Are you an optimist or pessimist?

It wasn’t so long ago when there were those exclaiming that the Earth was doomed. Paul Ehrlich’s book “The Population Bomb” (1968) gave England a 50-50 chance of surviving into the 21st century.

The “Global 2000 Report” released by Jimmy Carter was equally bleak, stating that life on Earth was getting worse. These gloomy forecasts were much the same as the alarm over global warming today.

A recent United Nations report, “State of the Future,” concludes, “People around the world are becoming healthier, wealthier, better educated, more peaceful and are living longer.” An odd characteristic of our news media is that they are quick to publicize reports proclaiming gloom and doom and generally ignore optimistic reports such as this one from the United Nations.

Here are a few good news items from the report:

1) Worldwide illiteracy rates have fallen by half since 1970 and are now at 18 percent.

2) More people live in free countries than ever before.

3) There have been dramatic increases in life expectancy.

According to this UN report, the improvement is attributable to capitalism. Free trade is rightly recognized as the engine of global prosperity in recent years. Why are the Democrats today working against free trade?

This does not mean there is not room for improvement. It simply means we need to concentrate on doing positive things instead of criticizing and running around proclaiming “the sky is falling.”

Glen Holzhausen