A call for proportions, perspective and balance

At the day loud headlines and breaking news report that terrorists perhaps killed 10 people in Germany, 10 people in Germany died in the traffic and 1,000 from diseases.

Where are the headlines that daily report on those one hundred times more often occurring tragedies, every day, all year round?

Where are the headlines to daily warn us for fear and chaos that terrorists are eager to spread while cheering the disproportionately large media coverage that generate more fear and chaos?

Where are the headlines to daily warn us for the politicians and secret services eager to exploit our emotions in order to further reinforce their control over us?

Where are the headlines that daily warn us for oil companies in areas those governments conquer in their artificially created wars?

Where are the headlines that daily warn us for the corporations selling aircraft, shotguns, listening devices and other equipment to governments that they bribe into warfare in the name of fighting terrorism?

Where are the headlines to daily help us keep perspective, see proportions and hold balanced opinions?

Ominous news, worldwide improvements

Disregarding ominous feelings created by regular media, a number of worldwide improvements occur:

• In Europe homicide rates have dramatically decreased over the last millennium.
• In the USA the number of casualties from gun violence is declining over the last twenty years.
• People live much longer worldwide than they did two decades ago, as death rates from infectious diseases and cardiovascular disease have fallen.
• The number of people living below the poverty line declined from nearly 2 billion in 1990 and to less than 1 billion in 2012.
• Casualties from natural disasters declined from an average of 100,000 to 20,000 per year.
• Casualties from warfare are spectacularly declining since 1945.
• Literacy rates all over the world are increasing steadily.
• The number of mobile phone users has gone up to 4.6 billion.

https://ourworldindata.org/homicides/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/03/weve-had-a-massive-decline-in-gun-violence-in-the-united-states-heres-why/
http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview
http://www.healthdata.org/news-release/life-expectancy-increases-globally-death-toll-falls-major-diseases
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/07/natural-disaster-losses-declined-in-2014.html
https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace-after-1945/
http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-highest-literacy-rates-in-the-world.html
http://www.statista.com/statistics/274774/forecast-of-mobile-phone-users-worldwide/

Outer jungle, inner balance: The challenge of postmodernity

Yes, our jobs are less certain than in the past. Messages about climate change, shortages of natural resources, food pollution, improper diets and wifi radition can be disturbing or confusing. Social media and Google bring information that we did not learn from regular media, school teachers and home doctors.

Trade unions, welfare arrangements, retirement funds and customer banks become weaker, unstable or outdated. Migrants, tourists, terrorists, goods, services, economic booms and depressions, money and exchange rates cross national borders like nation states hardly exist anymore and make national governments fairly helpless in coping with excesses.

All this and more, clubbed together under the heading of postmodernization, requires fundamental reorientations for large numbers of people.

We may consider that the certainties many of us are accustomed to, did not always exist. Oh no, not at all. In the human evolution of seven millions years, those certainties arose with agriculture only some 10,000 years ago and became stronger with the modern nation states just a few centuries ago.

That means, the collective certainties that we know exist for only about one-thousandth of the entire period. The other period we managed to survive in other ways and that survival management may still be very much in our DNA.

Perhaps we will revive those capacities and adjust them to present-day conditions.  Like our long gone ancestors we may become constantly alert again, always aware of details in our environment, with all senses and energy frequencies relating to what happens around us. For us, like for our ancestors, and for animals and plants, it will be a matter of life or death again to stay in contact with the environment.

This state of alertness is also called situational awareness. Most of us have lost that capacity as it was not direcly needed for survival anymore. We will have to rediscover it through deliberate efforts of overcoming our resistance against it.

Awareness training in spiritual circles may be rejected as unrealistic, but become seen as plain awareness needed to deal with the reality of growing uncertainties. It helps to regain inner balance in the face of outer dangers and uncertainties like in the old days of jungles and savannas. That opportunity is also the fruit of postmodernity.