The 21st Century: an Era of Moral Extremes

It’s such an interesting time to be alive.  The stakes are so high, and there seems to be a greater divide than ever between good and bad.

Good things and people are better than they’ve been before.  We have a humanitarian Pope for the first time in the 1600-year history of the Catholic Church.  We have presidential candidates who are getting real traction with platforms that include climate change mitigation and campaign finance reform.

Unfortunately, the evil things are getting more heinous.  Boko Haram kidnaps schoolgirls by the hundreds, and ISIS beheads Christians.  On the white collar side of things, Volkswagen poisons our air by falsifying emissions tests on 11 million vehicles.  ExxonMobil suppresses solid proof over a 37-year period that burning fossil fuels is causing global warming, while promoting the exact opposite, i.e., climate change denial.  Here’s Bill McKibben explaining why VW is a “flea compared to ExxonMobil’s elephant.”

Can this chasm between real-world good and evil spread even further?  We’ll just have to wait and see.