On Dec. 26, President Barack Obama signed into law a bipartisan budget agreement which eases the threat of automatic spending cuts while simultaneously preventing a government shutdown for at least two years. He also signed a defense authorization bill which alters how sexual assaults are handled in the military and makes it easier to transfer detainees out of Guantanamo Bay. In short, quite a lot of things happened on the 26th, but one in particular stands out: nobody really cared.

The budget deal was a media surprise. I was watching CNN one day when all of a sudden Anderson Cooper said that Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Patty Murray had forged a bipartisan budget deal which would successfully pass both the House and the Senate. After months of cliffs, ceilings, conflicts, filibusters and a government shutdown, something actually went right – we were saved! The world wasn’t going to end; we weren’t headed toward a financial apocalypse!

Then it was over. One story, a few passing mentions during news segments, and then it was promptly forgotten. The National Defense Authorization Act experienced an even more interesting press treatment: not only did media give lip service to the provisions that reformed the way military sexual assaults are handled and made it easier to finally close Guantanamo Bay, but they focused for several days over a single, specific passage in the bill, challenged by the ACLU, which allows the military to indefinitely detain terrorists.

While the Indefinite Detention provision certainly does warrant increased scrutiny, this circumstance reveals a rather disturbing quirk of the American political environment: we’re raging pessimists. We absolutely love to get really, really angry about things. We rarely celebrate triumphs, but often cry foul. We as a society continue to be very pessimistic about the direction the country is heading in, despite evidence that life as a whole is, and consistently has been, getting better. People live longer, eat healthier, have better access to basic necessities, are more likely to own cars and houses, enjoy vastly increased workplace safety, are more likely to get a college education and enjoy a much higher standard of living than half a century ago.

To some degree, our journalistic focus on the negative is warranted – after all, our republic is always seeking to better itself, so it only follows that we need to know what needs fixing. However, this focus has spilled over into personal political opinion, to the point where people actually believe that things are taking a turn for the worse. We spend so much time fixating on the negative aspects of our society that we forget to acknowledge how much we really have. It takes only a short look into the past to notice how far we have come in our nearly two and a half centuries of being a nation. The problems of today are miniscule in comparison to the gigantic issues of the past; modern America has no true analogue to slavery, Jim Crow, the denial of the vote to women or the existential threat of war.

Our predecessors fought to better life in the United States, and took momentous strides in this pursuit. They built the mighty foundation upon which modern society stands, yet they were no different than you or I. No matter what problems America faces, I am confident that we will be able to overcome them, because we have no shortage of everyday heroes. The next time you see a news story about an issue, a social injustice, or yet another looming “disaster,” look back and appreciate what we already have, then stand up and lead the charge to make it better, just as our mothers and fathers did before us.

Stefan Herlitz is a Collegian columnist and can be reached at [email protected].