One thing that makes me feel bad

Having my formative years in the 1990s means I thought everything was going to get better all the time. Peacefull protests had ended the cold war, had taken down the Berlin wall, and liberated of the Baltic republic, Ukraine, and other states. And all that without a single nuclear armed Pershing II missile was fired. In South Africa the white supremacist regime fell. Even in the Middle East it, for a short time, looked promising. At the same time there was the war in Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda, but things still looked relative good.

 

That was international politics. But good things also happened domestically, in Sweden the murder rate was cut in half between 1989-2012.  Explanations included an older population and economic stability. But now the murder rate is going up, and so is sexual assault. The same pattern is apparently as well seen in the US and in England and Wales (Scotland and North Ireland must have their own statistic), the murder rate was going down, but now it’s going up.
 

Then it comes to international politics I am of course not the first to write this. To mention odd things. On the culture pages they say that Austrian writer Stefan Zweig is rediscover now since our time is similar to his. First a happy period of globalisation and progress until 1914, then a long destructive era. You might I have seen Grand Hotel Budapest, that’s inspired by Stefan Zweig’s writing. (In case you didn't know that.) The title of this entry is selfish, since I’m hardly the one most affected by this, but yes, it all makes me depressed.