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Patton Oswalt is an actor and comedian. He wrote the following in the February 09 (the lastest issue) of GQ. I read it a couple of times and liked it so much, I wanted to pass it along. I think it's worth a minute of your time, particularly if you're tired of hearing about the doom and gloom of the American economy and choose instead to be hopeful about our future.
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I think a lot of the problems we've been experiencing come from the fact that no one embraces the miracle and amazement of the present. So many people – steampunks, fundamentalists, hippies, neocons, anti-immigration advocates – feel like there was a better time to live in. They think the present is degraded, faded and drab. That our world has lost some sort of "spark" or "basic value system" that, if you so much as skim history, you'll find was never there. Even during the time of the Greeks, there were masses of people lamenting the passing of some sort of "golden age."
But I'd never go back and live in any other time that teetering on tomorrow; this is the greatest time to be alive. In the face of even more fear than we faced in 2004 -- our banks are collapsing, Al Qaeda has reconstituted itself, the weather's getting scarier and more random by the day -- we chose the smart guy. The fall of 2008 was perfect for the "Scare the Shit out of 'Em" playbook, but we ignored it and strode forward like gunfighters, armed with smarts, engagement, and optimism. It's not that I'm hopeful about any one thing. What makes me hopeful is that the soil we walk on has, for the first time in a long time, been beneficial to hope itself.
