Oh, what’s wrong with the world today?
It used to be that the world was an absolutely awful place. People were starving left and right in all those countries to the South, the hole in the ozone layer was going to kill us all, there was no more oil left, grubby foreigners were going to steal all of our jobs, and the latest Star Wars movie
It used to be that the world was an absolutely awful place. People were starving left and right in all those countries to the South, the hole in the ozone layer was going to kill us all, there was no more oil left, grubby foreigners were going to steal all of our jobs, and the latest Star Wars movie was the biggest tragedy of our generation.
No matter which media outlet you checked, bad news piled up higher than the corpses of all the various species we were forcing into early extinction for fun. Every day there was a new crisis that threatened to destroy us: GMOs, the Y2K bug, El Niño, you name it, we were on the verge of global catastrophe RIGHT NOW, and NOTHING would be spared.
While it was perhaps a ploy to sell more copies of magazines or whatever paper contraption people used to get their news in the pre-internet days, it was actually a rather inspiring state of affairs.
The world was in bad shape, and there was a mighty need for someone to fix it. So much was wrong that every kid could grow up to be a hero. You could discover the next miracle drug and cure AIDS once and forever, or you could help save the rainforest, or you could bring books to crippled orphans in the Middle East. Did you prefer the beach? The Great Coral Reef needed a hand. Like the animals? Pandas have trouble getting it on. More of a people person? Gays aren’t going to stop being persecuted by themselves, you know.
Everywhere you turned, the world was in dire need of someone to save it and bring justice, peace and prosperity. As we were told that we were special little snowflakes, and that in each of us there was the potential for great things, we were presented with a list of dramatic problems that needed fixing. Each of us was a Harry Potter that would save the world, the last hope sent back in time to save us all, the chosen one to save humanity, the saviour that had to save, save, save, everything needed to be saved by the impending doom. Starving children, oppressed minorities, failing crops, dwindling resources, there always someone or something that was just waiting for a great hero.
But at some point the world stopped being the trailer for a disaster movie. The media never really took notice, but reality did. More or less naturally, things have gotten better. Nearly every statistic used to measure our decline shows that we’re really headed in the right direction: the number of people living in extreme poverty has gone down, literacy rates are up, we’re living in the most peaceful time in history, and all of it without a messiah to rise and ordain it.
The date for when we finally run out of oil is being pushed back and back, and we may actually wrap our heads around these newfangled “renewable resources”. After decades of violent rhetoric, Iran’s new president seems like an ok guy, and even the head of the Catholic Church, one of the most reactionary organisations in history, is turning out to be a decent, open-minded person; in both cases it is more of a natural consequence of the gradual change for the better rather than a sudden dramatic shift in mentality. All in all, things are looking up.
Don’t mistake this for complacence. Not everything is good yet, and there’s a lot that needs to be done still; but the situation was dramatically misrepresented, and, even worse, there’s no more need for a single Great Man™ (or Great Woman™) to fix it. The age of the individual is fading fast, and now more than ever it is collective, small efforts that are going to make our problems go away, not the actions of the single. There’s a reason why the gay rights movement exists and is healthy, but doesn’t have the equivalent of a Rosa Parks or a Martin Luther King Jr.: we’ve outgrown the need for an individual to inspire us and lead us, and instead rely on everyone’s contributions.
This is all well and good but unfortunately it means that standing out is next to impossible.
Some of us wanted to end world hunger by creating a giant tomato, dammit, and instead it’s going to be a slow but constant process of more efficient food production, less waste and better management.
Sure, there’s bigots and homophobes and racists in power, but they die and are replaced by more tolerant leaders. Fifty years ago they fought interracial marriages and, having lost that battle, today they have to fight gay marriages: eventually, things will get better.
The last thing that megalomaniacs have got going for them is hoping that the new Star Wars movie is awful and overfilled with lens flare. Maybe there will be a need for a messiah there, to bring to the franchise the salvation it needs.
This universe scarcely needs a saviour, but perhaps the Expanded one does.
