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.<\/p>\n
The thing that struck me was just how much…better things are.<\/p>\n
Yeah, I know, this has been a rough decade, bracketed by 9\/11 and the current economic meltdown.<\/p>\n
We face some big challenges, including global climate change. It doesn’t get much bigger than global.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Here’s another statistic that’s surprising: Since the 1980s, the number and intensity of wars world-wide has plummeted sharply.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And, oh yeah, America just elected an African American president, opening a hopeful new chapter to the story of race-relations in our society.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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