I think it will be better. I think trump will lose. I’ll graduate in December, I just got married, and we’re going to move out of my in-laws house sometime in the spring trading suburbia for a coastal urban city. I’m going to make new friends and have kids and ask them questions which will prepare them to be good and thoughtful citizens and whatever else they choose to become.

At this point you may, and rightly so, assume that mine are rose tinted glasses. However as a hobbiest student of history I’ve come to the conclusion that the world is always on fire. Humanity tends to have a bias towards bad news, and there is plenty of bad news around, but cynicism only incentivizes inaction. If we want to give the world the best chance for happiness in our time, to honor the legacy of those forebears who strove to build the better world of today, then we have to acknowledge the good.

This doesn’t mean ignoring the bad, or giving up on the better, but we have to immerse ourselves in the electrifying notion that civilization has moved over the past 200+ years gradually, with new and terrible acts of inhumanity along the way, toward better lives for the average human. We have a duty to fight for that trend so that we in our old age can scoff at the perceived slights of our progeny as our parents and elders do now. The disconnect between the generations in some ways can stand as a testament to the progress that has been achieved.

They don’t make cardboard like they used to so I’m going to get off my soap box before it sloughs into a pile of microplastics.