I was at a family event to celebrate Thanksgiving last month, just a few days after the Hamas attack in Israel. People were exchanging greetings of “Happy Thanksgiving” and I was thinking “What is there to be happy about?” Whether you are on one side of this conflict or on the other, sitting on the fence or stuck on both sides, the Middle East situation is another indication that longstanding divisions in our world have not been sorted out and that the cycle of violence in history will just continue “forever.”

Of course, alongside that particular massive conflict, we also have Ukraine and numerous other “smaller” ones around the world — some of them international and others civil — that we hear less about because the news reporters don’t get there to cover them. And then there are the non-conflict issues that face us — a pandemic that won’t entirely go away, the climate change crisis that has literally fueled wildfires, storms and floods, and the growing intolerance and authoritarianism that arises when our human family is under great stress.

Happy, huh? A few years ago, I chaired a panel discussion with speakers from several international aid agencies. At the time, this session was recorded by a videographer and used in education and training programs for people studying international development. One of my questions to the panel was, “Are we making progress in improving the human condition or does our aid and development work just cope with the crisis situations that arise?”

The answer wasn’t simple. If you look at statistics or if you have long experience in Third World countries, you can see that progress is being made. As an example, I traveled in East Africa a few years ago after being away from that region for a decade. I went to eat at a rooftop restaurant at a modern hotel where the clientele in the past had been largely white expatriates and foreign tourists. This time, there were lots of local Black people, evidence that there was a growing, national middle class. I also saw that Western products and modern department stores were more prominent. If that is one measure of progress, then I had found it.