Gee… I wonder what happened?
The 11th annual Global Peace Index is out. Using a combination of social, economic, and political factors, rates of homicide and terrorism activities, the index is used to judge how peaceful the world’s nations are and ranks them.
So where is the good ‘ol U.S. of A. sitting, this year?
Well, we apparently slipped 11 spots.
We’re now sitting at 114th out of 163 nations, dealing with varying levels of “peace.”
Given the last couple of years worth of Black Lives Matter, election protests, violence and mayhem that tends to show up in major cities (the ones with the strictest gun policies, oddly enough), I’m depressingly unmoved by the notion of being somewhere in the middle of the list, rather than closer to the top.
Of course, it sucks, but we’ve proven quite incapable, as a species, of not doing all we possibly can to ruin ourselves.
To give a better idea of where we are, the U.S. ranks just behind Armenia and Rwanda, and just above El Salvador and China.
“Iceland remains the most peaceful country in the world, a position it has held since 2008. It is joined at the top of the index by New Zealand, Portugal, Austria, and Denmark. There was also very little change at the bottom of the index. Syria remains the least peaceful country in the world, followed by Afghanistan, Iraq, South Sudan, and Yemen,” the report said.
Full disclosure: I know nothing about Iceland and New Zealand is Hobbit-land, right?
Maybe that’s the point. If you’re not hearing about them, it’s because they’ve got nothing going on.
Most U.S. allies are in the top-20 of the index, including Canada, Japan, Australia, Ireland and Germany. The United Kingdom is at No. 41, however.
The index is produced by the Australia-based Institute for Economics and Peace, which figures that the impact of strife worldwide is $14.3 trillion. News is not all bad, though. In a nutshell, the index found that 93 nations became “more peaceful” in the last year, 68 were “less peaceful.”
The hope is that we can do better.
If we don’t quell some of this divisiveness, however, I fear we’ll only slide further away from the elusive goal of “peace.”
You can check out the whole report here.
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