The best of times?

I went to see “Watchmen” last night. The film is based on Alan Moore’s nightmarish vision of America, sort of an alternative reality, set in 1985.

The thing that struck me was just how much…better things are.

Yeah, I know, this has been a rough decade, bracketed by 9/11 and the current economic meltdown.

We face some big challenges, including global climate change. It doesn’t get much bigger than global.

But in 1985, the “Doomsday” clock was creeping toward midnight. The Soviets and the US were just beginning to edge back from the brink of mutual assured destruction.

Global nuclear winter – that was pretty big, too, right? AIDs was spreading fast, with no hope in sight for people struck by a disease that at the time was 100% fatal.

Crime was at epidemic levels, with something akin to chaos reigning in whole sections of American cities. Ireland was a bombed out war zone, just as intractable as Israel and Palestine.

We humans — without the help of masked superheroes (sorry, Hollywood) — managed to sort out all of those problems pretty nicely. Nuclear holocaust has receded dramatically as a threat, and our cities are literally twice as safe.

AIDs hasn’t been cured but we’ve made incredible strides in treating those who are infected; and Ireland, until the current economic downturn, was a hub of peaceful prosperity.

Here’s another statistic that’s surprising: Since the 1980s, the number and intensity of wars world-wide has plummeted sharply.

Despite Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, and Darfur — despite the screaming headlines in newspapers — the world is by every objective measure a safer, more moral and prosperous place than it was two decades ago.

And, oh yeah, America just elected an African American president, opening a hopeful new chapter to the story of race-relations in our society.

So do we have big challenges ahead? Sure. But it helps, I think, to remember that we’ve taken on some pretty awesome fights before…and little by little we’ve made things a lot better.