Have patience and trust the institutions.

Not the people in them, necessarily. But this year has actually made me appreciate the genius of what the Founders put together.

The thing to remember is that our country has always been pretty much nuts. I'm still going through Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton, and the degree to which Hamilton and Jefferson were at each others' throats is unprecedented. Jefferson literally hired a guy at the State Department, officially as its translator, whose real job was to write editorials under a pseudonym lambasting Hamilton as dictatorial and aristocratic. Newspapers, meanwhile, had no ethical code(s) whatsoever. As Jefferson later wrote in a letter to John Norvell in 1807:

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.

They recognized when setting up our current government that people were terrible, and were careful to make everyone's scrabbling for power counterbalance everyone else's. And remember too that we've survived some terrible presidencies. Bush II, Buchanan (who botched the slavery issue), Harding (who died in office before the country realized how corrupt his administration had been), Andrew Johnson (who fucked up Reconstruction and was impeached for his firing of Secretary of Defense Stanton), etc. And that's without getting into how insanely corrupt local politics was through most of the 19th and into the 20th centuries.

So be angry, but don't lose hope. And channel that anger someplace. Write to your newspaper, tell your friends why Net Neutrality matters, whatever. It's not about changing things all by yourself, but being part of a much bigger whole that can.