Knoxville —
Yes, it seems like bad times. We have 535 supposedly grown-up people in Congress and they can’t create jobs or fix the deficit. One third of us live in poverty; over eight percent of us are out of work; and we have the worst green house gas emissions in history. On and on. Most of us could think of even more bad news.
But I’m inspired by Nicholas Kristoff who wrote recently that human life may actually have become better. That may be a hard sell in the face of what I usually write, but we are probably living in the most peaceable era in human existence. Yes, even through two World Wars, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Stalin’s murders, and Viet Nam plus Iraq, Darfur and 9/11 – only about 3% of humans world-wide died from human-caused catastrophe. That’s in contrast to estimates for pre-colonial people on this continent who killed about 13% of each other each year, or during the Thirty Years War in Germany (1600’s) when about a third of the people died.
Note: as recently as 1900 world life expectancy was approximately age 30. At least you didn’t have as long to be poor or unemployed.
But getting back to less homicide in the 21st Century, there seems to be a growing global consensus that killing is wrong! When leaders start exterminating groups of their population like Milosevic in Serbia, Assad in Syria, or our ancestors with the Native Americans, other countries speak up. They even get the mass murderers to the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Milosevic finally got there, and the last President of the Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo, was taken there after 3,000 people died because he refused to concede in a UN-certified election. This worldwide attempt at justice is new in our time.
Look at our country. Not so long ago if your skin was the wrong color, or if you were born what we call gay, or if you were female, you faced an uphill battle toward “equal rights.” Today? The Supreme Court includes three women judges! States increasingly include gay people in human rights – even gay marriage. And we might have had two men of color running as the major candidates for President – if certain women’s voices had not been heard!
If you consider earlier hard times, these days seem better and better. In the depressions of the 1830’s, the 1870’s, and the 1890’s banks failed, fraud abounded, and government corruption knew no limits. People went back to the farm to survive – with potatoes from the cave, hand-pumped well water, and the soft pages from Sears Roebuck in the outhouse. Or they might seek their fortune speeding West by oxen – through rain, snow, and mountains – ask the Donner Party. Then in the 1920’s agriculture failed and stayed down through the Great Depression. Your grandparents can tell the story from there. They might even remember that in the “good old days” before government-controlled Federal Deposit Insurance, you lost all your banked savings when your bank failed.
Enough. You get the idea. Thanksgiving is past, but we can still give thanks. These may be bad times but we’ve seen a lot worse!
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