My husband brought this up in response to my reading him a report from the NY Times about how maternal deaths have dramatically declined in the last 30 years due to better nutrition, more education for women, more health care providers, etc. (My rationale: If wars, famine, pestilence, etc. are worse now than ever before, how come the rate of women dying in childbirth or from related causes has declined in half, even as the total population has nearly doubled?). Check it out here.
He pointed out how there have been all these earthquakes in the last few months. "But wait," I said. "If Jesus' prophecy about the last days is true and the last days started in 1914, then we should see heightened earthquake activity consistently since that time, not just popping up 95 years later. So even if the last few months are an anomaly (and there's no evidence that they are), it still wouldn't fulfill the prophecy." Smart, huh?
IMHO, the prolonging of the "time of the end" to nearly a century is creating a huge problem for sustaining the idea that "times are worse now than ever before" simply because the impact of the traditional "proofs" like the Spanish Flu, WWI and WWII are becoming increasing diluted as they retreat into the past. Witnesses like to point to environmental devestation as proof, which is a growth problem, but the bald fact is that Jesus said nada about that and the only scrip they can use is Rev. 11:18 which only tangentally can be made to refer to it, and, in fact, if you have them follow the marginal reference, actually refers to ruining the earth with violence.