It's important to balance these two competing thoughts in your head to avoid becoming politically insane:

1. Things can absolutely get better, and we have the capacity to make them better; and

2. Things could absolutely be a lot worse, and we should be careful to avoid falling into the trap of thinking "anything is better than is", because the vast majority of possibilities *are* worse, and it's kind of a miracle of sorts we haven't wiped ourselves out so far.