America ain’t all bad: five good reasons to be optimistic

Recently I’ve been writing some fairly gloomy stuff, mostly related to war and international affairs. But even though I’ve been focusing on scary happenings overseas, I’m still very optimistic about the domestic situation here in the United States. So I thought I’d make a little list of trends that we should be happy about.

First, the big picture. 2020 and 2021 were pretty dark years for the US in many ways — not in all ways, but in many. Covid killed a million Americans, there was massive social unrest, violent crime skyrocketed across the nation, and in 2021 inflation soared and real income fell.

There were some good things going on too — Covid relief spending allowed a lot of people to pay down their debts, and the economy rebounded strongly in 2021 — but overall, if you said that 2020-21 were bad years, reasonable people probably wouldn’t contradict you. I still expressed optimism during those years, but more of the “We can fix it” variety rather than the “Things are going great” variety.

Those years, and the years of unrest that preceded them in the late 2010s, cemented a negative mood in the minds of the American people that will take a while to heal. But the healing is underway, because there are a bunch of positive trends going on in the nation right now. Here are a few.

Crime is going down now

Violent crime is a huge problem in America today — in fact, it’s pretty much always a huge problem in America, since this is generally a very violent country. But in the 1990s, 2000s, and early 2010s things were getting steadily less bad.

(Just as a side note, I like to use murder rates as a proxy for overall violent crime — assault, robbery, and rape are subject to underreporting. If there’s a lot of assaults happening,