The Real News

If you read a typical newspaper or watch TV News, you’ll hear a litany of drama. What’s wrong and who’s to blame. So much of it is not even news at all but projection – what might happen if if if. If you listen, you’d be forgiven for thinking the world is going to hell.

The real news is comparatively boring but much better news. The world is getting progressively better for more and more people. Sure, there are some big problems to deal with and some cyclic issues like the economy. But long term trends are largely very good news even if they aren’t noisy and exciting. I’ve compiled the following from several articles, the sources linked below.

“Good news is a child learning a little more each day or a business quietly prospering. We hardly notice it.” “It’s also the nature of progress itself: Good news happens slowly.”

“Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead, and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest rate ever recorded. The death toll inflicted by war and natural disasters is also mercifully low. We are living in a golden age.”

To paraphrase some of the other points:

In 1990, the UN wanted to half the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015. The goal was met well ahead of time. But it took 2 years to find out.

Global inequality is lower now that at any point in modern times.

Crime, especially violent crime, has been going down progressively in North America.

During a time of 6% growth, fossil fuel consumption fell by 4% in the world’s richest economies. Not because of government policies, but due to consumer demand for more efficient goods.

The average life expectancy in Africa reached 55 in 2012. The number dying from AIDS and malaria is dropping markedly.

90 percent of people globally now have access to clean water.

The Peace Research Institute in Oslo says there have been fewer war deaths in the last decade than at any time in the last century.

“In Nigeria, Egypt, and India, mobile technology is expanding entrepreneurship so quickly that small, mobile-tech-heavy businesses make up 38 percent of the gross domestic product.”

From the Millennium Project, “the world is getting richer, healthier, better educated, more peaceful, and better connected, [and] people are living longer.”

What none of the press is talking about is the inside out global development of consciousness. This rise in awareness will bring issues to the surface but will continue to progressively improve the quality of life for the whole world.

As Mahatma Gandhi said: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change toward him. … We need not wait to see what others do.” As one recently put it “there is no me, only we.”

“Bad news will make headlines in 2013. But good news will quietly rule.”

Quotes from the Spectator and Christian Science Monitor