There are only two things that convince me that for the U.S. specifically, dark times are fast approaching:
1. Global warming (as I've stated), which will be moderately bad in the short run for us and possibly catastrophic for the world in the long run (which is what I'm afraid of).
2. As someone else in this thread has said, the main problem is not so much the issues our country is facing today but our apparent inability to do anything to curb said problems; hell, Americans have made partisan issues of what problems we actually are facing. As with #1 above, it's a problem that can be mitigated or lessened to some degree if we can do something about it now, but if we do nothing or the bare minimum as we have been during the Obama administration, those problems will begin to overwhelm us. A stagnating economy (and the recovery the Republicans are about to kill) will rob us of superpower status, the civil unrest may not be as bad as in ages past but it will worsen and could indeed divide the country to the point of civil war, and these and other issues will result in a sharp decline in the quality of life over the next few decades. Pretty unfair for my generation, who was born and raised into what was arguably the height of American affluence. If the recovery dies, we'll have inherited one of the worst messes since the 1970s, or even the 1930s.