When you look at the "big" picture of our history, it's more of an "ebb and flow" or "rise and fall" instead of any sort of steady decline or "declinism" as it were. You have to look at things as a whole from a decade wide perspective instead of year to year. Under that microscope events look scewed.

I think if you were to graph this, over two hundred years, you would see a normal up and down pattern. Now being no different...