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Our Inner Skeptic Just Might Save Our Optimism
Our possibilities as a nation of optimists are being derailed by false, unmet, and unchallenged promises
What will tomorrow bring?
The drip, drip, drip of doubt is keeping us awake at night
If we have learned anything over the past three-and-a-half years under the current administration, it is that optimism is fast becoming a rare commodity among those of us who fear for the future of the nation. How reflexive it has become to shake our heads with incredulity as more straws of lies, deceit, and meanness are pilled upon our backs, straining our optimism to the edge of collapse. When we go to bed, how often do we lie there wondering just how bad tomorrow’s headlines will be? And when that morning comes with confirmation of yet another presidential or Congressional blow against our sanity and hope, don’t we wish for just one moment that the barnacles of pessimism that coat the hull of the American ship of state would fall away and let us sail forward with lighter spirits?
I have often written about how tenuous is our grip on democracy, how Lincoln’s mystic chords of memory, no longer swelling the chorus of the union, have been replaced by the bleating brass of this…
