A chorus of calloused, demoralized, fanatic, and selfish voices breaks into song whenever world reforms are proposed. Each one of the world troubles excites the same song, "It cannot be helped!" Imagine the din when the "Song of the Impossible" is sung at one and the same moment for all the major problems of this list to follow. Yet all of these troubles must be addressed at the same time (as they are in fact hopelessly addressed at the present time) if the world is to be tolerable for all of humanity in the 21st Century! This means that a world order, a new United Nations if you will, must be so strongly structured as to address firmly all of these troubles simultaneously.
Armaments huge and useless Atmospheric pollution Brain-drain Child labor and abuse City Rotting and chaos Civil & legal rights unavailable Corruption on large scale Debts abroad unpayable Deforestation Disease: AIDS, trachoma, all epidemics Drug abuse and traffic Ethnic persecution Fisheries depleted and poisoned Fishing fleets antiquated Food, home, shop, air pollution |
Free speech & press blocked Fuel for home and shop Genocide Health services wanting Illiteracy and miseducation Industrial safety wanting Insecticide diseases Malnutrition Money exchanges chaotic Oceanic and polar pollution Oil exhaustion Outer space monopoly & militarizing Political persecution Population explosion |
Public disorder Racism and chauvinism River channel control Soil loss & pollution Sovereignty unbridled Species endangering Telecommunications retarded Transport infrastructure flimsy University education weak Warfare Water shortages &pollution Women under repression Working conditions insufferable |
All of the indicators attached to these forty-three problems are stagnant or declining. The world is not improving or progressing, except for some few people relative to the whole people, and in wasteful practices and life-styles that build up the deceitful Gross World Product index, while actually contributing to the real downturn of all the indicators. The last gasp utterance of the human race could be "The GWP has never been higher!" And such a finale has a short-term probability thousands of times greater than the probability of any Earth-directed comet.