national par­lia­ments has almost dou­bled in the last 20 years.

We have the fuck­ing inter­net.

So just take a breath. Yes there’s more to do. There are social injus­tices. There are sys­tems that could work bet­ter. But it is get­ting better.

Pho­to­graph by ChaaChaa. http://​browse​.deviantart​.com/​?​q​=​g​o​i​n​g​+​t​o​+​h​e​l​l​&​a​m​p​;​o​f​f​s​e​t​=​2​4​#​/​d​1​r​e​bc5

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