Despite the "Chicken Little" attitude of the old "has been" CBS, NBC, ABC networks, and their nightly news readers, the sky isn't falling, and in fact, things are getting better and better in this country, and thus the world. As a matter of fact we are much better off than the best of earlier predictions and observations regarding our future. Consider this quote from a little over a hundred years ago in the New York Times, dated January 1900, "We step upon the threshold of 1900 . . . facing a brighter dawn of civilization." And now, compare that with the quote, a hundred years later, from Time Magazine, by Walter Isaacson, December 31, 1999, "If you had to describe the century's geopolitics in one sentence, it could be a short one: Free minds and free markets prevailed over fascism and communism." The New York Times was correctly optimistic on New Year's Day, 1900. And Time Magazine, one hundred years later, correctly stated that our system of government overcame Hitler and Stalin's godless and bloody experiments in world domination. And even present day Tom Friedman, the Pulitzer prize winning journalist, since gone lefty-bonkers, wrote in his best-selling book, "The Lexus and the Olive Tree," (New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999) that the goal of people around the world is, "the basic human desire for a better life: a life with more choices as to what to eat, what to wear, where to live, where to travel, how to work, what to read, what to write, and what to learn." What he "forgot" to write was that the United States of America was the ONLY country in the history of the world to have gained those freedoms, for the widespread majority of us, in the past century.

Friedman apparently got the idea of his list, I'm sure unconsciously, from President Roosevelt's "Five Freedoms." Nevertheless, it was, and is, the United States that has spread those freedoms, and democracy, wherever our great country has had a sphere of influence. By the way, Friedman rarely has had an original geopolitical thought, that I can discover from his books and columns, and his accomplice in taking cheap shots at America, Ms. Maureen Dowd (New York Times gossip columnist), apparently takes a heck of a lot of "inspiration" for her pithy comments from the plays of the very late, but always "current," William Shakespeare, who in turn himself rephrased a lot of preexisting "one liners" in his time.

If you're wondering, about now, what I'm getting at, it is that we are better off than we have ever been before, and that Americans have invented more in the past one hundred years than our worldwide ancestors had done in the past 1,000 years! And I would further emphasize that we Americans have shared our inventions and prosperity and faith and economic beliefs with those various countries from whom we came. For example, think about what Adam Smith wrote, in the 1750's, about the condition of Scottish peasants of his time. Smith wrote, "It is not uncommon in the highlands of Scotland for a mother who has borne 20 children not to have 2 alive." ("Wealth of Nations," quote from Heilbronner, "The Worldly Philosophers," New York, Touchstone Press, 1999).

Today, we have liberal "progressive thinkers" encouraging the killing of babies in the womb. Scottish mothers in the 1700's were begging for food for their babies, and now we have mass rallies defending a mother's right to use abortion for birth control. What happened? What happened to the maternal "instinct" in those women that was supposed to have guaranteed that a mother would fight for the life of her child? The same maternal instinct that causes a female gorilla to die battling for her baby? But that's another column.

Let's look instead at what child death rates were one hundred years ago. The death rate of children under the age of 15 has fallen by 95 percent since 1900 in our country, except for infanticide in abortion clinics. Today, children are living at a rate that we can't appreciate until we think about how many babies "routinely" died in "the good old days." And our babies are eating better than ever before, and not just in America. D. Gale Johnson, from the University of Chicago, reports that world famine was dramatically worse in the 19th century, in absolute (not statistical) numbers. That makes deluders of the doomsday "statisticians" of fifty years ago, who were predicting world hunger getting to the point of extinction in parts of Africa in the 20th century. Like many "doomers," (global warming, from auto emissions and cows' flatulence, nuts) they were wrong. Fact is, in the United States, American agriculture is so extraordinarily productive that the challenge in Washington, D.C., is not how to get more production, but how to get farmers to grow less. (D. Grigg, "The World Food Problem," Oxford, U. K., and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993, p. 34)

How about "poverty?" It's been estimated that by today's standards, about half of the U. S. population lived in poverty in the 19th century. For African-Americans (from 1865-1900) about three out of four households were poor, versus about one in four black families today. The biggest reduction in poverty has been for blacks, women, children, and the elderly. A family living at the U. S. poverty level today has an income that is about three times higher than the average per capita income for the world. Most poor (by government standards) American families today own a car, a color television set, a VCR, and a microwave. And they also consume more calories than those in wealthy families! (Sources: "Historical Statistics of the United States," Series G 416-452" and "Statistical Abstract of the United States": 1999, No. 740.) In 2005, we will continue to astound the world, and perhaps make it even more jealous of us. One wonders why the world has such a short memory, and why it seems to forget that we help feed and protect the very people who "hate" us. Nevertheless, we will "keep on keeping on" making life better for ourselves, and for the rest of the propaganda-blinded and ungrateful world.

Finally, one can agree with Paul Johnson who says at the end of his great book ("A History of the American People"), Americans are "the first, best hope of the human race."

Happy New Year, my fellow Americans!

Kenneth Kinchen is an independent writer with a background in international business and foreign service contracting.