No, America, We Will Not Be Okay.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast · Oct 22, 2026 · 5m

I am a semi-retired optimist.

I used to believe that things would always be okay: that no matter how bad circumstances seemed in the world, I trusted that people would eventually do the right thing, that goodness would prevail, that the rational center would hold.

I used to believe that our Constitutional checks and balances would protect us from overreaching parties and mentally unstable presidents and political leaders lacking a working moral compass and complete perversions of our systems of justice.

I used to believe that most people were basically decent, and that this decency would win…