Robert Heinlein once said something like “If you think that things are worse now than ever before in human history, you haven’t read enough history.”
Actually, I think what he said was “If you think death is the worst possible thing that can happen, you haven’t read enough history” but that doesn’t fit the blog I want to write, so I changed his quote. He’s dead, he won’t object.
My favorite Heinlein story was "The Man Who Sold The Moon."
Really, there are wars all over the world, starvation in Somalia, horrible abuses of women throughout the Islamist nations, economic hard times throughout the developed world and the threat of an actual corporate takeover of the United States, but it’s still nowhere near as evil as the world of 1940. It’s not as bad as the times of slavery and the brutal war that ended it. It’s not as bad as the times of the plague, the reign of terror in France, the Spanish Inquisition, the anarchy that followed the collapse of Rome, it’s not as bad as Roman times were for everybody except the Romans.
We not only have a pretty nice standard of living in the developed world, we have electricity, automobiles, airplanes, movies, computers and all sorts of cool stuff. When I look around me and see how incredibly stupid most people are (I believe it was George Carlin who said “Think of how stupid the average person is, and then remember that 50% of the people are even dumber than that”), I am rather amazed that we’ve gotten as far as we have.
But we have. And no matter how many ignorant tea baggers continue voting for Republicans, no matter how many completely unnecessary wars get started, people are still working on space elevators, and portable desalination devices, and robots, and alternative energy, and better artificial organs and limbs, and mag-lev trains and flying cars. Some day, we will have all these things.
We will still have fools among us, no doubt, but life will continue to get better. If we survive.
www.gurukalehuru.com 
Which brings me to a pet peeve: we need to stop interfering with Natural Selection and let Nature weed out these stupid people as intended. In fact, the more we artificially keep people alive that would otherwise end up as a link in the food chain, the more “drag” we accumulate as a species, preventing or at least slowing our advancement.
I say we introduce wolves, and maybe velociraptors into DC.
It’s a problem, to be sure, but you’re likely to run into objections of a humanitarian nature when you refer to technically human specimens as “links in the food chain.”
I would like to see a minimal intelligence requirement for parenthood but, you know, you just can’t stop people from fucking.