“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” We are presently passing through an era that exemplifies very nearly to perfection the point Charles Dickens was making in this quote from “A Tale of Two Cities.” Prospects for the world in our own day, as was the case in Dickens’ time, exhibit a contrast between the very grim, such as the headline “Attorneys general target sex trafficking,” and the undeniably glorious, as in the headline “WHO: Nigeria’s Ebola outbreak is officially over.”
Denizens of today’s planet Earth must somehow mentally reconcile the fact of a record number of centenarians with the also factual observation that the chasm separating our top most economic sorts from everyone else is about as wide and as deep as it was, or has been, at any time in the past hundred years.
Are things limitlessly terrible, as the pessimists argue, or are they so marvelously in order that humankind never again will find itself compelled to shed a tear? There was no definitive answer in Dickens’ time, and there is none in our own era either. That is our challenge.
Frank W. Goheen
Camas
