Oct 20, 2014 3 min read

There’s an election coming up – perhaps you’ve heard – and there are polls, polls and more polls being taken and being heatedly discussed by cable yackers who are always hungry to fill yawning hours of broadcast time. One that was published Monday by the online journal Politico we found particularly noteworthy.

It generally concluded Americans are in a pessimistic mood, and that’s no surprise given the stalemate in Washington, D.C., the lackluster economic recovery and the possibility of European turmoil infecting our own market. Of course, there’s also Ebola, ISIS, climate change, the problems with veterans affairs, the problems with the Secret Service and on and on and on.

That being said, the poll said 64 percent of Americans believe things in the country are “out of control.”

Yes, it’s safe to say that right now we are cursed by living in interesting times, to borrow the Chinese phrase. But “out of control”? We can say without fear of refutation that 100 percent of those who told Politico that the country was out of control need to breathe deeply, count to 10 and put the U.S.’s current position into a broader context.

There is not anarchy in the streets. We are not in danger of a coup d’etat. No one will have to dodge Molotov cocktails on their way to the office. Our system of governance, though certainly filled with disputation, is fundamentally solid. We face no existential threat from another superpower. Regimes are not rising and falling every six months or so. Our system of exchange shares the same relative stability – people are not having to load money into wheelbarrows to go to the grocery store because inflation is rocketing into the heavens.

We live in times where we are right to be worried about the course we are on. But we are not living in 1861, when the country was torn apart by a civil war. Nor are we living in 1968, when, on average, 500 servicemen were being killed every month in Asian jungles, rioting was a summertime fixture in many urban areas and our leaders were being assassinated or lived in a fear of that. If you were alive in either of those years, you would have had reason to ponder if, indeed, the country was spinning out of control.

Comparatively speaking, in 2014, the United States isn’t a bad place to be. It is not “out of control.”

Yes, the United States has a crowded agenda full of thorny issues. But perhaps the first thing its citizenry should do is get a grip.