RE: More anti-Trump projections of hatred
When I was just out of high school, I still remember where you could prefer FOX or CNN (or whichever of the big 5) and while there was different biases, you could at least have enough common ground to engage in a discussion of pros and cons of the different positions. Now, sometimes I will read multiple news articles on a single topic; it's to the point where sometimes the different perspectives will be irreconcilable. Someone MUST be lying because not everyone can be telling the truth.
As far as good and evil; in my limited perspective, it's less that the battle of good and evil is more intense. I would say more that, that battle is reaching an end game stage.
On one hand; we are seeing an increase in surveillance, government controls, destruction of family bonds, etc...
Yet, simultaneously, we are seeing more examples of medical breakthroughs, the exposure of corruption world wide, the breakup of pedophilia and other human trafficking rings.
The way I see it is that; whatever the conclusion at this point, either the world will be turned over to good and the corruption that has been around for most of human history will be blocked from regaining the type of control we have seen in the past. Or, if evil takes over, there will never be another opportunity so long as those systems remain intact for good forces to gain enough traction to offset this.
I like the Star Trek analogy; where we are today will either lead humanity into a future that looks like Star Fleet, or a future where our society will be like the Borg.
I remember those days too, different news channels might present stories with different angles, but not as distorted (and lying) as they do now. I also remember a time when newspapers were thought to have a conservative bias.
I am more optimistic. I believe that good and evil in the world has always been closely balanced. New technologies in the form of war weapons seemed likely to tip the balance and change civilizations. Yes, ours are more sophisticated than the longbow or bluderbuss but those were cutting edge weapons of their time.
Where I am cynical is the fact that human nature has not changed in thousands of years. The "Seven Deadly Sins" are still as active now as they ever were. There are good people trying to make the world a better place and bad people who don't care about any of that as long as they get what they want and have no problem taking from those who can't defend themselves.
So in my view we are just going through the continuation of human history and not an end-of-days scenario. And I really want that to be true!
I may have framed this a bit too strongly.... certainly the weaponry exists for an end of days scenario, that's not what I was talking about.
Even in an achievable utopia, there would be no way to rid crime (that wouldn't also rid freedom). That's relatively minor.
What's more dangerous is where criminals form into guilds, then insinuate themselves into government, corrupting things for their benefits; until ultimately their system collapses. That is the story of human civilization.
This is not so much a battle with guns and missiles; more about dismantling the systems of control, that enable and perpetuate the corruption. Which relates to what we are seeing around the world:
(That's before we get into the REALLY nasty stuff that most don't even want to know about)
I don't know what the future will hold, but this past year has been the first time in a long time where I actually felt like the next 5 years look brighter than the past 5 years.