People: better or worse?

I thought of this when I read your last post about people sucking, and the general idea that things in the world are much worse, not better than they used to be.

First of all I think a lot depends on where you are but generally, in the western world, I find people are much nicer than they used to be. Political correctness is more good than not good, when it means that kids aren't calling each other "retard" and "fag" in the interests of hurting each other's feelings. I think that people are much more sensitive than they used to be to the outsider. The more outside the "norm" you are in school, the more "in" you are these days. These days you can wear anything, and still be accepted. If you wear old clothing, they call it "vintage" and you're still cool.

When I went to school, it was all about the right label on your clothes, and the exact same clothes before they went out of style, and styles used to change every season.

It's now recognized that people aren't cookie cutter shapes and there's a recognition of people's strengths and weaknesses, and people tend to give each other a hand up more, even if that niceness is legislated by the law in such programs as Affirmative Action in the US.

I see more people going out of their way to help people who are poor than they used to, when being poor was just shy of having leprosy, as though people thought you had done something to deserve it.

Going even further back, just 45 years ago, as the speech of Obama's reminded us being the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech, black people in the US were still little better than slaves. And not so far back from that they were slaves.

Back in 1972, the death penalty was abolished in Canada, although the last execution in Canda happened in 1962, a good ten years before it was abolished. And it hasn't been that long either since it wasn't just a a man's "right" to beat his wife whenever he felt like it.

One could argue that there are more serial killers in the world today. I think what has happened is that bad people, have become more bad, while the vast majority of people have become nicer. I don't think people suck at all. I think people are amazing.

Layla