I was going to write this column about despair – what I saw from the train as I traveled from Chicago to Detroit, a moving picture of empty, crumbling industrial buildings and blight that is copied throughout the Midwest.

Instead, I’m writing about hope.

A few minutes after watching out that window, I looked down at my Android smart phone, opened up Facebook, and saw the post after post about how we caught that rat-bastard Osama Bin Laden.

And, suddenly, there was hope – hope in our economy, in our way of life, in our future as a nation that has been battered with housing and job losses as we have watched an old enemy in Russia get stronger, worried over the massive growth of China and continued to see, day after day, our soldiers hurt and dying overseas.

Part of me didn’t think we’d ever catch him. My pessimism wasn’t just professional –we journalists are expected, even encouraged, to foster doubt – but was based on personal experience.  I spent a year as a recalled military officer in the NATO headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2009. That year, as I heard about job loss and distressed properties spreading across the United States, I traveled in an armored Toyota Highlander outside a walled compound and watched dusty children walking goats in the shadows of shell-pocked buildings.

My duties included evaluating the border situation with distrusted Pakistan – a large, porous region with only one guarded gate – at a bridge that was sometimes unprotected at night. I knew we had teams trying to monitor the border– and desperately looking for bin Laden in the mountains on both sides– but it seemed almost impossible.

Back at home, the troubles in our Midwest – many cities economically struggling with old infrastructure – have seemed just as insurmountable. We’re not a vacation Mecca – it’s too cold. Our industry has moved to cheaper-labor countries. Think-tank and Census projections predict further job and resident loss, an unending spiral with no miracle in sight.

But the hope is still here – and here’s why: those throngs of people who cheered at the White House, in Times Square and privately at home, know that real relief hasn’t ever come quick or easy.

Catching bin Laden wasn’t a sudden miracle. The successful mission started four years ago with a tip and was followed up with patient detective work by thousands of defense operatives. Nor did the success solve our problems - our young men and women in the military, and civilians, will still die overseas and possibly here again by terrorist activities.

But to Americans who endured a 10-year wait, this closure was immediately seen as permission to hope again. The hope is that one day, this optimism will spill over into economic improvement. The hope is that our people still have that entrepreneurial drive that shaped our factories and boardrooms. The hope is that one day we’ll find ways to bring our cities back, find ways to unite race-divided communities and rebuild our rusting Midwest. The hope is that we now, as a nation, have faith that while we can take a punch, we cannot be knocked down for long.

That will be a welcome miracle.