The World goes Backwards !

"When I was young, everything was better." says my grandfather Rudolph The-Very-Old-Reindeer. Old people are like that, living in the past and refusing to see today's world. He also suffers from arthritis and that makes him grumpy.

When I - Rudolph The-Current-Reindeer – was young, I looked at the world around me and marvelled: Everything I saw was better, newer, greater and the outlook was for many more improvements. I thought - naively - the world was rapidly becoming a better place. As I got older my enthusiasm diminished and by now its definitely gone. On the contrary, today I’m looking at each new 'improvement' with doubt, suspicion, cynicism. And I don't even have arthritis. The gloss has come off. Promises weren’t kept, new things had bad side-effects, or they were of benefit only to a small - often the wrong - minority. Or good things have been withdrawn from the market and replaced with more profitable 'innovations'.

Let me give some examples:- *)

• TV had this great promise – everyone would get a free education, enlightenment, more democracy. The opposite has happened – kids are learning less, democracy seems to be losing ground, people don’t understand the present, let alone learn from the past. What we get instead is a sticky soup of infotainment, advertising and mayhem masquerading as entertainment.
• We thought we had defeated most diseases. But today tuberculosis is coming back, polio, meningitis; plus new ones - HIV, bird flu, super bugs - *) . Why: Misuse of medication, falling immunisation rates, excruciating poverty for many and lack of support from wealthy nations *).
• There are homes in the western world that don’t have a dining table any more. Thats because people are eating in front of the TV. They are eating junk food. And they are eating with their fingers. They are 'too busy' to cook for themselves. Instead, they are getting fat and so do the junk food firms. This has been going on for almost two generations now, so many young people no longer know how to cook. Basic human knowledge that was passed on to every new generation for the last 10,000 years is being lost. And nobody cares.
• We all thought that society would become more and more science-based, technologically advanced, knowledge-embracing, giving humanity a boost like freedom from illness, long life, less work *). Instead, we are seeing growing illiteracy and the emergence of religious fundamentalists (not just Muslims) and their dogmatism. The 'flat-earthers' have decided that not Darwin, but God was right, offering as proof his 'Intelligent Design'. I don’t know why God would need their assertion that he is intelligent.

See, what I mean by 'going backwards'? And remember, I’m just giving a few examples from a very long list. We thought we were contributing to a better world. Not the case. On the contrary, things are getting worse. What kind of world are we leaving behind for our children ?

The World is going Backwards. Please tell me I am wrong. Give me some examples.

Lets try and stop the world going backwards.
Lets try and improve it. Click here for some suggestions.

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*) These are just a couple of examples from a very long list