The state of the world is awful

 This is an emotional judgment. I feel things are really bad, and getting worse. The situation is very discouraging.

Most of my blog posts have been from the realm of thinking, and how thinking should often correct our feelings about things.

I have often argued that in many ways, things are better now than they have ever been before in the US, for instance in terms of health care, women's rights, and the availability of knowledge and entertainment to all. They say extreme poverty is overall falling (even though sub-Saharan Africa is an exception). Here's one reference (chosen almost haphazardly) supporting that idea: http://www.fao.org/3/i2280e/i2280e04.pdf.

Those promising facts are background just as climage change is really beginning to show what it has in store for us. I like to think that Covid-19, though a real nuisance, is only a temporary blip. But it is a reminder that if the next pandemic is high-mortality and highly contagious, it is one significant threat to the world order as we know it.

Donald Trump is out of office, but the forces that put him there are still very much alive and well. In the wake of the 2020 election, there were enough Republican elected officials with the backbone to say, "No, sorry, the numbers don't lie, and Trump lost." If he had had another 4 years to work with, it's less clear how things would have developed. And the prospect of him and a successor regaining power for 8 or more years in 2024 is quite real. I have just been reading William Shirer's "Berlin Diary", and am somewhat reassured that Hitler's control of Germany even before the war was much more overt and draconian than anything in the US in the Trump years.

Forces of intolerance and fascism are at large throughout the world.

Prospects in the US of something as simple as a long-overdue $350 billion infrastructure package are still very iffy. The debacle in Afghanistan was due to a non-partisan intelligence failure, and it was going to hurt no matter when the withdrawal happened, but Biden will lose political capital from it. (Could we basically buy the lives of the people we want to protect, by quietly making a certain amount of transitional financial assistance dependent on getting some out and letting the others continue to live in safety?)

The US will continue to see its influence decline. China is a rising power, but so far comparatively benevolent as rising powers go. It seems unlikely this will change the status quo of there being no threats of rich nations fighting full scale wars against each other.

But the emotional truth is that climate change is here for the long run, it is irreversible, and the only question is just how bad it will be. I think we as a species simply lacked the ability to prevent it, which is a dim reflection on our species. Perhaps a conjunction of radical green dictatorships over much of the world could have done something. It would have been highly unlikely, but I can't think of a more realistic scenario.

Aside from climate change, we can imagine all of these things coming and going in the decades and centuries to come. But substituting climate change for assassination, "But other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" rings bitterly true.

I can say comforting things on an intellectual level about every aspect of the world situation except climate change. But all the rest feels bad too.

This comes as I have re-established a level of stability in my personal life. I was forced to move this summer, a lurking possibility for a few years, but landed in a very nice one-bedroom apartment in Watlham (10 Middle Street Court, Apartment 4, Waltham, 02451). It has central A/C, an elevator if I need it, and laundry in-unit. It costs a bit more, but I've decided I can afford it. And above all, all of my medical problems seem to be stable for the moment.

Even so, the world feels awful.