It is a good topic for a thread. Personally, I would prefer to look at it as “Are we better off today…” because the big issues of today are so big that they are affecting us all.
My answer would be “no”, we are much worse off than a year ago. There are at least three major issues that are negatives and a fourth just beginning.
COVID is naturally still in everyone’s minds and has had a huge impact on most people’s lives. It has caused personal sufferings, severe health problems, financial difficulties, and business disruption. It has also resulted in huge additional public borrowings.
The environmental issues are also becoming very serious and causing a lot of damage and disruption around the globe. Whatever the causes of global warming, it is resulting in major destruction in many places as a result of extreme weather conditions, which is also creating huge additional needs for increased public borrowings. It is also causing irreversible changes in our global natural balance resulting in severe changes in the animal and plant kingdoms.
We are witnessing a growing trend in people and authorities trying to maintain a certain level of lifestyle which is not supported by actual economic growth. Rather, it is supported by more and more borrowings on both personal and public levels, and is resulting in record numbers of credit defaults.
The fourth issue has been brewing for some years but is only now starting to break the surface. It is the change from democratic society to dictatorships. Both the US and Europe understandably have no desire at all to risk warfare on their own territory and although they are still extremely mighty military powers, they are desperate to remain defensive and protective in their own territory rather than aggressively place peace at risk.
Unfortunately, that gives other, more aggressively-minded, dictatorships opportunity to exploit this reluctance and expand their own interests. A Russia-China friendship is a deep concern, especially with North Korea as a loose cannon alongside them.
Ukraine is the first major rupture of this change in the global power base and is pushing NATO to its limits of defensive posturing. Practically speaking, NATO is already at war with Russia in that it is supplying weapons to Ukraine. The only thing that makes it technically “non-NATO” is the nationality of the person using those NATO weapons. However, Russia is now already claiming that these weapon shipments are ligitimate military targets.
So what does this mean to us?
At the minimum it means additional economic difficulties as a result of sanctions. These always work both ways and negatively affect both sides. There are likely to be additional inflationary pressures arising from global food shortages such as wheat and vegetable oils and energy supplies.
But at its worst it means escalating warfare into Europe and involving NATO members, which can possibly also lead to wide usage of formidable weapons such as chemical and biological weapons, dirty bombs (conventional bombs filled with radioactive material), tactical nuclear weapons and even strategic nuclear weapons.
So that is how I see our present situation and how it has changed from only one year ago. So I really don’t think we are better off today, maybe some humans are, but not humankind…
That’s just my view…
