CS, your positive attitude is refreshing, but I think limited to your own narrow experience.
“Although there is still war today, it is not nationalistic ideal it used to be, but is seen as bad, and only to be used as a last resort.”
Perhaps that is how it is viewed by the US and western countries, but the US is not the whole world. Does not apply to ISIS, Syria, Iran, Russia, N Korea.
“Cooperation is values much more today than competition. The attitude is we all win together instead of winners and losers.”
Sure, that is why Trump needs to impose tariffs, why China steals intellectual property, why Europe was so eager for the sanctions on Iran to end so they could trade there..etc. Ok, maybe there is a new trend in kids’ board games to follow a cooperative rather than competitive model, but the real world has a ways to go to that end.
“families considered poor today have homes, electricity, meat and chicken, fridges and more.”
Yes, in western countries today’s poor have more than the poor of the shtetle in Eastern Europe, but there are plenty of families who don’t have meat and chicken in their fridges, whose electricity get turned off when they don’t pay their bills, not to mention the majority who live in third world countries who don’t have the basics that have become the standard in the west.
“not perfect yet, although there is a general trend of a search for meaning, …”
This is very reassuring to British Jews whose chinuch is threatened by the new liberal norms, by the sweeping moral change in the western countries where wrong has become right, and right is vilified as wrong.
Where anything goes, and those who protest the change in long-accepted status quos are considered evil. if anything, one can argue that we are getting farther from that ideal, and that is davka a sign of mashiach, when the world and its values turn upside-down.
But of course you are right, we are closer to Geula now than we were 100 years ago, just as we were closer 100 years ago than we were 200 years ago.