 As I scanned the news this morning I began to laugh.  The totality of its spin, negativity and plain ridiculousness hit me as just plain absurd.  We wake up to which one of our “B” list luminaries died, felt ignored today, or broke up with their significant other (that’s some other B list luminary they’d announced lifetime love for a week ago).  Our leaders are locked in a room, speaking talking points from political strategists, that occasionally get at the real business of the people.  The major stations hunt desperately for weather disasters or the slim evidence we will have one, turning weather into drama.  Sports gets its due as the great American escape, as it increasingly becomes meshed into our political dysfunction.  The message from the media is clear.  Don’t believe your actual lives because life sucks, people suck and if you look close enough, you suck too!
In fact, that’s not true.  If we do use our eyes, we see lots of people going about their daily life morally, ethically, with humor and productively.  They are concerned about others and they do both small and large kindnesses within their circle of influence.  They aren’t the neck-vein bulging, nearly out of control people we see in endless loops on our movie-sized TV screens and computer monitors.  But for some reason, we don’t much care to celebrate that or us in our media.  I guess decency is boring.
Today’s commentary is a short one.  Because rather than reading another couple minutes of my thoughts, I’m asking that you look around your actual world.  Who are the good people in it?  Who’s done some decency?  Who do you trust?  Who trusts and depends on you?  What are the good things you hope and dream for?  Rate your life on a scale of one to ten, with ten being content and happy most of the time.  Where is your actual life?  My bet is that most of us really don’t suck, when we step back and look at ourselves.  With that in hand, maybe we can start to think about how to move more Americans up the scale.  Without feeling like we’re, all going to hell in a handbasket.Ihg  11-19-2021
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