One thing that makes me feel bad

[oakfarm]

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.

 

Comments

[cactus_rs]

Things I tell myself to cheer myself up when I get sucked into the same moods:

Murder rate is harder to fudge, but when it comes to sexual assault, people in Sweden today are more likely to report it than in other countries (and maybe more likely than in Sweden ten, twenty years ago). That's always a statistic that needs a lot of context. If that cheers you up at all...? I'm still awful about following Swedish politics (I know enough to know which parties I'd rather vote for), so I'm no help on that front, but the backlash to Trump in the US is encouraging. A whole new wave of women and minorities and marginalized people are getting in on the ground floor of politics and policy by winning local offices, and paving the way for a more equitable future in the US, at least.

You're the second person I've seen mention Stefan Zweig; I suspect this means I should prioritize his book in my TBR pile.

[oakfarm]

I have not read any Stefan Zweig's beside the self-biography The world of yesterday that I think is too nostalgic. The world before 1914 couldn’t be as good as he remember it. But I have also read another biography by a writer named George Prochnik.