Has all decency left the entire planet?

It’s obviously too late for the person(s) responsible for this but it does increasingly look like educational strategies need to be looked again at with fresh eyes - especially in light of the tremendous changes we have seen in the last 25 years or so.

Social media may well be having a terrible dehumanising effect upon our generation. It’s too early to be certain, but there are plenty of signs already.

A good start might be to ensure that all perpetrators of aggressive violent acts should be made intimately familiar with the feelings and thoughts of their victims (friends and families included).

It’s also a pity that better preventative measures were not put in place. After the Notre Dame fire last year and the 2008 one at Universal Studios, it almost seems as if respect for history is fast becoming an early casualty of all this change.

I’m usually in favour of some iconoclastic behaviour - but this kind of thoughtless idiocy is going too far.

Parenting is easy. In theory.
You just have to get your children from birth to adulthood where they will be able to meet all the various demands for a successful existence.

1 Understand how their environment works
2 How their bodies work
3 How to get enough money to comfortably pay their way in life
4 How relationships work.

and perhaps the most important one,

5 How to assemble a cost effective satisfying Hi-Fi system.

Tricky, to say the least.

*Bear in mind also that it’s a big mistake to rely upon education systems to do the work for you as they usually fail to deliver on most counts.

@schubert , it’s good to hear that Germany has survived Angela Merkel.
Due to recent democratic reform almost 50% of young Britains now enter higher education. 40 years ago it was around 3%.

This increased freedom to advance career prospects through hard work and merit must always be welcomed but you also have to account for an inevitable drop in standards too.

Thankfully the advance of digital archiving means that in future we will be able to easily preserve a facsimile of whatever artefacts of civilization we consider worth preserving.

The fly in this ointment though is that these decisions are usually still left to politicians and accountants.

One thing I’d like to see being done now would be uncut in depth interviews with the leading scientists and thinkers recorded for posterity.

Books, records, films, photos etc can be great but little beats a good face to face interview for historical purposes.

@schubert, "the Hell of colonialism" can often eventually be seen as a good thing.

It takes time of course, often a lot of time. I think I'm still in the minority here in the UK who are truly grateful for the kick up the backsides we received at the hands of both Julius Caesar and William the Bastard (or William the Conqueror as he is also known). 

@schubert , I understand your discomfort but the unfortunate truth is that human beings have been squabbling over resources (land, people, and valuable commodities etc - oil is the current big one now) since day 1.

You only have to look at military spending to see how much this principle holds true today. I mean, ask yourself why does the US spend more on 'defence' than China, Russia, Saudi, India, France, Germany and the UK all combined? 

The map of the world has never stopped changing and the squabbling to change it further is going on right now. Meanwhile the Doomsday Clock inches towards midnight...

Still, no one can figure out how to reverse this inevitable march to catastrophe. Religious conflicts have done nothing to help whatsoever. In fact some belief systems even regard global anhilation as a worthy prophecy awaiting fulfilment. It has been so written, some of them believe. Imagine the consequences if such belief systems ever acquire the means to carry out such actions. Kind of reminds me of that scenario from the 1970 film Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

My own hope is that interplanetary travel will provide us with sorely needed new vistas to conquer and fight over. Shades of 2001 Space Odyssey but only with better software.

It's what we do best.