I was just wondering. I see a lot of problems, and sometimes I feel cynical, but I believe that saying that says, “scratch a cynic and you’ll find an idealist.” Back when I was in my twenties, and Reagan was running for election the first time, I spent days working from the morning until well into the night trying to get John Culver elected in his fight against Chuck Grassley. For some reason, Grassley has been returned to Congress every time since that election.
Reagan’s election depressed me terribly, as did Bush the first and second’s. I didn’t think the country could survive them. Obviously, we have survived. We’re worse off than we would have been, but we’re still here. People seem to have a great will to survive, even under the worst conditions. They find a way.
Of course, we’re after more than survival. We want people to have a good quality of life. We want to get people out of poverty.
I’m still hopeful despite all the obstacles there are in the way. I believe people are good, but many of them are misguided. So I have some positive feelings to balance the negative ones.
I asked this question because I’ve seen people who seem to think there are only negative things in the world. Everything is a problem to be solved. I don’t know if I could take it if I believed that.
What I’m talking about is probably related to depression, but different from it. When I was really depressed, I did want to check out, but that was because of personal pain. Seeing only problems is not exactly personal pain of the same sort. Some of it is pain at a distance. Some of it is cynicism about how one relates to people.
I think that being cynical about the well-meaningness of people is different from feeling like you are worthless to the point where you add nothing to world and might as well die. But still, it must be withering to only see problems and never feel any relief; never feel like you’ve improved anything. Even when I was depressed, I believed that problems could be solved. Just not my problems.