Over the weekend I watched Half Nelson, an independent film starring Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps. It was the most awkward film I’ve ever watched. The story itself was great – about an inner city middle school teacher with a drug addiction who becomes friends with one of his students when she learns of his problem. The awkwardness was organically created out of a string of inappropriate events. It was weird – but good.

I bring up the movie because in one of his lectures, Mr. Dunne (Ryan Gosling) asks his history class what the “machine” is. While I was sitting on my couch watching, I was thinking about how hard that might be to explain because the “machine” constitutes every institution our government has ever stuck its toenail in. I continued watching and let the thought go… until today.

Today I read an article by an English educated entrepreneur, originally from Hong Kong, Sir David Tang. The title was, “Optimism is the Cure for the Downturn.” According to Tang, pessimism is self-fulfilling and depression has become an epidemic born out of the global economic woes by people who have become resigned to the belief that they are in deep trouble and go around telling everyone else that they are in deep trouble too.

Here is what Tang suggests – we need to sit down, calm down, go back to basics, and most importantly, shake off our pessimism. Easier said then done Mr. Tang. What we experience ourselves, hear on the radio, television, and through people; what we read in the papers and online are all tainted by the “machine” that has created this fear and pessimism in the first place.

Despite the difficulty, Tang is right. We definitely need to calm down so that we can think clearly and figure a way out of this mess for ourselves.