Hope.

At the last election I decided to vote for hope. I chose to vote for someone with little political experience, almost no experience in running anything because he had a message of hope. He thought things could be made better, and he had ideas that he said he would implement that I agreed would make things better. I didn't know that he would do so, I didn't know if he would win, but I wanted to hope.
Today I read my friend Dade's blog, in which he put on his doomsday hat. While reading Dade's blog is always worthwhile I don't want to really go into his post in detail (although I like it). I want to discuss humanity's fascination with doomsday, the End of it All. I think this fascination has been with us from the beginning of thought, the first myths of most peoples all talk about the Good Old Days when men were gods and people were moral and so on. There's a thought that seems constant throughout history that things are in decline.
This feeling of decline has led to predictions of doomsday throughout history, as you can tell from our present situation, they've all been wrong. Here's a handy-dandy list for some perspective. But when you look at the history of humanity it is largely a story of steady progress in terms of rights, standards of living, longevity, health, education, freedom and peace. Right now is the best ever time to be alive, I truly believe it to be so. Here and here are my reasons for thinking so, and they seem to be good reasons for me. The crises we are facing are far lesser crises than we have faced before, with greater resources with which to face them.
This is The Hopeful Muser, I voted for hope, I choose to hope and I highly recommend it. If you are worried about global warming, do what you can about it and let go of worry. If you are terrified about over-population, don't have kids and support third world education for women and feel good that you are helping. If you are doing what you can then worrying achieves nothing. If you are worrying and not doing anything, then frankly, you are a blowhard. if you aren't worried and aren't doing anything, then you are probably happy.