- I was going to write about the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson and Pat Cippoloni, about the spike in inflation, about the Secret Service wiping its collective cell phones of all texts from January 5 & 6, 2021; about the rise of yet another COVID variant, about Ukraine and Russia, about Iran and Russia, and about Trump teasing for the next two months whether or not he’ll announce whether or not he’s going to run for President again.
- But then I came across a piece in the NY Times by Max Fisher which pointed out that “on many metrics, the world is generally becoming better off.”
- Tim Lambert, writing about poverty in 16th century England, said only “50% of the population could afford to eat meat every day. Below them, he wrote:“about 30% of the population could afford to eat meat between 2 and 6 times a week. They were ‘poor’. The bottom 20% could only eat meat once a week. They were very poor.”
- In 2021 the official definition of poverty is “a family or household of 4 persons living in one of the 48 contiguous states or the District of Columbia, making $31,661.”
- I don’t – couldn’t – live on $31,661 per year or $2,638 per month. That, as it happens, is about what I get from Social Security every month.
- In 2020, about 11 percent of Americans were at or below the poverty level. That was up one full percentage point from 2019 which I put down to another COVID effect.
- But, to my – and Tim Lambert’s – point, 1700s 50 percent poverty; 2000s 11 percent.
- That, if you are not one of the 11 percent, is an improvement.
- Lambert also points out that, while the Ukraine situation is a tragedy, we are not fighting wars in places like Yugoslavia or Iraq, much less Germany and Japan.
- Inflation at >9 percent is unsustainable, but no one told us to buy a three ton SUV that gets 20 miles per gallon and costs $150 to fill.
- Lambert points out that the world is significantly improving but in a “gradual” manner “unfolding over generations.”
- It’s like watching your kids grow. It’s hard to notice the change in height when you see them every day. But when grandma comes in for a visit, she see’s the change immediately.
- The bad news, with which we are bombarded about 27 million times a day, has nothing gradual about it. One second kids are in school studying their 7 times tables. The next second there is a (typically) young man shooting at them.
- “No one, Lambert writes, “notices the wars that don’t happen, the family members who aren’t claimed by disease, and the children who don’t die in infancy.”
- But the Internet and always-on cable news channels make every crisis, everywhere, seem as though they are all happening in our neighborhood.
- And it’s scary as hell.
- Polls which ask Americans if they think the country is going in the right direction or is off on the wrong track are pretty clear. In an Economist/YouGov poll the sample of registered voters was 19% right direction, 74% wrong track.
- Guess whose doorstep this bag o’ bad news is being left? Joe Biden.
- And it shows. According to fivethirtyeight.com, “[Biden’s] approval rating of 39 percent1 is now the worst of any elected president at this point in his presidency since the end of World War II,”
- President Biden isn’t responsible for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In fact, Biden’s work in holding (and growing) the alliance providing aid to Ukraine should be applauded.
- But, in a country in which a large percentage of the population grew up watching every conceivable crime solved by the time the 11 O’clock news came on, an invasion that has lasted five months is, like, forever!
- I know it will be easy to brand me a Pollyanna, ignoring the evils and dangers that befall our neighbors every day.
- I’m not. I recognize the difficulties many of you face and I pray you can overcome them.
- However, I also recognize we should step back every so often not to say “things could be worse” (although that’s true), but say, as Dr. Martin Luther King did, “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
- Amen.
See you next week.
