I disagree. The US has an American president who happens to have a really good permanent suntan. The actual genetic mix is inconsequential.
I detest separating people out specifically by accident of birth. You are American, or you are from another country here on visa, green card or illegally. An African-American would have dual citizenship of US and some country found on the continent of Africa. Our president is American, born in Hawaii.
As a 20 year old you’re real short on perspective.
All the insurmountable problems that were going to end the world shortly after I graduated from high school … haven’t ended the world yet, 30+ years later. Some have been fully solved, some shrank to insignificance, and some are still out there hovering in the future. Maybe they’ve gotten a bit closer, maybe they’ve receded; it’s hard to say. At your age, a lot of things seem pretty inevitable. Here’s a hint: Almost nothing is inevitable; stuff always changes and almost always in ways that are unpredicted.
The key thing to understand is that the professional media and the politicians and the pundits are all trying to make a living by making you worried and stressed. It’s their job. Without your stress, their revenue dries up.
Your job is ignore them. Understand they’re selling a house-sized snowball of exaggeration wrapped around a pea-sized grain of truth. If you insist, do the real research to identify a pea of truth you care especially and dedicate some real actual effort to fixing that pea.
But hand-wringing over the big-ol-house-o-exaggeration is both stupid and pointless. Real common and easy to do, and all but the most shallow amongst us did it / does it at your age. So it’s nothing to be ashamed or defensive about. But it is a bad habit you should work to get over.
This is good. You recognize that what you feel now is temporary. As you grow older you will get used to having these feelings, and like all the rest of us, you’ll put one foot in front of the other and make your way through the day. Even those who are unaware of the dismal state of reality are the same as the rest of us. We wake up each day and join the struggle to stay alive so that we may wake the next day. Welcome to the club.
No it’s not. When I was younger and finally started paying attention to the world around me, I thought the same as you. At my first job the boss always listened to talk radio. I could turn every news story into The End Of The World.
But eventually it all started sounding like the same old bullshit that it was. I’ve lived through times of war and peace, recessions and booms. It’s cyclical - it always gets better.
**humanafterall **go out in the rain and enjoy it. Remember this because it is true, one day you will look back on these times and regret wasting time fretting over trumped up news stories. Everything will be fine. The world will go on.
I cringe every time someone make the claim that journalism is more slanted (left / right / whatever) today vrs 20, 30 or 100 years ago. My experience is that the mainstream sources of news, especially with regards to larger issues such as politics and the like, have always slanted the way they do. It’s the progressive nature of journalists.
The difference is that nowadays there are so many more outlets for so many more voices to be heard, it highlights the biases that have long existed. It’s hard to compare & contrast journalism styles when there are few choices, aka 20 or 30 years ago.
And for the record I work in mainstream journalism.
Well said. 
Whenever I feel the news is getting me too depressed, I stop watching it. I look at my own life, my own family. I take a walk outside. Immediately I start to feel better.
And, as people have said, the news isn’t even all that bad.
Yesterday will be different.
Because we will say it’s all in the past.
If it’s all BS, there’s no reason to stress out about it.
The streets of New York were full of people partying last night. There were no riots. The passage of the bill was a joyous event.
yes this,
This? Meh, this is nothing! The Sixties, the Sixties were depressing. Race riots, pollution, political assassination (more riots) the draft, the Beach Boys were serious music.
Then came Disco.
Kids today, thinking things are depressing. Get off my lawn! I am going inside to take a nap.
Yes, it IS all BS. It always has been and always will be BS.
Living is learning to wade through BS. They probably didn’t tell you that in school.
Now you know. That’s a pretty good start, and a lot of people don’t even get that far. They are told the most of the BS is actually made of rose petals, and whatever BS remains will be changed to rose petals real soon, and they believe it.
BS is in and of itself BS, and even that is BS.
What helps me is to remember that if it makes the news, it’s because it’s UNUSUAL, not because it’s normal. You will never see the headline, “583 children walked home from school today, arrived safely.” Because it’s the norm, it’s just not that interesting. But you might see the headline, “Girl walked home from school today, was attacked by dog.”
So if you just read the paper and get your sense of what happens in the world that way, you might think that children who walk home from school are likely to get bitten by dogs, but that is just because you don’t hear about all the ones who don’t.
So remember, if you read about it in the paper, it’s UNUSUAL!
OMFG! It’s not like you are trying eke out a living on the African savannah 150K years ago. It’s not like you have to hunt mastodons during an ice age. It’s not like you are a Roman slave. It’s not like you are stuck in a hamlet during the Black Plague. It’s not like you are next in line for the gas chamber at Auschwitz. It’s not like you are stuck behind a wall in East Germany. It’s not like have to hide under your desk to protect yourself from russian nuclear bombs. It’s not like you’ve just been drafted for the Vietnam War. It’s not like you have to listen to Disco music. It’s not like you can’t buy another iPod because you wore out the old one.
Grow a pair. Stop believing what you see on TV. Get a job. Get laid. Get married. Have kids. Send your kids to college. Get off my lawn!
You’re plugged into everything that is happening world-wide, 24 hours a day if you wish. And much of what happens is noteworthy because it’s bad. It’s all consolidated and fed to you on thousands of different local and national newscasts. And yes, journalists tend to focus on stuff like the Casey Anthony trial and the missing white girl of the month that are negative things and run it into the ground.
Some newscasts like the nightly NBC news have segments like “Making a difference” that focus on positive things rather than negative.
Think more locally, I bet things aren’t as bad closer to you when you’re not taking in the whole country or whole world at once.
But overall if the news is depressing to you, stop paying so much attention to it. Or run for office. In between there isn’t anything you can do about it, things have always been happening it’s just now there is much more reporting and more people.
Sturgeon’s Law, friend.