Douglas: Not easy locating the bright side

I am by nature a glass half-full person, figuring that taking the sunny-side outlook is just another bullet in the chamber as we try to thread the needle of this journey called life.

As a single example, each year about this time I convince myself this will be the fall that UNC’s football team unshackles itself from a history of underachievement and is no longer the answer to which one is unlike the others when North Carolina’s athletic teams gather at the dinner table.

Need another one?

Last week, knowing that the cost of a postage stamp would rise from 68 to 73 cents this past Sunday, I invested in a roll of 100 forever stamps even though my next birthday is 37 days away and it will be No. 67. For perspective, it took me almost four years to go through my last roll of forever stamps, so this is a risky investment.

My optimism established, I cop today to being less than bullish on the future of the greatest nation in the history of the world, worrying that America might have already peaked. I would put that peak in the mid-1970s, the deciding factor being that is about the time the best rock and roll was being memorialized on vinyl.

I mostly blame the children we Baby Boomers raised, a generation of entitled, brittle, lazy Americans unappreciative of all the riches within easy rich to those of us lucky enough to be born in this country.

And their children are worse.

But, in a bit of a plot twist, what has shoved me to the dark side, especially as it relates to the next four years, are two old-timers who have been adept only at bringing out the worst among us Americans, brewing the cauldron of hate and making us a country of blood blue and blood red.

Social media each day is the accelerant, where friends, neighbors, co-workers and even relatives sever relationships in defense of these two unworthy candidates.

One is the guy with faraway eyes who needs the world to turn off the lights at 8 p.m. so he can get some sleep, and the other is incapable of empathy, profane, a narcissist willing to wave a Bible that he has never opened.

That should have angered pretty much everyone, but if the way you champion your guy is to say he is not as bad as the other guy, the problem is vivid.

I crane my neck when inching past traffic accidents, which explains why I watched a couple of weeks ago as the two “debated,” the quotations marks fastened because there was no exchange of ideas, just a septuagenarian and an octogenarian trading insults like a pair of kindergartners.

I learned nothing, except they are both willing to lie about their golf games, and I wondered if I had entered a portal into another dimension when the idea of settling the score on the golf course was floated. By that narrow measure, they are not unlike 37 million golfing Americans.

Since what should have been the nation’s nadir, it has gotten worse. We have watched as Democrats have tried to take out Biden by forming a circular firing squad while a registered Republican took a shot and barely missed Trump’s brain.

How can it be that these two are the best these political parties can cough up to chase the most important job in the world? Just how long have we been watching this national train wreck with neither side willing to change tracks? Where are the adults?

It all makes me want to take a long nap, and when I say long, I mean until Jan. 20, 2029. I worry that when I awaken the America I love so much will not be recognizable.

Perhaps in the interim, UNC football will do something remarkable, and when I arise from my slumber I will at least have plenty of stamps.

That would be the bright side.