The world is safer now than it ever has been

A friend of mine recently posted this on FaceBook in response to a status about the war and chaos in the Middle East, compounded by the plane being shot down and a variety of other events that make the news one of the most frightening things to watch.  I am a total knowledge geek, product of a father who made me look up anything I asked him about that he did not have ready answer for, so of course I had to check that out for myself.

I did and study after study  - no not Op Ed pages but actual journals and organizations that are legitimate - seem to have been studying world violence trends for years.  Who knew?? After all these people obviously do not have any influence on the news which deals in gore and anger and rarely on this amazing statistic.

How could that be ??  Venezuela is a mess, Libya is a slow burn, Syria is on fire, Iraq has Isis and a host of other problems, the Taliban is doing it's deeds all over Afghanistan,  Palestine and Israel - who cares who started it how about we all go on to who ended it??!!!  We move on to Russia who has a finger in many of the above and a rocket missile launcher that may have crossed into Ukraine to shoot down a plane, full of the civilians including the loss of 100 or more HIV/AIDS specialists.

So the world is safer then ever????? It is but the news is more dangerous.  There is very little reporting done these days on paper, internet or tv.  Most of it falls into op ed masked as reporting or sensationalized kind of like TMZ for politics and conflict.  In that mix there is no room to report that even with all of these events which are horrific in so many ways - the loss of life, the loss of hope, the creation of more hatred between these factions, the rise of fanaticism cloaked in religion, the use of massive amounts of money not for education and improvement of their own people but to aid in the destruction of them along with whoever they are targeting.

How about if the news reminded us that the mother of a child cries when her child is injured or killed on both sides of those rockets, that the rest of us with children applaud the world for being less violent.  If the news took the time to report rather than try and tell us what to think - giving less time to a zealot or a serial killer or a gunman and just the facts without the making those criminals the star - maybe we could focus on what we need to do together instead of what "wrongs" we perceive as done to us.

So for me I choose to tell my children of these conflicts that somewhere a child has been spared but that his parents sleep with one eye open.  I tell them to be kind to others for that kindness is what has led to the overall reduction in violence.  I hope for them that the trend continues and that maybe someone can remind those places that right now are in conflict that the majority of us and the majority of them can do so much more if we listen to the doves of peace rather than the hawks of war.