This week has been a pretty uneventful one. Aside from last night's board meeting and subsequent long history lesson with Jason Horsman about our mutual and life-long enemy the CFS, it's been pretty quiet. Work is super super super busy right now, and it's starting to spill over into my personal life. It's not like I have so much stuff to do that I have no time to breathe, but it feels like it and it makes me uncomfortable. With that being said, I am leaving for Mexico in less than a month and there is a lot of Christmas-related things that will take time out of my normal schedule that I've got to keep in mind or else I just might wind up going under.
Aside from seasonal things, I also have some motion pictures to see. If anyone would like to see Matrix 3, please give me a call and we can go and see it together before it leaves theatres. Also, Return of the King is out the week of the 17th, and I am not going to miss that for anything, so get in touch and you can join me!I will be buying tickets soon!
I found this article (from here from here from here) and I just gotta say it really sums up why I not only am I optimistic for the future, but why I think we've made some good moves in the past - both of which are two ideas I'm sure leftist-types don't agree with. The entire text of the article is re-printed below for your reading pleasure:
Refuting the Cynics
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: November 25, 2003The Economist magazine recently observed that in the 40 years following World War II, "America and Europe seemed to be growing more like one another in almost every way that matters." Demographically, economically and politically, the United States and Europe seemed to be converging.
Then, around the middle of the 1980's, the U.S. and Europe started to diverge. The American work ethic shifted, so that the average American now works 350 hours a year - 9 or 10 weeks - longer than the average European.
American fertility rates bottomed out around 1985, and began rising. Native-born American women now have almost two children on average, while the European rate is 1.4 children per woman and falling.
Economically, the comparisons are trickier, but here too there is divergence. The gap between American and European G.D.P. per capita has widened over the past two decades, and at the moment American productivity rates are surging roughly 5 percent a year.
The biggest difference is that over the past two decades the United States has absorbed roughly 20 million immigrants. This influx of people has led, in the short term, to widening inequality and higher welfare costs as the immigrants are absorbed, but it also means that the U.S. will be, through our lifetimes, young, ambitious and energetic.
Working off U.N. and U.S. census data, Bill Frey, the indispensable University of Michigan demographer, projects that in the year 2050 the median age in the United States will be 35. The median age in Europe will be 52. The implications of that are enormous.
As we settle down to the Thanksgiving table in a few days, we might remind ourselves that whatever other problems grip our country, lack of vitality is not one of them. In fact, we may look back on the period beginning in the middle of the 1980's as the Great Rejuvenation. American life has improved in almost every measurable way, and far from regressing toward the mean, the U.S. has become a more exceptional nation.
The drop in crime rates over the past decade is nothing short of a miracle. Teenage pregnancy and abortion rates rose in the early 1970's and 1980's, then leveled off and now are dropping. Child poverty rates have declined since the welfare reform of the mid-1990's. The black poverty rate dropped "to the lowest rate ever recorded," according to a 2002 study by the National Urban League. The barren South Bronx neighborhood that Ronald Reagan visited in 1980 to illustrate urban blight is now a thriving area, with, inevitably, a Starbucks.
The U.S. economy has enjoyed two long booms in the past two decades, interrupted by two shallow recessions, and perhaps now we're at the start of a third boom. More nations have become democratic in the past two decades than at any other time in history.
In his forthcoming book, "The Progress Paradox," Gregg Easterbrook piles on the happy tidings. The air is cleaner. The water is cleaner and we are using less of it. Our homes have doubled in size in a generation and home ownership rates are at an all-time high. There are now fewer highway deaths in the U.S. than in 1970, even though the number of miles driven has shot up by 75 percent.
Obviously, huge problems remain. But the overwhelming weight of the evidence suggests that despite all the ugliness of our politics, this is a well-governed nation. The trends of the past two decades stand as howling refutation of those antipolitical cynics who have become more scathing about government even as the results of our policies have been impressive. The evidence also rebukes those gloomy liberals who for two decades have been predicting that the center-right governance of Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush would lead to disaster.
Most of all, the evidence rebuts the cultural critics of the right and left, who have bemoaned the rise of narcissism, cultural relativism, greed, and on and on. And while many of these critics have made valid points, if you relied on their work you would have a horribly distorted view of the state of this nation.
In his book, Easterbrook seeks to explain why we feel gloomy even as things go well. I would only add that the beginning of political wisdom in times like these is realistic optimism, and the proper emotion at this season is, as always, gratitude.