I haven't lost faith at all. In fact, I believe our species has an incredibly promising future ahead of us. The only problem I have is wading through the sea of idiots between then and now. Don't lose heart, guys, we're gonna make it.
Tangential inquiry: am I the only one that rolls his eyes whenever an ever-popular "Three underage boys rob a bank and slaughter the population of Wisconsin because their dad wouldn't let them play Xbox past their bedtime" thread shows up? Our instinctual sense of morbid curiosity is helping to corroborate the narrative provided by mainstream media outlets, and that narrative is "humanity is starting to suck, the end is nigh". These depressing stories are the result of a small fraction of our population, and it's certainly not the fraction we would put before alien visitors to try and impress them, so why should we judge humanity as a whole based on these people? The world's population is at an all-time high (since idiots are a statistical certainty, more people means more idiots to do more idiotic things), and living in the Information Age has brought the "big picture" to a lot of people that were comfortable believing the rest of their world was just like their comfortable little bubble of reality; the result of this is the modern media treating the rest of the world's events with the same mentality that they treated their small-town "cat stuck in a tree/boyfriend shoots ex-girlfriend" stories with, and that makes for daily forecasts of the apocalyptic end of humanity, because news stations have always had a woody for scary stories about murder/rape/assault/theft because it's guaranteed to grab better ratings than a kitten stuck up a tree... only now they have the means to find, hype, and report every other one of those incidents that occur, everywhere.
As a result: it's a fear-based economy right now in America. People are getting into office with threats of what could happen if they don't get elected, and a burgeoning section of the economy is built on "terrorism prevention" despite the fact that America has had a surprisingly small amount of terrorist attacks and highly competent civic infrastructure more than competent enough to handle the recent volume of attacks on its own. Republicans in particular are selling a message of "humanity is on its last legs, let's restore us to our former glory before it's too late, or else Osama Bin Laden will touch your kids while they're sleeping and Jesus will make his return with guns a-blazing". Common sense dictates that things are only as bad as they've always been, but as access to the crappy parts of humanity is greatly expanded, we're seeing more of the parts that we've always preferred to ignore. It's over-reactionary and irrational to posit that conditions are worsening, so just don't. Things are actually great right now, all things considered, and it's time we appreciated that fact; when you view history without the omni-distorting lens of romanticism, and compare it to modern times, you'll see just how much things have improved (and continue to).
