I'm a brit, so speaking from the outside. I'm getting sick of this downtalking of everything. People have various fuels, and optimism is one (cautious, realist

I'm a brit, so speaking from the outside. I'm getting sick of this downtalking of everything. People have various fuels, and optimism is one (cautious, realistic, measured optimism, together with appropriate self-belief). This is not reflection, it's putting a hole in that tank to drain it out. It was incompetence that got the US into the mess it is, but if the US is sick, I have full confidence it will get well again. USA'ians putting down the US unrealistically will hurt your country as much as any other factor, draining your confidence - and to be clear, there are sate actors out there who are happy to chip in. This is bad and it's going to get worse. Consider yourself in a war and now try to see how to survive it and contribute to it instead of wallowing in apathy and fear. Of course the faults in the US are there and they are deep and must be acknowledged before they can be fixed, but they will be fixed and the US will be stronger (and just maybe smarter) for it afterwards. Destroy a person's hope is the most effective way of destroying them, and you're doing it to yourselves (with, I'm sure, a little help from others who want the US shrunken). (I'm normally on the negative side of things but watching people sink themselves into blackness over it all isn't realistic, as much as believing that 'hope is enough' or 'god will fix it' isn't realistic).