So it's getting better now?

Each and every year our Prime Minister delivers his or her annual New Year's speech, always broadcast live. In this speech the PM will highlight some of the past year's developments, events and - in particular - the various policies they have successfully carried out.

Last year's version of this annual exercise in verbal recycling was particularly unimpressive. Mr Jens Stoltenberg, as his name is, droned on about how much the world had improved in 2007, as compared to previous years. Never in the history of man, he claimed, had so much been done to e.g. reduce world-wide poverty. Never before had man been in a better position to correct the wrongs, make strides in almost every imaginable field of human activity, and so forth. According to Mr. Stoltenberg, we had every reason to believe that it's all going up and up and up.

Progress is the trend, Utopia is just around the bend?

Much could be said as to just how correct, or wrong, the PM was in his rosy-red assessment of the state of this world. I think I see other trends, too, that should cause some concern over just how brilliantly we are guiding our Global Village in this third millennium.

Kerry Livgren, one of my favourite lyricists, penned a very interesting song in 1984, where he derides the often hollow use of the word progress. Take a look and see which one will get your vote. Is it Mr. Stoltenberg or Mr. Livgren?

PROGRESS, by Kerry Livgren

So they say it's getting better now,
And we're climbing ever higher up the scale
Soon controlling all conceivable solutions,
No one notices that all our efforts fail.

Progress, we are marching backward
Progress, as the captains of our fate
Progress, as we spiral downward
Progress, we defile and we desecrate

Calculating every possible obstruction,
Have to sacrifice a few along the way
Devolution from genetic degradation,
Seperation from Creator brought decay.

Progress, we are marching backward
Progress, as the captains of our fate
Progress, as we spiral downward
Progress, we destroy and we annihilate

Ideologies, moralities are passé,
It's said the concept of religion's obsolete
Something's missing in our picture of the future,
It seems our latest observations' incomplete.

Progress, we are marching backward
Progress, as the captains of our fate
Progress, as we spiral downward
Progress, we entangle and we complicate.