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"Find the good and praise it"

The title of this post is a quote from an article entitled " If it ain't broken, it must not be America"  by George Korda in the Knoxville News Sentinel of 1 November 2016. That article suggests things may not be as bad as they seem. We humans do seem to have a proclivity towards pessimistic presentism whereby, when we feel that things are going badly for us (like now in the midst of this appalling US presidential election campaign), we tend to think that our lot is worse than it has been in the past. Clearly this is an over-reaction. In the  previous post  on this blog I suggested that although things do feel pretty rum in the world right now, fear not; we are all probably not going to ruin, provided enough of us stick to our jobs and do our duty undistracted by the whirling noise of potential chaos. Similarly, George Korda in his article quotes his own father as telling him:   “Quit worrying. Times are always desperate.”  And George counsels us to lead by find

"... We'll all be rooned", said Hanrahan, "Before the year is out."

Things sure do look like they're going to ruin on planet Earth at the moment: Russia seems intent on provocatively escalating its saber rattling in the Baltic, Syria and Ukraine. China is aggressively asserting its hegemonic claims in the South China Sea and seems to have incomprehensibly large domestic debt problems. Iran is now actively developing a nuclear warhead capability, unrestrained by the international community.  North Korea is testing nuclear capable ballistic missiles that can reach Japan and beyond. The interminable war with Islamic extremism intensifies yet again. This time its Mosul, Iraq. Aleppo, Syria is being bombed into oblivion in the proxy millennial war between Sunni and Shiite Britain has voted to Brexit.  France is on a path to electing Marine Le Pen. Academia in the West is progressively and inexorably losing whatever slight grip it may have had on reality. Each day we seem to read yet another story of an educational institution abrogating its re