Sustainability — Is Society Making Progress? 

I believe that the world population is gradually making progress in the direction of peace and sustainability.  Huge volumes of resources are coming from literally millions of different sources to address our most pressing problems.  There are now more than 200,000 groups worldwide whose missions are social and environmental justice.  In the end, I feel that sanity will prevail here.

But it’s hard to be confident, given the level of sheer nuttiness that is all around us, and, amazingly, seems more pronounced than it was 30 years ago.  Maybe it’s a reasonable question: what’s behind this extreme behavior?

• Why do people want to carry automatic weapons into toy stores?

• Why the pushback on women’s reproductive rights?  E.g., why does Michael Potter (the CEO of a line of organic foods, not hollow-point bullets) claim that contraception “almost always involves immoral and unnatural practices?”

• And check this out.  What would make people want to protest against environmentalism, and outfit their trucks to spew extra black smoke in the air?  What type of antisocial psychosis does this require?

I don’t have any good answers, but I remain convinced that these are anomalies, and that reason will ultimately prevail.   If you have any feedback that will help me sort this out, I’d love to hear it.