No. I used to believe we were, I thought every generation the world was becoming more open and fighting for a better tomorrow.

But not anymore, I think the rich has put short term profits over the needs of the world sooo much that it’s placed the majority in a bad situation. And because of that, people can and will only be able to look out for themself first. Because they are in a situation where they have to.

And I think we’ve gone past the point of return, where the future will continue to go negative, whether it be businesses destroying the society for profit, or the destruction of the planet or financial crises and hyper inflation from printing money, or just some outright war.

The majority are so busy trying to put food on the table or get a roof over our head that we can no longer care for the rest of the world.

I’m expecting a repeat od what’s happened in the past, with major changes eventually happening when the working class gets too upset. But I don’t expect that to happen for several more decades.

But with a much hotter climate this time around.

Humanity is so fickle, it’s impossible to tell.

In the US, we went from overwhelming opposition to gay marriage to overwhelming support in less than a decade.

On the other hand, we went from aggressively eradicating CFCs and fixing the ozone hole to dragging our feet on renewable energy for several decades.

Even further back, we went from back-to-back world wars and economic collapse to a tentative global peace and prosperity.

Monarchy seemed inevitable for ages, and then multiple democratic revolutions all sprang up in quick succession.

Equality was fundamental to the Constitution, but we still haven’t healed the wounds of slavery.

There seems to be no telling. Some problems languish for a long time, but then see massive improvements in the blink of an eye. Some obvious fixes lay dormant for an offensively long time.

When I think about this stuff, I get a weird mix of hope and despair and guilt and frustration and impatience.

It seems unfair that we got stuck with these particular crises, with no guarantee that we’re actually prepared to handle them. (Maybe that’s the entire story of humanity.)

And then I remember what Tolkien had to say about such things:

Not for humans. Fascism can be recovered from, but climate change can’t at this point until humans are gone.

Society is already a balancing act. If anything, the balancing will just get harder.