With the political landscape strewn with the corpses of scandals, hypocrites, failed legislation, and Constitutional and rational crises, what rooom do any of us have for optimism? What makes us think that we are able to competently govern ourselves? Since history has been recorded, government has been a disaster; perhaps the second most destructive and devisive force right behind religion. We preach democracy, freedom of speech, civil liberties, peace, but is the world a fundamentally better place than it was 50 years ago? 150? 1500? Are our leaders better today? Are the world's economic conditions better? Is their peace? Humankind has failed in every aspect of life, and it's time that we all take a look at ourselves and our beliefs and evaluate them based on results.
It's easy to believe that things are always improving. This, after all, is the basic tenet of the widely held belief in evolution. But are we really evolving or devolving as a species? In the twentieth century, our century, yours and mine, more people were killed in war than in all of the rest of human history combined. The Spanish Influenza killed countless millions. Today, one third of the world's population goes to bed bloated from malnutrition and starvation. Where's this progress? Is a cellphone that can play music really progress, or is it just a distraction from what is going on in the world around us?
I'm not a liberal. I'm not a conservative. I'm not a patriot or an anarchist. I'm just a person looking around at his world who has become deeply concerned that civilization is quickly crumbling. And while we argue about the legality of wire-tapping, or the hypocrisy of the Republican party, or the potential dictators we're going to elect in a year and a half (democracy, after all, is just a choice of two dictators), I hope that someone will read this and think about the human landscape. It's a war-torn, disease-plagued, bitterly-contentious field of false dreams. And I, for one, don't see how any human will be able to make a difference.