The good news is the bad news is wrong. Everyone – from preachers to politicians to the media – is out to scare you. This is understandable because fear is a great motivator. However, it is not the best motivator – especially when it has no grounding in reality.
And yet we continue to listen… and fear. We have it better than any previous generation on the planet and yet we cower in fear and complain about everything. This book provides a wealth of statistics to prove that – contrary to the apocalyptic prophets of doom and destruction – things are actually getting better all the time.
The authors begin: “The central premise of this book is that there has been more improvement in the human condition in the past 100 years than in all of the previous centuries combined since man first appeared on the earth…. Yet over the course of the 20th century, almost every measure of material human welfare—ranging from health, wealth, nutrition, education, speed of transportation and communications, leisure time, gains for women, minorities, and children to the proliferation of computers and the Internet—has shown wondrous gains for Americans” (1).
Yes, the poor still exist, but what we often fail to recognize is that “[m]ost Americans who are considered ‘poor’ today have routine access to a quality of housing, food, health care, consumer products, entertainment, communications, and transportation that even the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, and the 19th century European princes, with all their wealth, could not have afforded” (6).
The authors believe the three relatively modern inventions have revolutionized human life: (1) Electric power invented in 1873; (2) modern drugs and vaccines; and (3) the microchip.
Two of the many examples the authors put forward to demonstrate how things are getting better include statistics about recreation and housing. In regard to recreation: “Today, the average U.S. household spends about 10 times as much on recreation as it did in 1900 and about 3 times as much as it did in 1950. Americans have 3 times more leisure time over the course of their lifetimes than their great-grandparents did” (9). In regard to housing: “In 1900 less than one in five homes had running water, flush toilets, a vacuum cleaner, or gas or electric heat. As of 1950 fewer than 20 percent of homes had air conditioning, a dishwasher, a dryer, or a microwave oven. Now between 80 and 100 percent have all of these conveniences. The homeownership rate has soared from 40 percent in the first half of the 20th century to more than 85 percent today” (9).
Keep these statistics in mind when preachers, politicians, and reporters seek to scare you into repenting, voting, or viewing. In 1980 the U.S. government issued a report titled Global 2000. Here is the fearful future it predicted: “The year: 2000. The place: Earth, a desolate planet slowly dying of its own accumulating follies. Half the forests are gone; sand dunes spread where fertile lands once lay. Nearly 2 million species of plants, birds, insects, and animals have vanished. Yet man is propagating so fast that his cities have grown as large as his nations of a century before” (20). Though it is obvious that this report was nowhere near the truth, it certainly scared the socks off of its readers in its time.
Could we be recipients of the same fear-mongering? The media is certainly responsible for exaggerating our perception of fear. It rarely reports good news. It focuses on all that is bad. For this reason, few news agencies reported that “there was not a single commercial airline crash out of the hundreds of thousands of commercial flights and billions of air passenger-miles traveled” (22). Think about it: Does the news give an accurate picture of reality, or does it distort reality by highlighting the bad?
Also, keep these statistics in mind when you are tempted to get lost in nostalgia – pretending the past was better than the present. As Jackie Gleason said, “the past remembers better than it lived.” No matter how nostalgic we may be, we must remember that “[t]he objective reality is that for the vast majority of Americans, life on earth was not better in the 1950s than it is today. We are healthier; we live longer; we are richer; we can afford to purchase far more things; we have better jobs at better pay; we have more time and money for recreation, sports, the arts; we have bigger and better homes; we are at much less risk of catastrophic accidents; we breath cleaner air and drink safer water; the list could go on and on” (21).
So quit fretting and start living. Quit complaining and start giving thanks. Quit living in the past and go forward with hope into the future.
For more, check out my summary of Culture of Fear.
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