People are pessimistic about everything and for good reason. The economy is just a part of it, and because American discourse is so economically deterministic it’s the way they express their overall negative assessment of our day to day life.
When you ask people how they’re personally doing they mostly say they’re hanging in there with a growing number saying it’s getting much tougher to afford the cost of living. That’s because important items like housing, health care, electricity are all going up and wages have stagnated. And the job market is looking grimmer as well.
But I think there’s a lot more to this. The culture at large just feels sick. People are disturbed by what they’re seeing in their leadership, which now behaves as if it’s on a 6th grade playground (when it isn’t indulging in aberrant, criminal behavior and corruption.) While street crime has gone down significantly we now see images every single day of masked secret police brutalizing people, often women and children, on normal residential streets of America. The president is insane, slapping his name and gold filigree all over everything as if he’s the reincarnation of the King George the Mad King even as we “celebrate” the 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence. The mainstream media is disintegrating, our social media is a toxic wasteland and rank bigotry is making a major comeback.
America has been through bad times before, and we will probably pull through in the long run. There are still massive reserves of strength, resources, good will and decency. And there’s a fair chance that we’re going through the worst of it right now and will come out the other side sooner rather than later. (By sooner, I mean at the end of this presidential term from hell.)
Gotta keep hope alive.
Happy Hollandaise, everyone.