You know what improves my mood? Reading about Ronald Reagan. It's the only time I believe that yes, things maybe have been somewhere approaching this bad before.
If I'm any kind of academic (which is, of course, questionable), I'm a historian. One of the things I like about being a historian is that knowing a bit about the past gives you perspective. People lived through the Depression, we can live through this; people lived through McCarthy, we can live through this. Or even yeah, not everybody did live thought that, but the country got better, the country recovered. I've always been kind of comforted by social history during times of great stress, because it reminds me that no matter how sucky things get, people keep living their lives. Nothing is too much to bear.
Well, if anybody digs up my diaries and uses them as part of a historical study of this time, let me tell is to you straight: we may moving through our days, living our lives (or those of us who are lucky enough to have that option may be doing so), but it really is that bad. These are dark, dark days.