By Adelina Gonzalez, Staff Writer
As we sit here waiting to graduate, a realization hit me hard. The older I get, the scarier the outside world seems to me.
The news is constantly bombarding us with negativity. There is always a famine, flood or civil war going on, and every day it seems like we are on the brink of World War III. But is the current world really as dark and as menacing as the media makes it out to be?
Truly, I don’t believe it is.
According to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations 2017 annual letter, there are many things in the world to feel hopeful about.
When people think of a world fallen, they often first think of the welfare and lives of the world’s children. According to the United Nations, 122 million children’s lives have been saved since 1990. The trend since 1990 shows deaths of children under age 5 have been cut nearly in half.
The letter also details global vaccination coverage at its highest rate, with 86 percent, the highest percentage in history. The gap between the richest and poorest countries is at an all time low and vaccines are a big contributing factor to the drop in childhood mortality.
These milestones are great! However, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation letter only addresses the improving state of the health of children in impoverished countries. I assure you though, the world is getting better for us old folk just as much.
According to ourworldindata.org, data shows that the world’s literacy rate over the last two centuries has gone from only an elite reading population to a population where 8 out of 10 people can now read and write.
Even though, when we look at the news and see anything political, we tend to groan with agonizing disappointment. We forget to take a look at the parts of the world where political freedom has made phenomenal progress.
Freedom is surprisingly difficult to measure, just because a country claims it is free doesn’t mean it is. The graph I looked at from “Our World Data Group” used democracy as “the least problematic of the measures that present a long time perspective.” The graph indicated that in the 19th century most people lived is autocratically ruled countries. Today more than half of the global population lives in a democracy.
All of these wonderful improvements so far were made possible by education being more widely available and reformed. By 2020, post secondary education will be available to about 8 billion people worldwide.
I understand that as we Hawks leave the nest, both our home nest and our high school bubbles, the outside world can appear to be both frightening and troubling. But it is important to remember that there is always a bright side.
We are the change that the world needs us to be, and with brains like ours, the world is only going to keep getting better.