There Is Hope For The World

I have always had a positive outlook on how things will turn out in the world. I have always had faith that people will come around to the right way in the end. Partially, this is because I grew up in the waning days of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union crumbled as I was making my way through high school. My college years were years of (relative) peace. Of course, radical Islam was on the rise during this period, but today's blog is not about vigilance. It is about the ability of people to come to the right decisions.

Today's sign that things will get better comes from Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez lost his attempt to eliminate his term limit and stay in power for life. Not that I'll ever be a cheerleader for Chavez, but I will give him credit for at least accepting his defeat, rather than just throwing out the election and killing off a few thousand people in taking control. There's still a good chance he will do that in the next four years, but at least it will be as an unabashed dictator instead of a false president.

Russia has a similar situation. In this case, Vladimir Putin won, but the victory was marred by the opposition and international observers screaming foul. Considering how far Russia has come from its old Soviet days, when protests meant a government-paid trip to Siberia, a corrupt democracy is better than nothing

And even in the Middle East, where democracy is promptly shown the bad end of a lot of stones, we have had relatively free elections in Iraq and Afghanistan. As more people gain access to more information and the threats to their lives and freedom are lessened, they tend to respond by spontaneous acts of democracy.

So even when you hear about some half-baked dictator tightening the reigns on his downtrodden populace, the whole world will get to know it. And even when half the world calls the USA an imperialist nation or whatever vomit spews out their collective mouth, at least more and more of those people have their freely elected government doing the America-bashing. And while that's not necessarily a good thing, at least it's free stupidity.