Stop worrying and count your blessings

Okay, so there’s lots of doom and gloom coming out of everyone’s mouth. People’s worried about falling into a crater and never getting out. I wish the whole lot of news anchors and that parade of babbling heads and vloggers would just shut up. They don’t know how things will shake out, no one does—but they keep drumming up the fears of all’s us. These know-it-alls predict like they got a direct line to God, but they sure don’t know nothin’ more than a carnival tent tarot reader. They may be paid well, but hell, they might just be one more dumbass with a book to sell you.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s some gnarly stuff going on right now…but when did we become so wimpy as to lose our grip because of it. Life’s gonna throw stuff at us. We just gotta pick it up and throw it back at em. That's all.

Here’s something good ol’ Thomas Jefferson wrote that I think’s fitting right about now. Here he’s responding to John Adams back in the year 1816 before the civil war and all the brutal wars that followed:

“You ask if I would agree to live my seventy or rather seventy-three years over again? To which I say yea. I think with you that it is a good world on the whole; that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us. There are, indeed, (those who might say nay), gloomy and hypochondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present, and despairing of the future; always counting that the worst will happen, because it may happen. To these I say, how much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!”

We should all try to answer that question for ourselves. There are evils, and maybe we’ve come to the brink some times, but we’re still here spoiled and living high off the hog compared to other people around this world. You wanna look at all the yuck, go for it, but it’s not going to do shit for you. Anyhow…

Jefferson goes on in his letter to say, “I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern. My hopes, indeed, sometimes fail; but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy. There are, I acknowledge, even in the happiest life, some terrible convulsions, heavy set-offs against the opposite page of the account.”

Then he admits to wondering to what good end is grief intended. On a personal level, I know grief and it has humbled me in countless ways, but not political grief. That’s just a whirlwind of greed and stupidity that every American generation has had to put up with during good times, and bad. So stop worrying and count your blessings.

(Cartoon by Herblock from 1950)