Whoever is in the White House and whatever happens, believe this even if it isn’t true: we will survive.

Richard Fernadez discussed the feeling of helplessness and despair gripping many people. Read the whole thing.

Excerpt:

Comments in some of the most recent Belmont Club posts have been haunted by what Scott Johnson and Victor Davis Hanson have called depression. No longer do people put forward solutions as much as despair of solutions until the prevailing conditions change or the national mood shifts. Afghanistan? Well it’s no good discussing it until someone serious is in office. The economy? We’re all doomed so let’s just measure the rate of our decline. Dr. Hanson attributes the gloom to the loss of the old certainties. The world has been turned upside down by recent crises, and things no longer work in predictable ways. The present only seems to confirm the worst suspicions of some and they await the rest of the sentence with a kind of masochistic glee. In contrast to VDH’s focus on zeitgeist as the source of passivity, Scott Johnson puts his personal source of malaise down to one thing: Barack Obama. “I feel utterly powerless to do anything about the fellow in the Oval Office who combines infantile leftism and adolescent grandiosity in roughly equal measures. It seems to me that every day he is responsible for assaults on the freedom and well being of the American people. I can’t keep up and I can’t stand to pay attention.”