Does Anything Ever Change?

A few weeks ago Mary Blu made a comment that got me thinking: "... as each day goes by I can't help but think that we go further and further from such an idealistic fantasy. I've not given up hope, it's just what I see".

It's an understandable approach to take, in these days when the media is full of negatives and the b.o.f.s repeat their old, old story of how much better everything was in the old days, when they were young. But was it really?

The obvious counter-example is Barack Obama, of course. Not just a black man elected as leader of the historically-racist USA, but also an intelligent and educated black man, in a nation where 'wise guy' has long been a term of abuse. Not to mention that the most credible alternative contender was a woman.

The Big Issue, a magazine sold in the UK (and several other countries now) by homeless people, has just celebrated its eighteenth birthday. Back in 1991, in the last serious recession here, London had its own sub-city of cardboard, inhabited by the homeless. London's shanty town, on the edge of incredible wealth. This current recession, whilst UK homelessness remains a problem, the scale is completely different, and a new Cardboard City is most unlikely. Some other countries have made rather less progress, sadly.

In international relations, the world is in something of a mess, with plenty of well-known hot-spots and potential flash-points. But does anyone seriously reckon that we could be taken to the brink of all-out nuclear destruction today, just because of a few missiles based in Turkey and Cuba? The US has recently cancelled the tension-raising (although non-functioning) Star Wars deployment in Eastern Europe, but even if it had gone ahead, can you imagine it leading to Mutually Assured Destruction? The world may be very troubled these days, but it's no longer quite that stupid.

A generation or so back, in 1974, the first World Food Conference was held. Back then something over one in three people worldwide were malnourished (I can't find my original source for this now, but you can see similar data here). Over the past year or two world malnutrition has risen again, up to around one person in six. It doesn't match the hopes of that first conference, but it is definitely a lot more people fed. According to worldhunger.org:

The world produces enough food to feed everyone. World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase. This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day (FAO 2002, p.9). The principal problem is that many people in the world do not have sufficient land to grow, or income to purchase, enough food. 

There's a lot of fuss being made in recent years about homosexuality and civil rights: the 'right' to marriage (as opposed to a legal equivalent under a different name), and the 'right' to hold any office in any religious group. My use of 'scare quotes' around 'right' in these examples reflects my scepticism on some of this, but it is undoubtedly true that anti-homosexual rhetoric, attitudes and violence remain. Nevertheless, if you compare this to the situation back in the 50's and early 60's, when homosexuality was illegal in Britain and North America, and persecution could be open, things really have moved a long way.

Not everything is getting better, of course. Climate change, in particular, is different. There have been environmental fears for many decades (going back to Malthus, I suppose), but climate change is such a clear and serious problem with definite, and hard to achieve, timescales for action. Another issue is religious intolerance, including anti-religious/secularist intolerance, which seems to be on the rise again (although I'm not really sure where to look for decent data on this).

Overall though, whilst I think we live in a badly messed-up world full of badly messed-up people, I also think that slowly and falteringly there is a renovation job going on. The road to justice and peace is far longer and harder than it should be, but it's still worth the time and effort. It has to be, because otherwise we are left with the despair of the Del Amitri song I opened with:

Nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all
The needle returns to the start of the song
And we all sing along like before
Nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all
Theyll burn down the synagogues at six oclock
And we'll all go along like before