The US was fighting wars in the Middle East for the first 30 years of our lives, we watched the worst mass casualty event since pearl harbor on live tv, we lived through the worst economic crisis since the great depression, covid, tea party, trump, Katrina, isis, Putin, etc etc. When were these high hopes you speak of?
People used to make an evening of finding a black person, accusing them of a heinous crime, and then hanging them. Before that, they found a young woman and accused them of being a witch and burned her alive. Before that, they accused random people of talking to demons and buried them alive, or tied them to a rock and left them to die, or a million other horrible things. Sociopathic hellscape is the norm.
There's barely any person left in it these days