Is America's decline hopeless?

That's an honest question that deserves an honest answer.

Reading the news and knowing whether to be optimistic or pessimistic is challenging for me. I am wired to naturally see the positives, but that’s not to say that I don’t see how bleak things appear on the surface sometimes. I just don’t choose to dwell on the negativity, in part because I don’t find pessimism to be very useful.

But what if the “realists” (you know who you are) were right after all? What if my blue sky take on the world is just one huge overreach? What if we really have gone too far as a culture, and there is no hope of climbing back up the long cascade of slippery slopes that America the world has been on since its beginning?

That leaves us with some weighty questions. From where do we derive hope? Circumstances? Nature? Or does hope come from somewhere else? Or more accurately, maybe, someONE else?

This question of hope vs. despair may seem like an inconsequential side question in life at first. I mean, it’s just a matter of how we feel about the world, right? One day …