GayandRight

My name is Fred and I am a gay conservative living in Ottawa. This blog supports limited government, the right of the State of Israel to live in peace and security, and tries to expose the threat to us all from cultural relativism, post-modernism, and radical Islam. I am also the founder of the Free Thinking Film Society in Ottawa (www.freethinkingfilms.com)

Friday, October 05, 2007

Gee, even the UN says things are getting better...

There can be no doubt that life is much better now than 30 years ago, much less 50 or 100 years ago...

I'm old enough to recall the days in the late 1960s when people wore those trendy buttons that read: "Stop the Planet I Want to Get Off." And I will never forget that era's "educational" films of what life would be like in the year 2000. Played on clanky 16-millimeter projectors, they showed images of people walking down the streets of Manhattan with masks on, so they could avoid breathing the poison gases our industrial society was spewing.

The future seemed mighty bleak back then, and you merely had to open the newspapers for the latest story confirming how the human species was speeding down a congested highway to extinction. A group of scientists calling themselves the Club of Rome issued a report called "Limits to Growth." It explained that lifeboat Earth had become so weighed down with humans that we were running out of food, minerals, forests, water, energy and just about everything else that we need for survival. Paul Ehrlich's best-selling book "The Population Bomb" (1968) gave England a 50-50 chance of surviving into the 21st century. In 1980, Jimmy Carter released the "Global 2000 Report," which declared that life on Earth was getting worse in every measurable way.

So imagine how shocked I was to learn, officially, that we're not doomed after all. A new United Nations report called "State of the Future" concludes: "People around the world are becoming healthier, wealthier, better educated, more peaceful, more connected, and they are living longer."

2 Comments:

Blogger GDW said...

Heh, and guys like Jimmy Carter were one of the reasons why life was getting worse, to say nothing of the fine contributions made at the time by our own great constitutional warrior from Quebec. Of course it all looked downhill to Brother Jimmy, stuck as he was in the political and economic assumptions inherited from Lyndon Johnson's sixties (i.e, the Great Society and Vietnam-inspired anti-Americanism and pacifism).

There's a warning, too, for all those global warriors/Chicken Littles burning up still more energy carrying on about an impending thermal catastrophe for the planet Earth: these disaster-of-the-week bandwagons come and go and have been doing so for a long time. They're upholding a well-established tradition of tearing one's hair out in public and throwing it in the faces of confused passers-by, but even a conservative would probably concede that that's one tradition that might usefully be thrown into the dustbin of history.

11:54 AM  
Blogger Guelph First said...

the economics of globalization...lifting people outta poverty

12:28 AM  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home