Despite the darkness, I still see signs of hope in America

It remains difficult to pinpoint the moment in my life when it felt like my country started to lose the plot. Oh, there were signs, like the September 11 attacks and the botched response that drew us into interminable entanglements in Afghanistan and Iraq without “fixing” either country. The financial collapse in 2008 accelerated wealth inequality. Increasingly online, Americans started populating echo chambers and imbibing conspiracies, and distrust of the media grew. No one could agree on a common set of facts anymore, let alone debate them in good faith. More kids wanted to become social media influencers than astronauts. Anger, isolation, and paranoia rose. Big things weren’t getting done, couldn’t get done. With the rise of smartphones, life shifted even further toward screens to mediate the world. The forces of ignorance and grift even managed to turn parts of Americans against vaccines, arguably the single most life-saving medical invention in human history. All of this played out against an increasingly poisonous political environment. When Donald Trump was first elected a decade ago, many Americans were struggling and felt unserved by the existing political class. Trump campaigned on addressing those frustrations, promising disruption instead of the status quo. Americans chose disruption, and they got it. They also got hatred, contempt, bullying, misogyny, narcissism, corruption, lies, and a palpable love for dictators—and what were these but symptoms of advanced political disease? About a decade ago, when I left the Houston Chronicle newspaper to write about space full-time for Ars Technica, I also started a website focused on local weather. Our purpose was clear: In an era of sensationalized storm coverage, Space City Weather would provide no-hype information about weather impacting the lives of people in Houston. We stuck to that, and when giving public talks, I often joke, “Boring is our brand.” But in a world awash in clickbait and shouting, the quiet work we have done with Space City Weather still resonated with people. When storms threaten the community, it turns to us—because it trusts us. For many Americans, there remains a hunger for credible, evidence-backed news and information. Of course, if you’re reading Ars Technica, you share such a hunger already. But you are not alone. Progress does continue, even among the retrograde orbit of our political life. In recent decades, we have seen great advances against cancers like childhood leukemia and metastatic melanoma, and the next 10 to 20 years should bring additional progress with cancer vaccines. As our population ages, there will be a greater focus on advancing aging science. We will continue to see wins with genetic diseases. The story is similar in physics, astronomy, chemistry, and the other sciences. When I first started writing about science in the mid-1990s, consider how difficult it was for scientists to collaborate using the time-tested tools of books, printed journal articles, and telephones. Today, researchers can access almost every bit of knowledge about a specialized topic, instantly; work globally with hundreds of scientists; sequence genomes cheaply; and run models on powerful supercomputers. And science is now global. No single government or religion can halt its progress. When America showed the world during the latter half of the 20th century that basic research begat economic development in a big way, the world took note. Finally, reality itself has a way of fighting back against lies and propaganda. Yes, it takes far longer than one would like. But in the end, badly built rockets explode. False medical claims don’t cure. Companies with corrupt accounting—early in my career, I covered Enron’s bankruptcy case in New York City—eventually fail. More recently, we have seen commercial satellite imagery and communications provide incontestable truths about Russian activities on the ground in Ukraine, undermining attempts at propaganda. As Shakespeare wrote, “Truth will out.” There are so many reasons to be unhappy about the state of America, the world, and humanity as we come to the nation’s 250th birthday. But America has been resilient. And the beauty of this country is that every person has the power—small in isolation but much greater in the aggregate—to make change. That power is not wholly spent, nor wholly eclipsed, by anti-democratic forces. Because I am unlikely to greet America when it turns 300 years old, the best time for me to exercise that power is today. I hope you’ll join me.