Hope, more growing pains, more emphasis (part two)

Problems; perennial & otherwise

   A therapist once put into perspective the complaints of his charges in recovery, that for all the complaining they now had a better caliber of problem. Problems do not disappear altogether. This could easily serve as a metaphor for our times. It is easy to be nostalgic about times past, until one peels away all the romanticism and is reminded of the inefficiencies, the burdens, the relative ignorance, the diseases, the shortened life spans ... ad infinitum.
   We still have war, and the US has a military complex larger than the rest of the world combined. We have pandemics, seemingly with regularity since the turn of the millennium; SARS, mad cow, avian flu, swine flu. It does not appear that we have cured disease since polio; and that was in the 1950s. Food issues have always been around. At this moment whole species are dying out, which should not be justified even when speaking of an insect. However, we are now to the point where we are speaking of whole fish stocks. Hunger has killed more people than all the wars combined (The Hunger Project, February, 1977). Pressures from every direction question the future of energy. Among all the other implications of how energy has been shifting around the world there are projections for all the known petroleum reserves to end in less than 30 years (McCandless, Key, & Hancock, 2010). Some issues, such as despots, greed and the gap of classes may always be around in some form or another; so much of those dynamics are part of the human condition.
   In addition, consider some new problems. No sooner do we find ourselves at a juncture where the very dynamic of one country's standing armies out-might those of another seeming quaint and ridiculous, then we find someone has reinvented war. Global terrorism seems to have thoroughly changed every aspect and rule of war. Then there are issues such as extreme climate change. There is a floating as well as a submerged garbage dump in the middle of the Pacific as large as the state of Texas, ice sheets breaking off in the Arctic the size of Maryland, volcanoes dormant for hundreds of years coming back to life. “The ozone hole peaked in size on Sept. 13, 2007 reaching a maximum area extent of 9.7 million square miles (24.7Area (million sq. km) ¬ just larger than the size of North America … Approximately 120,000 residents of Punta Arenas, a city in southern Chile, were exposed to very high levels of ultra violet radiation.” (Answers Corporation, 2010). There is likely more, and one more relatively new issue is internet security. Counterfeiting has always been around, by some estimates it accounts for 10% of today's commerce, and passing yourself off as someone else is nothing new, but to be virtually someone else so thoroughly, so completely, identity theft devastates people's lives. Stealing is nothing new, but stealing bits and bytes on the one hand is stealing knowledge, just data, or from a different perspective just ideas. This too lays waste, as groups of boys in Third World countries hurry to the Internet café after school and compete with each other in a sort of game to hack credit card numbers and see who can order the most toys for themselves.