Are the problems we face in 2008 more dire than what earlier generations faced, or are we confronting something more apocalyptic? The AJC asked five people across a variety of disciplines. Here are their edited responses, which came mostly from phone conversations with @issue editor Richard Halicks and also from e-mails.

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Bad news bombards us 24/7, adds to our stress

Jerilyn Ross, president of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America, believes that times may not be any harder now than in the past. But now we get treated to the bad news incessantly.

I think the difference is we're getting it 24/7, and that really takes its toll on people. We're bombarded with stuff, and not only are we hearing it over and over again, it's everyplace. It's on our BlackBerries. One of my patients was saying she was getting a pedicure the other day and something bad happened in her hometown and there she was on her BlackBerry.

The earthquake in China —- the images were coming in just as fast as they could get them. Most of us have never had this intense, 24/7, in-our-face bombardment. You have to be almost comatose not to be affected by it.

We've had wars before. But they watched it on the evening news and maybe read about it in the paper. They didn't have embedded photographers reporting right from where things are happening every minute. You go to run on your treadmill, and what do you do? You put the news on.

[She notes that media overexposure does not cause anxiety disorders but that it does add to stress.]

It's only going to get worse. How we get our information is going to get more intense, but I think we don't quite know how to deal with it all, to turn it off, to separate it out. We're kind of unconscious about it. I don't have people calling up and saying, "I'm stressed because I can't stop watching the news." I don't think they know what it's doing to them.

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Problems are complex; we need leaders and hard work

The Rev. Joanna Adams has been senior pastor at Morningside Presbyterian Church for four years. She also served at Central Presbyterian in Atlanta and was pastor of Trinity Presbyterian in Buckhead for 11 years.

Things are much more complex, and it's harder to discern the good. I sometimes yearn for the days when there was clarity about how to respond and who ought to respond. There was clarity during the civil rights movement. America's joining in World War II was clearly a right and just thing to do. Things are much more complicated now, and it's hard to know who is in control of various things.

On every level, we're suffering from a lack of leadership. Sometimes, just at a dinner party, I will ask friends, "Whom do you admire the most, just in terms of people who seek that higher moral ground and to say, 'Here's the direction to go?' " People really have to scratch around. We just don't have many people of that stature.

I'm not an optimist. An optimist is naive, or has an element of naivete, and we don't need that. We need realism. If you really have hope that things can be different, that God has given us the wherewithal to make a difference in the world —- I love the story about the person who became sort of overwhelmed by all the terrible things happening in the world and prayed to God, "God, why aren't you doing something about it?" And God says, "I've already done something. I've created you, and you're supposed to do something about it."

My soul truly does rejoice in the great long sturdy promise of justice prevailing. It was Martin Luther King who said he believed that unconditional love and unvarnished truth will carry the day. And if you really believe that love is stronger than hate, if you really believe that the moral universe is tilted toward justice, when things are bad, you don't give up on your belief. You work harder.

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Short-term thinking convinces us this is a uniquely bad time

Michael Shermer is publisher of Skeptic magazine, a columnist for Scientific American and the author of 11 books, including "The Mind of the Market."

Every generation thinks that their time is special, different, better, worse, more or less corrupt, more or less moral, etc.

In the last election, everyone I know proclaimed that this was the most important election in American history. I recall my parents saying the same thing about the 1968 presidential election, and my college professors about the 1976 election, and my friends and colleagues about the 1980 election.

When I was in graduate school in the late 1970s, there were people lined up at gas stations, and experts, politicians and the news media crowed about how we were about to run out of gas. My professors predicted that by the 1990s billions of people would die from starvation, the rain forests would be completely gone, most species would be extinct and global cooling would destroy the environment.

When the market crashed 500 points in 1987, that was surely a sign that the stock market was doomed, the economy was going down the tubes, and we would never recover. The Dow was then trading at around 2,600; today it hovers around 12,000.

The problem is psychology, not economics or politics. Psychologically, we "frame" our perceptions in immediate and short-term context. Relative to a couple of months ago, yeah, things don't seem quite so good; but in the context of just a few years or decades, never have so many of us been so well off, so free and so autonomous. We must take the long view to put things into perspective.

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U.S. has enormous potential to revitalize itself

Futurist Jagdish Sheth holds the Charles H. Kellstadt Chair of Marketing at Emory University. He is the author most recently of "Chindia Rising: How China and India Will Benefit Your Business," which has been published in Asia and will be published here later this summer.

Unfortunately, we do not do long-term strategic planning for the nation. Such a plan would anticipate the future and proactively position and reposition the nation.

Instead, we are a great reactive nation. After a crisis, we wake up and fix the problem. This has worked well over the last 60 years (since WWII), but I believe it is more an immediate medication that suppresses the symptoms but does not cure the ailment.

The transformation in the way we operate in a global economy will be out of sheer necessity.

The way we worked in the past is just not working anymore, no matter who the president of the country is.

For whoever becomes our next leader, the biggest challenge will be to bring a fundamentally different leadership approach toward this nation.

At the same time, the U.S. has enormous potential to revitalize itself.

As a nation, our potential is more appreciated by outsiders who come here and invest their life and capital.

The best example is the automobile industry, where Toyota is building new plants, whereas GM and Ford are shutting down plants.

I'm absolutely convinced that revitalization will take place by the outsiders. Surprisingly, everybody will show up here at our doorstep to invest.

If you look at the second wave of immigration, which is just taking place, the people came from all over the world —- Eastern European people came here, the Caribbean people came here, the Asians came here, the Hispanic people.

There's still something about us that attracts people and capital.

Just as we have welcomed immigrants to America, we must welcome and encourage foreign investors, especially from emerging economies of India, China, Russia and Brazil, to invest in America.

In short, I am very bullish about the future of the American economy.

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Warm-up will ramp up, with some nasty effects

Robert E. Dickinson, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Tech, has engaged in climate research for more than 40 years. He has been at Tech for nine years; he also spent 22 years working as a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. His thoughts on climate change:

It's going to keep getting warmer, and things will change in various ways. We're going to at least be able to mitigate it a bit, but I don't know how far we'll go. If we were committed to the same degree that we've been committed to the war in Iraq, I think we could make a big dent in it. So far it hasn't caught the public's attention to the point that there's willingness to commit a great deal of resources.

It looks a lot worse 100 years from now than it does 10 years from now. The biggest concern for a lot of people are things that might happen —- there's no strong evidence right now that they're going to happen. But if they did, it would be a lot worse than what's expected to happen. [As an example, he cites the prospect of rapid shrinkage of the polar ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.]

The high latitudes are especially sensitive to the changing climate, and they're going to be quite different 50 years from now, if not 10 years from now. It's going to do a lot of damage, but there may also be opportunity. People [engaged in] development of natural resources can get at them much more easily.

There's also the concern of an intensification of flooding and of droughts. I'm not sure what we've seen the last few years is much connected to global warming. But that's the kind of thing we might see more of. We'll also see lots of species becoming endangered or disappearing because of the changes in their environments.

People have to feel personally threatened rather than just see the world threatened, I guess, to be willing to do much. [He follows this remark with a quiet, ironic laugh.]

 MARK WEBER / L.A. Times Syndicate

 NANCY OHANIAN / L.A. Times Syndicate

 BOB NEWMAN / L.A. Times Syndicate

 MARK WEBER / L.A. Times Syndicate