Depressed by the news lately? There's plenty of cause. Health care reform derailed. Afghanistan going badly. Bailed-out bankers bathing in megabucks, again. Joblessness and crime on the rise, education and civility on the decline. Central America's a mess. So is most of Africa. Europe's social fabric is fraying. Asia has typhoons, nasty dictators, nuclear rogue states. Even Antarctica, which you'd think would benefit from being uninhabited, has problems since it's apparently melting. But if you look hard enough there's reason to be perfectly cheerful about the state of old Terra right now. Consider:
At first blush those folks screaming and yelling at health care town halls are mighty depressing. How ignorant, wrong-headed, and just plain imbecilic can people be? Apparently these people think a country that spends more on health care than any other yet ranks thirty-seventh in the WHO rankings, that has more than forty million citizens without any health insurance at all, thirty percent of whose health costs are spent on administration instead of care, and whose medical and insurance industries enjoy obscene profits while millions of households go bankrupt from medical bills, has an excellent system.
They've convinced themselves that the Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security programs they cherish have nothing to do with the federal government they profess to abhor. They believe that their constitutional rights and civil liberties will be infringed by universal medical care. True, they have been manipulated and misled and lied to by a powerful and utterly unscrupulous alliance of corrupt politicians and self-serving industrialists. But these are supposed to be sentient beings after all, with free will, at least rudimentary literacy, and reasoning ability of an order higher than sheep. However degenerate they have become, they are still technically human. There is really no excuse.
But there is some hope for these abject fellow citizens. They seem to travel in organized packs. Many of them are armed with handguns and rifles and assault weapons. A significant percentage of crimes committed with firearms involve offenders and victims who are intimates or at least associates. There is therefore every possibility that many of them will shoot each other in statistically meaningful numbers.