Article snippet: Posted at 6:35 pm on June 4, 2017 by Susan Wright 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. 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. 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. Link to the full article to read more