Are things really that bad?

The previous post was rather gloomy. Sorry about that – because of my job, I spend a lot of time online and large portions of the Internet have become galleries of sociopathy. It scares me.

But then sometimes I talk to actual people in my actual town who are just proceeding as normal and feeling mostly OK about the world and their fellow humans. I recently heard a popular historian/sociologist say that one of the worst things about America today is that “people are afraid of their neighbors,” but that doesn’t seem to be true of my neighborhood.

So if anyone wants to talk me down from prepping-for-a-failed-state mode, I’m open.

And I wasn’t planning to post for the rest of the summer but I do have a translation anecdote to share. More anon.