Big Left seems to thrive on misery.\u00a0 They seem to love to cling to the notion that things have never been worse, in the nation or the world (or at least they do when there’s no Democrat in the White House).<\/p>\n
For example – ask a typical liberal, and they’ll say that “gun violence” is at an all time high.\u00a0 It’s not – nationwide, it’s at sixty-year lows, and even in Democrat-controlled major cities it’s lower than it was 25 years ago.\u00a0 And yet if you ask a “progressive” what’s going on in the world, they’ll to a person insist “violent crime is out of control”.<\/p>\n
And that’s not the only area.<\/p>\n
I mentioned the other day the church service I went to on Christmas Eve<\/a>, featuring a homily that made it sound like the world was teetering on the the brink of collapse – notwithstanding the fact that, for most of the world, things have never been better.<\/p>\n Don’t get me wrong – the human condition is an ugly thing.\u00a0 I’m of Scandinavian descent, so optimism and pollyannaism don’t come naturally.\u00a0 \u00a0And the arc of the universe, while long, curves inexorably toward tyranny and barbarism.\u00a0 It could all go south someday.\u00a0 And there certainly\u00a0 are wars going on, refugees in camps, pockets of malnutrition.<\/p>\n But for now, for most of the world’s people, things have never been better. As evidence, I submit this:\u00a0 \u00a0for the first time in the history of humanity, obesity is a bigger problem than malnutrition, as reported by those noted conservative crazies in\u00a0The Lancet<\/em><\/a>, in this case via both CNN<\/a> and an actual news organization<\/a> (which notes that obesity kills three times as many people\u00a0worldwide\u00a0<\/em>as malnutrition).<\/p>\n