Life is full of optimism and dread at the same time. Just getting up in the morning is an act of optimism, even when all we get thrown at us by the various media is 50 shades of dread.
I have lived long enough to remember the days when we did drills at school not for active shooters but for nuclear attack, covering our heads and kneeling in the elementary school center hall against the windowless walls rehearsing for Armageddon. I was a Cold Warrior, sailing the seas with I can neither confirm nor deny in TLAM launchers. I was told history has ended but here it is again.
The truth is we have always lived on a knife blade, but we only can do so by holding the conflicting ideas in our mind that we are both on a knife blade and living. Existing requires both optimism and realism.
I have been on this planet for 58 orbits and now I realize that, looking back on things, it has always been this way and there were no good old days - only days of total obliviousness and blind nostalgia. The reason why some don’t want real history taught in schools is that they prefer their kids share the obliviousness and not challenge them to lift the scales from their eyes.