I am, by nature, an optimist.
By that I do not mean that I emulate Pollyanna. (Do kids still read that in this day and age?) Nor do I agree with Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide that things are all happening for the best in “the best of all possible worlds.”
While I am well aware of the many negative things in this world, I have tended throughout my life to assume that we will muddle along and things will work out more or less all right. There will be suffering and great evils and progress will be uneven, but we will stumble forward.
The election has shaken my optimism to its core. I don’t seem much path for muddling forward after that.
Dave Karpf, a professor of political communication and a very interesting thinker, had some good observations on the day after the election. His thoughts aren’t particularly comforting – “I did not think American Democracy was in any way perfect, but I did believe we were at least better than this” – but they’re in keeping with my own and also not big on trying to fix blame on political decisions.
His focus is the future and his answers are bleak, but he does think the country will eventually come back. He observes, “This will get very bad for a great many people, and many of the effects will be locked in for decades.”
I don’t have decades. I look at the same things he’s writing about and think “this is the rest of my life.”