Oh, the times are scary, all right. We have a political system more polarized than it has been since the 1850s. We see a bizarre cultural landscape in which social norms in place for eons have been gleefully wrecked. Ideas that have traditionally bound us together have been spurned by a percentage of the population as somehow racist and ‘exclusionary,’ whatever that means. Historic inflation has already reduced our standard of living, and there’s more on the way.