This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Last week, I eavesdropped on two women in the grocery store checkout line. It was entirely against my will. I was trapped in line behind them.

The women had babies and wads of coupons. Being young mothers, they were deeply concerned about the evil world in which their children were going to grow up — war, food, disease, fuel, etc. Things were horribly more horrible than any horribleness ever before.

Mom A: "It wasn't this bad when I was little."

Mom B: "I know. It's the worst time in the history of the world."

Note to Mom A: Yes, it was. Note to Mom B: No, it's not.

The world has always been going to hell. If you can remember a time when it hasn't been, it's only because you didn't (or couldn't) pay attention.

"The good old days" are a myth as far as the world is concerned. I was in denial for a while, too. I believed the world went through good times and bad times, that some global eras were markedly better than others. But the world has always been a malevolent place.

Today, terrorism is regarded as a sign that the world is coming apart. The crap in the Middle East is escalating to the point of Armageddon. Energy is running out. Food is expensive and increasingly modified. The weather is viciously unpredictable. What else? Oh, Charlie Sheen is HIV positive.

This sounds exactly like the world my oldest daughter was born into back in the '70s, a time of, well, rampant Middle Eastern slaughter, murderous regimes like Pol Pot in Cambodia, and Chinese tanks running over students in Tiananmen Square. Mother Nature was mad enough to kill millions people with tidal waves, earthquakes and tornadoes.

Like the mothers in the store, I worried, too. The signs of world doom were everywhere — serial killers, IRA bombings, air hijackings, labor strikes, Ebola, disco. What business did I have bringing a child into such a messed-up world? It wasn't like this when I was a kid.

Except that it was. Sixty-plus years ago, I was born to a couple of equally worried parents. I don't remember it, but I can imagine my parents' faces the first time they heard Little Richard screaming "Good Golly, Miss Molly." Hell had to be just half a mile off, right?

The world I was born into had doom written all over the pages of newspapers. Polio, terrorist massacres in Africa, French battling in Indochina, the first successful transsexual surgery, Hugh Hefner's scandalous Playboy, McCarthyism, Soviet tanks crushing all uprisings.

While Moscow announced Russia had the hydrogen bomb, America executed the Rosenbergs for giving them the nuclear secrets. Then we tested our own hydrogen bomb, and kept doing it until we eventually killed more Utahns than we ever did Russians.

The good news is that the world is also a place of enormous beauty. During all of the above, we also managed to eradicate diseases, create beautiful works of art, explore the universe, and keep having children.

It's all well and good to take precautions and be prepared for calamities, but when we look at our children or grandchildren, it shouldn't be through a lens of fear. They're the only beacon of hope for this world.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.