We have become not only ugly, but impotent.
Yet, when shown the ideas and proven technologies that can solve the most horrendous problems, most people retreat into implacable passivity. Our time is the first to have the technology and resources to feed, house, educate, and humanely employ every person on earth, no matter what the growth of population. Our post-World War II era is the first in history in which these horrors are completely avoidable. There have certainly been periods in history where mankind has lived through similar kinds of brutishness, but our time is crucially different. Our plastic arts are ugly, our architecture is ugly, our clothes are ugly. Music is everywhere, almost unavoidablebut it does not uplift, nor even tranquilizeit claws at the ears, sometimes spitting out an obscenity. Our children spend as much time sitting in front of television sets as they do in school, watching with glee, scenes of torture and death which might have shocked an audience in the Roman Coliseum. Our own city streets, home to legions of the homeless, are ruled by Dope, Inc., the largest industry in the world, and on those streets Americans now murder each other at a rate not seen since the Dark Ages.Īt the same time, a thousand smaller horrors are so commonplace as to go unnoticed. Most of us have become so inured, that the death of millions from starvation and disease draws from us no more than a sigh, or a murmur of protest.
The people of North America and Western Europe now accept a level of ugliness in their daily lives which is almost without precedent in the history of Western civilization.