It is true, there is pain and evil in this world.
Yet there is much good to be observed, if one has eyes for it. The contemporary news media apparently has no desire to find the good, and receives no money for reporting about uplifting events.
Yet there is much to celebrate, from both a human and a humane point of view, in the world today. Public health expert Claire Ninde explains:
Vaccines have been so effective at improving health and saving and extending lives that most people in the U.S. have no idea what it’s like to watch a child die a painful death from a tetanus infection or to witness a loved one experience brutal paralysis and death from polio.
Diseases which in the past routinely claimed the lives of millions around the globe are now nearly impossible to find. The pandemic of 1918 claimed many more lives than the pandemic of 2019/2020, whether measured in absolute numbers or in percentages of the global population.
Smallpox, polio, tetanus, measles, and other diseases caused many deaths annually in previous centuries; now, such illnesses are rare, and lives are longer — not only longer, but healthier — as Claire Ninde explains:
Over the last 200 years, U.S. life expectancy has more than doubled to almost 80 years (78.8 in 2015), with vast improvements in health and quality of life.
The reduction of sickness and death is one metric which indicates that the world is not as horrid as the daily newscast would have the reader believe. Another criterion is poverty, and the decreasing rates thereof.
Despite all the images — not thoughts, not data — which the media throws at the viewer, poverty is becoming more and more rare. Lucy Tompkins, writing in the New York Times, reports:
In 1990, about 36 percent of the global population — and nearly half of people in developing countries — lived on less than $1.25 a day, the World Bank’s definition of extreme poverty at the time. (It’s now $1.90 a day.) In 2000, United Nations member states pledged to cut extreme poverty worldwide — specifically to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty, from 1990 levels, by 2015.Bottom line: The U.N. goal was met. By 2015, the share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty fell to 12 percent from 36 percent in 1990, a steep decline in just two and a half decades. During a single generation, more than a billion people around the world climbed out of extreme poverty, surpassing the goal.
Tabling for the moment questions about why and how this has happened, the reduction in poverty is something to be celebrated.
Disabling or lethal diseases are declining. Poverty is declining. That means that people are healthier, living longer, and doing so with more money. That is a reason to be cheerful.
