Are We Doomed?

Is the planet in the worst shape it has ever been in during all of recorded or even pre-recorded history? Are we in a handbasket on our way to a self-induced hell? Is there anything going right in today’s world?

I’ve been reading non-fiction lately, which is always a chancy proposition. Every writer, regardless of how much they try, writes from a biased viewpoint. It is impossible not to do so. But some people take bias to an extreme.

But the problems seem to be insurmountable. There is no doubt in my mind that there are problems in the world and in our country. I can see the difficulty with porous borders without anyone telling me the dangers implicit in that stance. I can see a war being waged. So no one needs to point that out to me. I can see children “graduating” high school and they can’t read, write, or cipher.

Is it getting worse? I don’t know if there was ever a time when someone somewhere in the world wasn’t at war with someone else. Nationally speaking. I think I read somewhere about a miraculous year that was war-free, but that may be wishful thinking or some novel.

A few hundred years ago, when the printing press was first invented, no one printed much other than a few books because the general population was illiterate. It took a couple hundred years to get a population that could read enough as well as to get paper and ink cheap enough to make printing a daily newssheet worthwhile.

What scares me today is that we seem hell-bent on giving up any freedom in the name of appeasement and “doing the right thing” to any and all. Illegal aliens need protection under the law. Why? They aren’t even supposed to be here. Protect their butts right back to wherever they came from. I need to be bilingual because people who illegally enter this country can’t apply for my tax dollars easily if I don’t help them by my learning their language rather than their learning mine.

Somewhere freedom of religion got turned into freedom from religion and the Ten Commandments, supported by Jews, Christians, and Muslims must be removed from buildings because the ACLU finds them distasteful, unlike NAMBLA which is just freedom of speech. The KKK can put up a cross, my tax dollars can pay for plastic poop and pictures of vaginas to be plastered on the Virgin Mary, but I better not even think about wanting “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” being played in a mall while they are praying in the accounting offices that the Christmas rush will make up for the empty coffers from the rest of the year.

My parents handed off a world that saw civil rights granted and then my generation made up quotas, stigmatizing people of color as being somehow inherently less able and needing a hand up forever more.

My parents gave me a world free of Hitler and the death camps emptied and my generation has turned a blind eye to wholesale slaughter in Africa and the Middle East, not wanting to get involved.

My parents handed me a world where literacy and scientific knowledge was stridently endorsed and my generation has made curriculum so dumbed down that anyone should be able to pass any test, and yet the scores keep falling.

Somewhere along the line, self of steam became the only possible worthwhile enterprise. Self-actualization and self-satisfaction became more important than self responsibility. Everyone is a victim of a society that mistreats them. No one is responsible for their choices.

I hope the grandchildren have a world to grow up in. I hope my generation doesn’t make it impossible for them to learn, grow, and become responsible adults.