So John Robbins is coming to Tucson in October. He’s someone I’ve had a guarded respect for, a promoter of compassion (always a good thing). But this quote on the flier really bugs the heck out of me:

“We can face the disease and pain of our times and respond with vitality, compassion, and wisdom.”

I mean, he gets points for the Oxford comma, but…oh, where to begin.

I agree with the sentiment, in terms of how to respond to the world. Vitality, compassion, and wisdom are lovely ideas, if a bit hazy. No, it’s that first part that bugs me: “the disease and pain of our times.”

It sound awfully like one of those “we live in a bad, bad time” things. We humans are good at that. Every era, it seems, has felt it was on the precipice of horror and nightmare and burning puppies. You see it in religion — Christianity with its idea that we’re on the downward slide to Armageddon; ditto Islam; the idea of cycles of time in many Eastern traditions, and boy are we in the worst part of the cycle.

Today you hear it with things like this: there’s more war. More disease. We’re sicker. We’re meaner and less wise.

Bull. War is at a low point in human history, and fewer people die because of violence, per capita, than at any point in history, so far as we can tell. We’ve beaten back many diseases and are finding answers to others. Around the world, more people live longer and healthier lives than ever before. There’s no evidence that we’ve gotten meaner and nastier, either.

All those negative ideas come from an inability to really look at the big picture. We are good with one on one stuff, so we see individual exchanges on the internet, say, and decide people are bigger assholes than they were back in the old days. We see cancer on the news and decide that we’re sicker than ever before. We see wars on the news and think we’re in a dangerous spiral of violence unprecedented in human history (really, we’re just better informed about the fewer, and smaller, conflicts that exist now, compared to the past).

There’s certainly disease and pain. There always is. And “our times” have their unique bits of that. But mostly it’s the same old story — good and bad. Opportunity and obstacle. We show wisdom, and we show folly. We show compassion, and we are callous. We are many people, so we are many things. Even individuals are many things.

Pie in the Sky thinking doesn’t help us; neither does Negative Nelly thinking. Things aren’t as bad as they may seem, and they aren’t made better by adding imaginary ills to the list. The solution to our problems rests not only in a careful assessment of our ills, but of our strengths, too. It’s sad that we have such a hard time seeing those.