I'm an optimist

I'm an optimist. As strange as that sounds to my friends and family, and even myself at times. This is new.

As a teenager, I watched the McLaughlin Group and ranted about media consolidation.

As a college student, I protested the Iraq War and ranted about the environment.

In my adult life, I loathed partisan politics and ranted about the money that makes it go

I still don't like any of those things.

And there are plenty more like them around us now.

But today, at 39, I find myself in an unfamiliar place.

This lifelong Eeyore is an optimist.

Even in these seemingly dark times, man is destructive and man we are resilient.

The more I learn about our history as a people, as humans, the more I've come to bet on us.

Through war, through famine, through pandemics and strange political and societal seasons, through wild weather and all it brings, I bet on us.

Even though nothing is going back to the way it was.

This faith stems back to a photo I saw in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic a few years back of people during the 1919 pandemic masked at a baseball game.

I thought about the century that followed and what those people would think of our time.

And it reminded me of an old verse from Ecclesiastes.

What has been will be again.

What has been done will be done again.

There's nothing new under the sun.

What do you think?