The Choice

I'm going to let y'all in on a little secret of mine; it's the thing that keeps me going ... keeps me positive ... but above all, keeps me working to, for lack of better cliché, make a difference. It is the idea that no matter how messed up things are, many things have been improving. It's the essential belief that society makes a lot of mistakes, but that people learn and evolve in their sense of humanity.

Take, for instance, the idea that just less than fifty years ago segregation was an accepted aspect of American society. For those individuals who were born after that era, the idea of having a 'black' drinking fountain and a 'white' drinking fountain is absolutely inconceivable. It was just 88 years ago that women were granted the right to vote in this country, and only 55 years before that, people legally owned slaves. Your great or at least great great grandparents lived through that. Our social evolution has seen us change from individuals who kill for gain, to ones who view the act of murder with utter disdain; though I should point out that we still have a ways to go. We continue to kill as punishment for killing—as we justify killing in the ‘just’ wars; perhaps the distinction between people and governments ought to be made in this respect.

Of course I am generalizing to an extent. Many societies--primitive, advanced, and industrialized—have displayed desires to be more humane and tolerant communities, but the social advances of developed nations in the 21st Century are astronomical in comparison to the ways of yesteryear. To use the obvious examples: a black man may be President this year, and a woman may be Vice President. There will be a woman President, and soon there will be a gay President of the United States. And with the revolutionary development of the Internet, people everywhere are connecting and learning about each other and their plights like never before in all known history. The Internet will continue to grow, the world will continue to shrink, and tolerance will spread faster than we are able to conceptualize.

However, we must not constrain ourselves to the promises of tomorrow. A large part of the world does not have the wealth and prosperity that citizens of developed nations have been blessed with. Will Africa ever be able to catch up with the rest of the world? Or will there forever be a continent of suffering masses? Even more important are the negative implications that have come along with our advanced technology--the prime one being the ability to split the atom.

The world is now in a position where one false move and a series of bad decisions will obliterate all that we know. This unfathomable potential for doom is the one thing that could undo all of the progress humanity has made, and will prevent us from ever discovering what kind of people we could have become. Humanity will one day be faced with the choice: we will either continue the traditional route of aggression and nuclear politics, or we will realize that this struggle can be overcome. The day we realize that having enemies (and thereby making enemies) is no longer an acceptable or survivable threat, will be a great day.

How will the world change? What will the status of the traditional nation-states be? How will we fix broken government? Will world government become a reality?

It will likely take a true disaster for us to reach that point…

…but then again, humans have been known to be unpredictable buggers.