Time Essay: PS.: There's Some Good News, Too

One has two duties—to be worried and not to be worried.

—E.M. Forster It is the first of these two duties that seems these days to consume America's waking—and sleeping —hours. The nightmare fantasies have become tangible. An undertow of hopelessness and helplessness tugs at every conversation. The dolors of recession, the possibility of a Middle East holocaust, the random violence erupting in crimes against people, and indeed against civilization—the awful litany grows longer by the hour until the West seems to be sinking under its own weight, as if programmed by Oswald Spengler.

In such a season of despair, it seems idle...