General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: How fucked up is the USA? [View all]Axelrods_Typewriter
(297 posts)Through my life, I've believed in a dark, depressing world. I was angry, cynical, and nihilistic. Long story short, one day it came to a head. I realised I was really just self-harming, not by cutting or by hitting myself, but with my belief system. I had to do hard work on myself and choose to believe in a bright, hopeful world. To be optimistic even if I had no reason to be and laundry lists of reasons not to be. To believe in the long arc towards justice.
So much of our media, pretty much all of it, is dedicated towards showing the doom and gloom, the extreme cases, the far fringes. I live my everyday life that I've removed most of the media from and encounter very little of it.
I take stock in the Winston Churchill quote "Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else." We've been on the ropes many times in our history, and nearly every decade there has been a truly awful event that could have very well been the end of our country. But we've always come back from the brink, held on, and went on. Even from a full-scale civil war with hundreds of thousands dead. Or from a time when there were blacklists of actors and musicians who were censored because of the opinion of a congressional committee. Or from a decade where we had two towers knocked down by jetliners in the first half and a huge recession in the second.
We're still a young country. We're going through growing pains now, moving out of "adolescence" and into adulthood. We've kicked the can down the road in the past with some problems, and other problems are new. But instead of continuing to kick the can down the road, we're beginning to tackle these problems and get things done that should have been done decades ago. That alone is cause for hope.
Edit history
![](du4img/smicon-reply-new.gif)