Startled, because I was a pessimistic whiner who thought that humanity would nuke itself into oblivion when it first learned to split the atom, and yet despite the misery that certain members of the species choose to wallow in, the human race survives. The species as a whole knows that every generation faces its share of problems and hardship and that only a small percentage of the population has believed these times were the end times, shouting their doomsday rhetoric from the rooftops without a trace of irony of the fact that people have been doing it since we first learned how to speak a language.
No, humanity continues on, each new generation solving problems and facing new ones, and it is often a very small if vocal percentage of people that believe we're a hopeless example of sentient life, and refuse to see any perspective but the one given to them by Fox News during a Democratic presidency. The old generation lament the changing times and believe them to be a mark of mankind's final moments, even if those changes are at best cosmetic in nature. People browse FaceBook instead of the ice-cream social? Yeegads, Beelzebub must be nary a day's ride on the horizon! The young generation look at the state of affairs and believe their problems are the only problems, that for some reason the issues they face are wholly unique and no generation before them has ever faced its like. Here's a news flash - disease and recession and wars happen all over the world. People in China went about their lives without realizing or caring that there were wars going on in Europe a thousand years ago. The only reason you even realize it's happening today is because we have media networks now, not because some angel came down from the heavens and blew seven trumpets at you.
The rest of us - those of us with a sense of reason and the tact to not take every article of bad news in a newspaper clamoring for attention as a sign of the Beast's return - know that the world has always teetered on the brink of something bad, and yet when the chips were down humanity tightened its belt and persevered. I know this because Hitler is now a tired internet meme and a poster child for Glenn Beck's teary-eyed "my America is dying of teh cansker!" doomsday rhetoric, and not the aging God Emperor of an ethnically cleansed Earth.
So seriously. Lighten up. You think you got it bad? Two words. Bubonic Plague. "Oh I can't afford my mortgage payments!" Try whining when you're living in a neighborhood of disease corpses. I bet you could pay off your bills then: house prices would plummet. Maybe you should all get on your knees and whip each other other until God makes it better, huh? Earthquake in Haiti, Tsunamis threatening nuclear winter in Japan? Shoot, those guys sucked it up and fought through it, so you can damn well eighty-six that belly-aching and start contributing to the solutions instead of running off to the hills with a bottle of Feeny water and palette of canned beans to hide in a ditch until the angels tell you the Rapture is over, you tiresome windbags of doom.