2016

A lot happened in the world at large in 2016, and quite a bit of it was bad news.

To review the bad news is easy, and the headlines are full of the negatives and the deaths.

For this post, I will try to mine the news for the positives, sometimes the positives within the bad news.

My first point in this vein, is the news from France.  It was repeatedly hit with terrorist attacks, which is horrible, but the reaction of the government was humane and decent.  In a world where the refugees and immigrants would be singled out to blame, France looked at the facts and reacted to the facts, rather than the emotions.  They refused to close their borders out of fear, and instead looked for other solutions.  I do not know if they will find them, but the government has so far stuck to blaming the individuals responsible rather than the ideological groups.

While the headlines often insist that Christians and Moslems hate each other, vast numbers held hands and protected each other from extremism.  Circles of Christians protected mosques and praying Molsems, and vice versa.  It gives one great hope for the future.

Canada made me proud when it welcomed Syrian refugees, and the fact that the Canadian government is now having problems processing the sheer number of Canadians who want to sponsor Syrian refugee families is something to be extremely proud of.  The number that Canada has thus far taken in is a mere drop in the bucket, but a start is a start, no matter how small.

There are many other countries that are doing all they can to alleve the difficulties of the refugees forced upon them, but it is a strain on already thin resources in that part of the world.  The over all response of the UN has only shown once again how ineffective it is.

But in the middle of all this, the strain we can all feel, the tensions between countries seem to be at a fever pitch and the possibility of global conflict seems to be edging on the near horizon, the fact is that fewer conflicts are currently going on than in most recent history.  Fewer children are dying.  Fewer people are living in poverty.

More people than ever are being educated.  Not just numbers of people, but the percentage of literate people continues to rise.

We appear to be on the cusp of eliminating malaria, yellow fever and dengue fever, by gene engineering.  Instead of eliminating the mosquitoes, as nice as that idea is, we appear to be able to alter them to wipe out their ability to carry the diseases instead.  The lab trials on malaria have been done and look positive, almost unbelievably positive.  If the tests are correct malaria could be wiped out before the end of the decade, with yellow fever and dengue quickly following.

What humans are doing to our own environment in terms of pollution and climate change, whether on a micro or macro scale has become a global problem.  We could well be on the way to the collapse of the ecosphere, but at the same time, we are understanding more and more about the life around us.  That ability to understand how things are working at a micro cosmic level may very well hold the solution to balancing the human dynamic within ecology as a whole.

Who knows what the next year or two will bring and the news headlines seem to scream despair and tragedy await us all.  But at the same time there are breakthroughs in energy and science that seem to give hope.

Our society is still very much dependent on oil, but alternatives seem to be ever closer to allowing us to maintain our energy addiction, while changing it from oil to other sources.  I do hope that change happens soon.

Comments are welcome.