Ross Douthat has a good pep talk in today's NYT, arguing that the country is overdoing the gloom just as it overdid the exuberance during the mortgage bubble:

Maybe this time is different. The recession is deeper. Our debts are piled higher. The gloom is more pervasive.

But even now, there isn’t a major power in the world that wouldn’t happily change places with the United States. Our weaknesses are real, but so is our potential for resilience. While our rivals (in Asia as well as the West) face a slow demographic decline, our population is steadily increasing. The European Union’s recent follies make our creaking 200-year-old institutions look flexible by comparison. And China can throw up all the high-speed rails and solar panels it wants, but it won’t change the fact that most of the country is still sunk in rural poverty.

As if to prove his point, his optimistic piece is not one of the most-read NYT stories online. It's not in the top 10 hits for views, emails or blogging. Instead, people are reading a three-day-old NYT piece on the delusional Robert Prechter, who says the Dow Jones Industrial Average will go down to 1,000 in a few years.

UPDATE: Wait, I take it back sort of. Douthat has made it into the top 10 articles viewed. (No. 10.) Maybe there's hope.