I do love my morning beach walks.
Between 6 and 7, ride the bike down to the beach, greet the various regulars down there, James collecting bits of glass washed up overnight among the shells, Rob and Luke, taking the dogs for a run, Janet likes a swim before heading off to work. The wildlife is waking, cormorants ducking underwater to get breakfast, a pod of dolphins foraging, seagulls grazing, fish reflecting silver shimmers through the water.
And then there are the Jehovah’s Witness (JW) ladies, Marg and Carol this morning, Friday it will be Sue and Sue. Faithfully spreading the good news that Jesus will be back soon and giving away the Watch Tower and some other magazine telling of the joy of living forever in the warm embrace of ... free to whoever wants one.
On Saturday it may well be Matthew and John. There is another man, but I missed his name, but he takes the lead in discussion. His challenging question is a ‘How bad can it get?’ kind of question as he ruminates about all the evils that beset humanity; famine, wars, pestilence and so forth.
It’s interesting when we ask such a question, it happens to us all at times, we get a bee in the bonnet and swat away madly but it won’t go away, but when we look back, do we compare what we have today with what it was like in which ever yesterday we choose to reflect on, and is our recollection accurate?
Tom Waits shared such a moment in his song Martha, an imagined call to a long lost lover from his youth:
They were days of wine and roses, poetry and prose
And Martha, all I had was you and all you had was me.
There was no tomorrows, we’d packed away our sorrows
And we saved them for a rainy day.
And I remember quiet evenings trembling close to you.
Reflections of a long lost love, of days that were just too perfect for words and the joy of young love seen through the prism of an unhappy marriage perhaps, he alludes it ‘You know that I got married too’. The reflection of the lost love leaves the listener to see that the singer is perhaps not all that happy, wishing he had not made the mistakes which led to him and Martha breaking off, starting new lives apart from each other.
So how bad is it today?
The challenging question from the JW man was to make me aware that the end is coming soon, Jesus will return and all those who believe will be carried off to heaven or something, those left behind will burn in the eternal flames of hell perhaps.
The last time we met, we spoke for almost an hour. I asked him to reflect, as he had asked me to, to compare life today and some distant yesterday.
We talked about the world population, currently 8.2 billion and slowly climbing. Never before have there been quite this many people alive on the earth at any one time. What has caused the population to climb so dramatically? In 1950, just after WWII, the world population was estimated to be around 2.5 billion and has grown about three and a half times in seventy four years. Yet, despite the headlines of war and famine and hatred the average life expectancy of those living today is higher than it has ever been. Life expectancy in 1950 was about 66 years, today it is around 84 years.
If life is so bad today, why are people living longer?
In his book Factfulness, Hans Rosling lists a number of ‘bad’ things that have got better, including infant mortality. The number of deaths before a child reaches 5 years has gone from 44% of child births to 4% in the last 200 years.
The countries where people died from smallpox 200 years ago was about 148, today smallpox is effectively eliminated, no country has reported outbreaks of smallpox since the mid 1970s.
Deaths from disasters is an interesting statistics since when a disaster strikes, such as the floods in Spain, reports indicate that about 200 people have perished. The floods in the Netherlands in 1953 which devastated parts of Holland, Scotland and Belgium reported a total of 2,551 fatalities. The statistic quoted by Rosling is that during the 1930s 971,000 people died in various disasters compared to 72,000 in the most recent decade.
Another interesting statistic is of people dying of hunger, since 1970 that number has dropped from 28% to currently 11% of the world’s population.
He also lists good things which have got better.
Harvests of grain crops since the 1960s have improved both on a per hectare from 1.4 tonne per hectare to 4 tonne, and the amount of land-growing crops has also increased so food is more readily available, immunisation rates for 1-year-olds have increased from 22% in 1980 to currently 88% which has decreased the risks of infant mortality though infectious diseases, cancer survivals increased dramatically, access to potable water and electricity and sewerage has improved as has the rate of literacy.
In the last 20 years, the number of people living in extreme poverty has almost halved.
So how bad has it got?
As political campaigns come on line, and people are fear driven to do something about all the bad things current governments are not addressing, crime becomes a hot topic; in my local Bunnings store this morning there was a display of security and anti-theft products in a special display. Yet, a close examination of available statistics show that crime has decreased in recent years. Could it be because so many homes now have security systems, monitoring cameras surrounding properties, accessible on the mobile phone?
Or could it be that we really are tough on crime, so much so that the prisons are overflowing and we will need to build more, just in case crime goes up again despite our best efforts.
In just about every statistical line we can follow, life has improved for most people. The ones who suffer are primarily those in war zones or those being pushed aside because of ethnic or religious intolerance.
So why is it that there is a perception that things have got so bad, if we believe the doomsayers or my JW friends, worse than it has ever been?
Could it be that we have an inbuilt negativity instinct, that we see people camped by the beach and are suddenly aware of homelessness virtually in our back yard, or that news and social media highlight the issues such as crime, young kids having too much fun late in the evening, that Mrs Jones down the road had a break in last week so crime is out of control.
The housing crisis, the un-affordability of either buying or renting in the major cities and the high interest rates making even the dream of home ownership seem more like a nightmare than a dream which can be realised. And those who express that fear include those who are watching the resale values of their way too large, mortgage-free homes climb to ever increasing peaks.
Or could it be that we have such high expectations of having a perfect life, a life where every whim and fancy is satisfied, that governments are elected into office to make sure that all I need will be on tap, the control of those in my neighbourhood who make noise at night, the young kids bouncing a basketball, throwing hoops after dark in the local park is just too much to handle, call 000, they might get tired of throwing hoops and want to steal something of mine.
Or that should I suffer from type 2 diabetes because I love my sugar fixes and the odd drink of something soothing, that the medical facilities are close at hand to fix me. Surely there is a pill for that. But please don’t tell me I am too self indulgent, that I should be a bit more circumspect regarding what I put into my mouth or that I should walk to the shops, 250 metres down the street instead of driving there. My phone tells me to do 6,000 steps. If it wants that many steps it can do them itself, thanks a lot.
Getting back to my JW friends who seem to smugly suggest that all the problems alluded to, but are in fact far less than they imply, will be resolved when Jesus returns. The first prediction was for 1874 and that the saints would be raptured to heaven in 1878. Alas, the predictions were not accurate, so another guess was 1914, with Charles Taze Russell declaring that the second coming actually occurred but was invisible. But all we got was five years of the most brutal war in history. And again in 1975 the Watch Tower Society predicted that Armageddon would occur in 1975.
Still waiting for that, but we need to be ready!
It appears me that not only are the predictions nothing more than guess work targeted at gullible people who are too afraid of life and want the second coming and the rapture to take them away from the cesspool we live in and an opportunity to smugly preach to unbelievers to repent or face the gloom of eternal hellfire. But then I am an ‘unbeliever’, and as such quite open to allowing others to believe what they believe, and ask that those who believe whatever they believe allow those who do not believe what they believe to be free to believe what they want to believe.
Instead of joining those social media trolls and the fear-mongering press barons to instil the fear of god or faith in political saviours or ‘influencers’ to solve all the perceived ills of our world, to let us know that there is some good news, things are not nearly as bad as they were, and with hard work and compassion from each of us and the leaders we either choose to lead us or those who acquire leadership through other means, fair or foul, things just might get even better.
I live in hope.
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