Greater Depressions and Ultimate Turnarounds

America, and some other parts of the world are surely in depression–like situations and everyone knows the types of extremism that can be bread of these circumstances.

With much of the world now effectively under dictatorship-like regimes, or at the very least strongmen and gangsters of various sorts, and ecological havoc on the near horizon, can the once leader of the free world throw off its current shackles and return earnestly to the world stage?

As the late Leonard Cohen sang in Democracy:

It’s coming through a hole in the air,
from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It’s coming from the feel
that this ain’t exactly real,
or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there.
From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
…
It’s coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and the worst.
It’s here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it’s here they got the spiritual thirst.