While today is certainly a dark day for the US, that paints an inaccurately rosy picture of the past to make us look even worse than we are today.
Our literacy rate has never been higher, belief in evolution is at an all time high, more people have college degrees, and access to accurate information has never been easier. We are in a short-term downswing on many axes, but the long term trends are towards science and education.
You are absolutely correct that we are more polarized than we have been since the Civil War.
22 years of downhill might be short term for a nation but it’s not for people
And yet, without knowing it, ahead of you was the Civil Rights Act, the women's liberation movement, the environmental movement and the Clean Air Act, increased support for interacial relationships, gay rights.
In the midst of that dark time, it would have been hard to believe any of those could be ahead of you. Who knows what could be ahead of us now?
I have elementary age kids and it is fascinating seeing how that generation is growing up. They are so much more community oriented and caring that my generation was. They seem to understand that there are hard problems to be solved and that they won't be solved alone.
I'm filled with sorrow at the world they are inheriting, but I have a lot of optimism that they will do a better job with it than we have.
There's nothing metaphysical about observing that we have imperfect knowledge of the future and some potentialities are positive.
> I've already discounted the idea.
That's a personal choice of attitude and perspective, not an objective property of the universe. You're welcome to it, of course, but it's probably not accomplishing much for you.
> Everything ends eventually.
All the more reason to make the most of it and find the joy we can while it lasts. If it's going to end either way, why obsess about it?
Also, due to having to argue basic shit like the value of a pluralistic educated democracy when we have the physical problem of climate change bearing down and really wanting our attention. I marched for Roe v Wade in 1988 the first time, protested against stupid wars in 1986, helped build what I thought would tie humanity together in an enlighten network of discourse in the 90s as a programmer, had kids in the 2000#, and now back to Roe v Wade. Meanwhile the CO2 is 420 ppm and we haven’t got a damn Mars 100 picked out yet (Sci fi reference there). I want Red Mars with more realistic population distribution, not Parable of the Sower.
Stop educating people on biology (and in the post genome sequencing world), stop women from having reproductive control, stop LGBTQ folks from participating without fear, stop the free thinking people, stop it all in the name of that olde time religion (which itself is mostly a modern nostalgic reconstruction).
Very harmful to our ability to focus and succeed on technological transformation.