The Best Things That Happened in 2013 – According to Bill Gates
Although there were a number of disaster and tragedies in 2013, Bill Gates reminds us of some areas where humanity made some progress. For example:
- We got smarter and faster at fighting polio.
- Child mortality went down—again. Half as many children died in 2012 as in 1990.
- The poverty rate went down—again. The poverty rate has dropped by half since 1990
- Rich countries re-committed to saving lives.
- Vaccination programs continue to expand. One new vaccine, Pentavalent is expected to save up to 7 million lives by 202
What’s Out and What’s In: Washington Post’s Annual List
You realize how “out” you are when you hardly recognize what’s in or out. But anyway, scanning the list some good “Outs” include: Hilary 2016, Brussell Sprouts, The Justins. The “Ins” list is totally depressing. “Fancy lady hair for men!” Come on! I think I may sit out 2014.
The end of traditional religion?
We see versions of this article almost every year. Maybe it’s the same journalist who just keeps recycling in different venues for another payday. If not, they all seem to have a fervent desire to see their question mark become an exclamation point!
- The Rise of the Nones. Nearly 20% of Americans listing “none” as their religious affiliation. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 32% are Nones.
- 20% of American Jews consider themselves “Jews of no religion.”
- Religious affiliation appears to be growing more polarized: There are now more fundamentalists, more liberal-to-atheists and fewer mainliners in between.
- Mega-churches are spreading and old-line churches are dwindling. It seems that the center cannot hold.
- Pope Francis tells us he won’t judge gay people, that the church is too obsessed with sexuality and that untrammeled capitalism is immoral.
- LGBT equality movement has caused a striking moderation in views. Over 60% of church-going Catholics in America support same-sex marriage (compared to over 80% of Jews), which is above the national average. Even younger Evangelicals are caving.
The author ends by asking, “Is this the dawning of a new, liberal age, in which America finally starts to look a little more like the rest of the Western world?” You can’t help but sense the disappointment as he reluctantly answers:
Don’t count on it. American religion is nothing if not resilient. It is malleable enough to change with the times, and if anyone ever does declare war on Christmas, they will lose. We remain a weirdly religious country.
There are signs of innovation and renewal, too — forms of religion which focus on the pastoral and the personal, rather than the dogmatic. And these values are timeless. No matter how shopworn and threadbare our religious language sometimes becomes, the mystery and tragedy of human experience still remains — and so religion endures.
The Gender Battlefield in 2013: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
Cathy Young says women made remarkable progress in 2013:
Women claimed leadership at General Motors and Lloyd’s of London, the world’s top insurance market; Angela Merkel was reelected to a third term as German chancellor while widely recognized as Europe’s leader. The Pew Research Center reported that women made up 40 percent of America’s breadwinners in families with children—and nearly 40 percent of those were married mothers with median household incomes of about $80,000 a year.
However, she also says that “the state of feminism in 2013 may have hit a new low, with much of its energy spent on battles that are either trivial or destructive. Between gender-war feminism on the left and old-fashioned sexism on the right, picking the year’s worst in relations between the sexes in easy; picking the best is much harder, but worth the effort.”
This rather “gritty” article turns out to be a fairly balanced look at the best and the worst, the heroes and the villains in the so-called “gender wars.” Glad to see my heroine Margaret Thatcher got an honorable mention. She’s described as “a model of a truly liberated woman who did not conform to traditional or feminist scripts.”
Young closes with a wish for true equality in 2014. “Perhaps the next year will see more calls for a balanced approach that promotes fairness and goodwill toward both sexes. That would make a good, if optimistic, New Year’s resolution.”
An Open Letter to The Wolf of Wall Street
By all accounts, this is one of the most horrific films made in recent times, with almost every sin in the book glamorized and glorified for viewers’ entertainment. It centers upon the lifestyle and exploits of one of Wall Street’s most notorious conmen, Jordan Belfort.
Now the daughters of one of Belfort’s partners in crime has written to Belfort, Martin Scorsese, and Leo DiCaprio, who plays the Wolf, to give them a behind-the-scenes look at the consequences of the sins that they’ve painted in the best possible colors. She says:
You people are dangerous. Your film is a reckless attempt at continuing to pretend that these sorts of schemes are entertaining, even as the country is reeling from yet another round of Wall Street scandals. We want to get lost in what? These phony financiers’ fun sexcapades and coke binges? Come on, we know the truth. This kind of behavior brought America to its knees.
And yet you’re glorifying it — you who call yourselves liberals. You were honored for career excellence and for your cultural influence by the Kennedy Center, Marty. You drive a Honda hybrid, Leo. Did you think about the cultural message you’d be sending when you decided to make this film? You have successfully aligned yourself with an accomplished criminal, a guy who still hasn’t made full restitution to his victims, exacerbating our national obsession with wealth and status and glorifying greed and psychopathic behavior. And don’t even get me started on the incomprehensible way in which your film degrades women, the misogynistic…message you endorse to younger generations of men.