'You do know, right, that the world is getting better'

News headlines of heartbreaking tragedies, violence and wars, glaring injustices, poverty and inequality leave little hope for optimism. Joe Schlesinger, a longtime and well-respected CBC foreign correspondent, writes, "You do know, right, that the world is getting better."

His glass-half-full analysis is not a Pollyanna type of optimism. He does not ignore the existing suffering in our world while he identifies the progress that has been made and is being made. His essay takes a brief trip around the world and through time to show that by "almost any measure -- life expectancy, literacy, global nutrition, war deaths -- the trend line is up."

He writes:

With mankind having overcome so many enormous obstacles over the millennia to get this far, there is good reason to expect that we and future generations will also find ways of continuing to make life on this planet ever better.