History shaking events

My sister-in-law worte in her blog:

I realize that the two major time markers in my life are awareness of aids and the world trade center yuck. Both are events that stirred up enough fear to change the worlds I touched forever. Try as I might I can't think of anything that is as powerful a force with a positive motivator...

I do try to pay more attention to the positives, and I *do* believe that great events have happenned in my life.

My thoughts run more along the theory that there are only two motivators: fear and love. You have lots of sub-motivators (e.g. greed, agape, need for stability), but they all can really be brought down into these two catagories.

If AIDS made my world afraid of intimacy at its heart and the WTC thing made us afraid of exposure - and thereby freedom - where is the major change that was brought on by a 'love' motivation. You could even say that our child-centered society is often motivated by the love of our children. However, I would argue that much of that motivation is actually from fear of being found out as the not-perfect parent.

I've got a couple other time markers in my life: The JFK assassination (I was too young to be aware of it at the time, but it was a 9/11-magnitude event for the people who do recall it), Watergate, and a few others. The only positive event of this scale in my lifetime was the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Just like on 9/11, every living person who had access to a TV stopped whatever they were doing to watch the live images. They even rolled out TVs at Disneyland and inside Las Vegas casinos. At the time, it seemed that science and technology would be the unifying force that would bring the world together and solve all of mankind’s woes.

Now, 35 years later, science and technology have advanced, but they have failed to improve human nature. "Islamic Extremism" is the new Communism threat used by the forces of hate and fear to encroach on civil liberties and justify wars and fat government contracts for the friends of government officials. But when I look around, there really is a lot of positive energy in the world, but it seems to be very difficult the positive to capture peoples' attention like the negative can.