As the New Year unfolds, we will be subjected to a variety of centennials and bicentennials of great events in American history. Looking at this year’s crop of centennials can seem like a depressing event, unless you also look around and realize that we’re no longer mired in these types of grisly events.

 Here’s a sample of the leading centennials America will “celebrate” in 2012:

• 1812 launched a new war with Britain which led to the burning of our Capitol and White House.
• 1862 gave us some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, including Shiloh and Antietam.
• 1912 gave us the sinking of the Titanic and the beginning skirmishes that led to World War I.
• 1962 gave us the Cuban Missile Crisis and the market-killing U.S. Steel Crisis.
• 1987 (25 years ago) gave us the worst one-day market crash in history on October 19.
• And, of course, December 21, 2012 marks the end of the world, according to the Mayan calendar.

Amid all this historical drama – and all the voluntary noise we let into our lives via electronic media – I am going to ask you to listen to today’s silence. As we enter 2012, the first piece of non-news I’ll call to your attention is the relative silence of guns in formerly-hot war zones. America is pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan and some bad guys (Muammar Gaddafi, Osama bin Laden, and Kim Jong-il) are dead.

There will always be wars, sad to say, but the world is a far more peaceful place than it has EVER been.

Silent Trend #1: The World is Gradually Becoming More Peaceful

A dozen years ago, as the new millennium began, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara predicted that three million people would die from wars, on average, each year in the new century. While that’s still theoretically possible, the actual average in the first decade of the new century is only 55,000 deaths per year by wars. That’s less than 2% of the grim death toll that Secretary McNamara predicted.

According to the Peace Research Institute Oslo, the death rate from war is barely half the rate suffered in the relatively peaceful 1990s, less than a third of the average during the 45-year Cold War, and less than 1% of the rate during World War II when 60 million died from war. The 1940 population was 2.3 billion people, meaning that 2.6% of the people on earth died from that war. About 80 years earlier, in the U.S. Civil War, 620,000 of 30 million (about 2.1%) died. An equivalent death toll today from a new U.S. Civil War would be 6.8 million, and World War II deaths are equivalent to 80,000 per DAY today.

Since the end of the Cold War, deaths from war fell 45% each decade. That’s a trend we can live with.

Average Deaths per Year from War

Date Range           Major Event         Annual Death toll
1940-45                World War II        10 million
1946-89                Cold War               180,000
1990-99                Post-Cold War      100,000
2000-10                21^st Century            55,000
Source: Peace Research Institute Oslo

The nature of war has also changed from big national armies fighting each other to smaller guerrilla or terrorist conflicts against “asymmetrical” (i.e., U.S. or U.N.) forces. These conflicts are nasty and brutal, but they won’t end in a world war or a 900-day siege (like Leningrad) or trench war between uniformed foes. The last war between two big armies was in Korea 60 years ago. Today seems violent if you watch the news, but the only reason the world “feels” more violent is because we see it on our iPhones. Our cell phone cameras and “flash mobs” have made every act of violence a viral “hit” on YouTube.

Silent Trend #2: Other Major Causes of Violent Death are Also Declining

The U.S. murder rate hit a 50-year low last year. Homicide has now dropped out of the top 15 causes of death in America. All forms of violent crime were down 6.4% in 2011. The murder rate in Washington D.C. last year was one-third what it was 20 years ago in 1991. Experts are seemingly shocked that U.S. crime rates have declined dramatically since 2008, despite a deep recession and rising jobless rates.

According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Statistics, violent crime rates rose dramatically and consistently from about 1960 to 1990, but then they began a dramatic decline. There are two very good reasons for this welcome trend: (1) Most violent crime is committed by males, age 16-25. The first Baby Boomer turned 16 in 1962 and the last Boomer turned 25 in 1989. The second reason is not so encouraging: (2) U.S. prison population is at an all-time high, so most of the bad guys can only hurt each other, not you.

Traffic fatalities are also falling. In 2010, 32,708 people died from traffic accidents, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. That’s down from a peak of 54,589 in 1972 and the lowest total of deaths since 1949, when our population was less than half of today’s total and miles driven were 85% lower. Today, we drive safer and more fuel-efficient cars on better-designed highways. There is now only one death per 100 million miles driven (vs. 7 in 1949 and 15 in 1935), an all-time low.

Silent Trend #3: New Inventions give us Greater Freedom and Comfort

Let me close by comparing a day in my life 35 years ago with a typical day today. Let’s pick Jimmy Carter’s Inauguration Day, 35 years ago on January 20, 1977. I brewed Folgers instant coffee and turned on my fuzzy antenna-driven TV to three sound-alike news channels (ABC, CBS, and NBC) to hear yesterday’s news. I checked yesterday’s stock prices in the newspaper, then drove my Dodge Dart (or VW bus) to a gas line, drove over clogged freeways in smoggy air to a stark office, playing my 8-track (or cassettes), which spat out or chewed up wobbly music. At work, I typed on an IBM Selectric with a white eraser tape. A long-distance phone call cost $2 a minute and a cross-country flight cost $960.

Today, I brew Starbucks coffee, monitor hundreds of mostly-HDTV satellite or cable channels while writing these words on an instant-edit Word program, using free real-time stock data on the Internet. My car plays CDs without a wobble, while I can access any radio station on earth via my computer, free. Cell-phone calls are also free and my flight to Florida next week costs me only $250.

And those gas lines?  In the last few years, America’s oil imports have fallen 30%, from 12 million barrels per day in 2005 to 8.8 million barrels today, according to the Energy Department. Our secret weapon is that more and more people work from home, avoiding freeway traffic. We also drive more efficient cars, while technology has discovered new ways to extract oil from North American sources.

There will be plenty of bad news in 2012, but the silent good news is also happening. You just need to turn off your iPad (once in a while), listen to the silence, and see that our lives really are better now.

Silently and relentlessly, these trends should fuel a rising stock market over the next year and decade.