Things Might Be Better, But They’re Still Bad [and that’s difficult to accept]

Sometimes people work really hard to improve themselves. It is difficult, and there are setbacks. Let’s take alcohol as an example. A person might drink to a point of drunkenness three times per week, on average. They might recognize this as unhealthy, and they might consider their hangovers to be preventing them from doing what they want to do in life. So they decide to reduce their drinking to only getting drunk once per month. They do pretty well for a while, but then a month comes along where they get drunk four times. They’re tempted to feel like a failure, that they haven’t made any progress at all. You might explain to them that they just had ten months in a row of moderate drinking, and even the bad month was not as bad as it used to be, but it’s hard for them to accept that, especially while they’re currently hungover. 

It’s a common experience for bad things to get better, but still be bad. Instead of feeling that it’s better, it’s common to feel that it’s just bad. It’s hard to recognize things as better when they’re still bad. 

I believe that this concept applies not just to individuals, but to socio-political issues and potential futures we might create or experience. That’s what I want to explore.

Let’s take gun control, for example. The citizens of the United States own a lot of guns. A lot of our fascination with, ownership of, and culture surrounding guns stems from a single sentence: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. That sentence was ratified as an amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1791.  Different states have different laws concerning who can buy a gun, what they need to do in order to do that, the types of guns that are available, and what they’re allowed to do with that gun. In general, though, people are able to get guns in the United States. Currently, there are more civilian guns in the United States than there are civilians. 

Gun ownership and gun use is a constant socio-political debate within the United States. It is a continuous debate, but it usually spikes in intensity immediately after events such as Columbine or Virginia Tech or Geneva County or Fort Hood or Aurora or Sandy Hook or the Washington Navy Yard or San Bernardino or Charleston or Orlando or Las Vegas or Sutherland or Parkland or Santa Fe or Pittsburgh or Thousand Oaks or Virginia Beach or El Paso or Boulder or Buffalo or Uvalde. 

After these events, we discuss whether certain types of guns should be outlawed, whether background checks should be strengthened, whether age requirements should be raised, whether a “good guy” with a machine gun should be stationed at every school, every Walmart, every movie theatre, every place of business, every place in the entire state. The state would be completely patrolled by the police. What’s that called?

Anyway, I do think that a big overhaul of the gun situation in the U.S. could have a significant positive impact. Do I think that it will actually happen? No, but that speaks more to my lack of faith in the U.S. than my desire for things to get better. It could get better, but it probably won’t.

But let’s say it does get better. Let’s say we implement sweeping reforms, including more rigorous background checks, higher age requirements for certain guns, bans on the most deadly guns, better red flagging systems, and a massive gun buyback program, among other things, maybe. I think all of that would limit the access to guns for potentially violent people. It would delay the access to guns for some 18 year-olds, who, by the time they turn 25, may have changed their minds. Overall, a big program like this would reduce the amount of people dying in mass shooting events. 

However, because we have so many guns already, because we have a strong gun culture, because there still may be ways around these measures, we won’t be able to stop mass shootings completely anytime soon. But just like the alcohol example, I believe we can make things significantly better, but not perfect. Therein lies the problem. Let’s say that sweeping gun reform happens, and it reduces mass shooting deaths by 50% over the next ten years [compared to the number from the previous ten years]. That would be a great improvement, but it would be hard to feel that it’s an improvement, especially after mass shootings still occur. When a bunch of high school kids get killed in 2029, let’s say, it’s no comfort to say, “Well, it’s half as many high school kids killed in mass shootings in the 2020’s than it was in the 2010’s.” 

I think almost anyone, if they could reduce the amount of mass shooting deaths in the U.S.A., would do it, but it would still feel as though we just live in a society with mass shootings, plain and simple. People react to the news, not an academic sociology study that shows improvement over the course of a decade. It would be very easy for people to say, “Look, we had all these gun reforms, and we still have mass shootings! Let’s just undo all the reforms!” It’s a perfectionist, fallacious way of thinking, that we should throw away anything that improves society because it doesn’t work completely and perfectly to remove the problem. 

It’s concerning, but it seems more likely that we won’t get significant gun reform at all, and we’ll just live in a mass shooting society for the foreseeable future. 

I feel worried about a similar thing happening with climate change. Climate change is both slow and fast, which is bad. We won’t all boil to death tomorrow, but we also need to act quickly to avoid the worst case scenario of the next century and beyond. Some bad climate change effects are already happening, and human activity right now will create impacts in the future. Climate change, and its negative consequences, cannot be “stopped” completely. Bad things are going to happen. But we can still do a lot to make it not as bad. If we had some huge societal changes with transportation, electricity, agriculture, etc., that would have a positive impact [relative to doing nothing], but we would still have huge hurricanes, floods, droughts, and people dying in heat waves. It’s gonna happen. 

So I’m worried that people in 2035 will say, “Hey, we did all these changes to mitigate climate change, yet we still have people dying in hurricanes and heat waves. I guess it didn’t work, let’s just go back to a completely fossil fuel-run society!” Things are better than they could be, but they’re still bad.

Maybe it’s not the most worthwhile thing to worry about, since we need to get those huge societal changes to happen in the first place. Yeah, I’ll go worry about that now.

I guess the wider point is that I’m trying to be encouraging. It’s hard to improve things that are really bad in your life. It takes time. It’s easy to feel like there’s no progress, even though there is. Sometimes you gotta talk it out with someone, if you can, or write it out. Might help. And I’m here for you too.