Got to admit, it’s getting better
Again this is just a nugget of a thought, non parsed, ill thought out and under researched. What t’internet was made for! It’s a topic I’ve touched on before a little bit, so you’d think I’d have worked out what I was trying to say, but alas…
A week or two ago we’d some Jehovah’s Witnesses or something come to our door to tell us the good news that the world was going to pot, all we have to do is turn on the news to see what a state the world is in.
That kinda attitude disproportionally annoys me… how can someone claim that the world is getting worse? Bad things happen, but they always have and to say that the world is somehow ‘getting worse’ shows an embarrassingly naive knowledge of history.Never mind world wars, work houses, slavery, plagues… for goodness sake, its only 20-30 years since the world was on the cusp of complete nuclear annihilation… now that the threat of this has somewhat receded, can Mr Witness at least admit that a spate of stabbings on the local Points West news (the example he gave), while tragic, is small bananas… and the very fact that it makes the news, is a positive.
TwoBigYellowCranes (regular commenter) brings to light the tragic case of the man who was killed last week in Belfast, in front of his pregnant wife. I’m not saying that TBYC isn’t right to highlight this, but i remember the days, all too well when this wouldn’t even have got a mention on the local news, because of all the other tribal killings, shootings and punishment beatings. We do ourselves a disservice by not recognising progress. Sometimes the glass IS half full.
Reasons to be cheerful:
Child mortality at record low
Gap between crime rates and fear of crime
UK homicide rates failing (note that the 2000-2003 jump is seen as largely down to better recording)
Life expectancy set to soar
I hear you, it really bugs me sometimes when people go on the ‘daily mail’ esque its all going to pot rant. I’m the first to admit the world is far from perfect but i wonder if some people have ever read any history – the middle ages wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs, some of the ancient empires were pretty horrific.
I must confess Christians are especially guilty of this – some are a little blinkered to the goodness that is around us(which of course we say comes from God), and lament the decline in morals. Sometimes I wonder if these people actually read and understood some of the things going on in some of the cities in New Testament times, never mind the Old Testament would they change their tune?
panic and tut tuting sells papers… the express is worse than the mail these days i think… I suppose every generation’s parents thinks they are in decline (i think) … when its actually just a re-alignment based on humanity’s experince. There’s of course the debate about ‘absolute’ right and wrong… a topic which i’ve unsatisfactorily tried to harvest before on these pages. I guess if you think that it’s a backward step to let women vote or gays go about their business or slavery be abolished, then for you moral decline is real and self evident
Firstly, as someone still relatively new to blogging (under one month) can I just how much I am enjoying questioning others and being questioned by others. Great to be challenged and to try to respond by being challenging.
My original post on this was because the two stories in question were on the local new and I wasn’t really bringing a Norn Iron dimension until I said (maybe by implication) how much better our peaceful society was than ‘the bad old days’. There is no doubt that the darkest of the dark days of the Troubles are long since behind us (indeed, very few people I know can really claim to have really, really suffered first hand during them). I am incredibly thankful for where we are now and where we seem to be going.
HOWEVER, what I was saying is I don’t think we can afford to get swept up by the self-congratulatory feelings that I sense occasionally in NI politics/business. By virtue of being a wee corner in this world, very bad things still happen. In the early hours of this morning, a 23 year old man was stabbed outside a nightclub about five minutes’ (brisk) walk from my office. That is not right and I believe we should be upset/offended/outraged by things like this.
I am a cheerful, optimistic individual generally and most bad things that happen around me tend to wash right over me (far too much). I don’t believe that we are any worse as a generation than any other before us – we just have true worldwide knowledge of what is going on through the media and t’internet. However, the story of the horrendous killing of John Mongan (almost akin to the style of the Shankill Butchers) really shook me up. It made me really stop and think that this is a broken world which we live in (as opposed to just saying it occasionally) and I don’t believe that that is what it was originally. As a Christian, I have to hold my hand up and recognise that all that is wrong in me contributes to the brokenness.
To focus back on Norn Iron, ‘Spotlight’ this week (which I only caught the end of) was a wife swap between a reasonably well-off east Belfast resident and a woman relying on benefits over in the west of the city. It was pretty interesting viewing and, off the back of it, I found the following link:
http://www.niapn.org/PDFs/17thOctfactsheetonPovertyinNINIAPN2007.pdf
Some work for Stormont to be getting on with then.
good response… and i’ll let you have that as the last word.