Have you seen the news this Christmas—Who and What Will Save the World?

Here in Australia, we are currently enjoying our annual summer holidays. Most of the country goes on holidays at this time of the year. The traffic in the major cities winds back to that seen in country towns as the population deserts the cities for the coastline and its beaches. It really is quite lovely to see a city’s snarling twisting clogged-up traffic jams relieved and transformed into an orderly progression of relaxed drivers.

It is a lovely time of the year in many ways, but on the other side of things, in part due to the quietness that abounds, it is also notable for the shocking nature of the daily news.

It is said that news producers at this time of the year pray for a natural disaster to give them something to put to air in their news bulletins!

It’s interesting that when the news channels really have to go looking for news, they only seem to come up with bad news. Whether it is a day-light murder in Sydney’s south-west when Michael Clarke was scoring a cricket triple century for Australia just down the road at the Sydney Cricket Ground (just tit for tat violence not a bikey war the police tell us!) or just endless stories of violence, distress and sorrow to a failed bungee cord on the Zambezi river! It just all seemed bad—the news channels couldn’t seem to find any good news stories to run.

It really stands in stark contrast to the hope of Christmas time, which celebrates an amazing human’s birth, a person so perfect he gave his life for his fellow man.

So, while we all strive to be our best, to be as Christ-like as we can, it seems that things are just getting worse and worse. And nobody seems to know what to do about it. So, who and what can save the world.

Are we evolving into a more co-operative peaceful species, as seemingly evidenced by the recent global concern about climate change for example? Or is that really just leading us all up the garden path as well, as surely the problem is not the climate changing, but the humans that caused it? So, will it save the world? I don’t think so, especially if the news over Christmas time is any indication of which direction humanity is heading.

Well, perhaps something that will help save the world is a new book by Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith called ‘The Book of Real Answers to Everything’ with a dedicated chapter called ‘How can we save the world?’. It’s right on point and right on time it would seem.

The book suggests that it is only by dealing with the issue of the dark side of human nature that the world can be saved. That hugging trees and holding hands and humming won’t work—that instead we need to understand where our dark sides came from and by so doing ameliorate it. Now that’s a fresh approach—and I think it might just be a start to save the world!

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