The end is nigh, or so it would seem.
How can I ignore the orgy of violence that is reported to me via intellectual feeding tube every day? My phone seems to delight in perking up with reports of fresh blood, new shootings and the like.
It's common to hear opinions that the world is a worse place than it used to be, that it's getting worse all the time. Whatever happened to those good old days in which all nations and peoples treated each other with respect, and prosperity ruled?
You know, when there was no war...er, I mean, slavery...uh, when there were no sweatshops? Drug trades? What about before unethical prostitution?
You feel me on this, yes? Pardon my pessimism for now, but humanity is a reliably dark thing, and the world it inhabits has thus been equivalently dark through the ages. So why does it seem like we're worse off than ever? Here in the 21st century, shouldn't we have learned by now? What's with the ethical regression?
Perception, my friends. Consider the sheer availability of recording devices, which rest irritably in the pockets of audiences waiting to happen across our excitable little Mother Earth.
If your smartphone isn't in your hand now, it will be in a moment.
I don't remember witnessing professional footage from the recent Las Vegas country massacre. Like me, you may bring to mind grainy and quaking footage, tap-dancing gunfire atop some local hotel, a pitter-pat fairly more sinister, yet innocuous, than its eruptive cinematic counterpart.
It was easily and instantly recorded by unfortunate laypersons who were somehow able to muster the wherewithal to capture a tragedy in the making. And fear is available in the format you prefer; with cream or sugar, now, on your laptop at Starbucks. I'm a smartphone-between-classes sort, but I can make friends with someone who imbibes threatening media in podcast form, on the go.
Fear is swallowed at leisure because it is so very accessible. Shout-out to our indispensable and unignorable internet. I suppose if you lived in a relatively peaceful community before the advent of global awareness, you might have thought the world was doing just fine. But even a person who grew up in the mid-twentieth century has seen the rise in availability of the report. To this person, neither a stupid person nor an ignorant one, this is by all appearances an anticipation of cataclysm, which I should add is liberally supported by America's #1 holy book.
It's coming soon. When though? Soon.
Confirmation bias is at play in the minimum-security jungle gym of your mind. Mine too. It nearly always is. If you expect the worst, you'll find signs of it. Cherry picking is mankind's legacy, and we toil in a labyrinthine orchard.
In fact, our planet enjoys unprecedented peace. It is not perfect, do not mistake me, but with infant death tolls at a historical minimum, slavery burned alive, disease suffering a medical strangulation, and women continuously uplifted from the sexist muck in which they have long flapped, I say we have earned congratulations.
You want to contest this; you want to say #MeToo, you want to point out gun violence, school shootings. I know the rest.
The movement for women's rights continues, and when we judiciously expose & condemn sexual misconduct, we are taking unrealized transgressions to the chopping block. They were already there, only now we're doing something about it. This is an improvement, not a decline.
Violent gun activity at the civilian level is at some bizarre peak in the U.S., but it pales to the death tolls we saw in Stalin’s Union, and to the long history of prevalent monarchies in which violence has been simple, and measurable by the casual bloodlust of its unqualified rulers.
Suicide awareness and prevention are a text message away; child-protective measures scrutinize necessarily to excess; cigarettes are far and away less popular than they were.
We are the new health officers appointed to a great and filthy restaurant at which everyone has dined. We have found rats beneath the tables and exterminated them; we have caught the chef pissing in the soup du jour and fired him promptly; the kitchen utensils are now washed with soap at our command.
The patrons, a well-meaning but confused bunch, notice these dramas and decide the restaurant is in a deep slump. We didn't see rats before!
They could be forgiven for this.
