Blue sky is where you find it

I like to think of myself as an optimist.  It's a little hard to hang on to your optimism these days with death lurking in our spinach and lettuce, but I still like to see the bright side of things when possible.

That doesn't mean that my concern level doesn't go up when I see a movie like Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth."  After all I'm writing this in a chair just a few feet above sea level.

Yet I have to wonder if too many people including many of the politicians are painting a picture just a little too gloomy.  Many in the media are often rightly accused of loving negative stories and ignoring the positive ones.  The old saying is "bad news sells."

When I worked for Apple Computer, we used to roll our eyes every time someone predicted the death of Apple.  The business magazines took turns having cover stories predicting the imminent demise of the company.  Yet my best years at Apple were those when the company was fighting the hardest to survive.  The company was much more open to customer concerns, and when times were bleakest, certainly worked hard at keeping its best employees.  Today while Apple is at the top of its game, my guess is that profits are what they think of most, while employee retention might have moved down the list a little.

We've had lots of rain in the last few days, but there has been plenty of blue sky if you just take the time to look for it.  I snapped the opening shot today between rain storms. The NC Seafood Festival even managed to survive the series of storms.  Today I found the blue sky I hoped to see, but I had to look for it.  It would be nice to see more blue sky thoughts about the positive possibilities in life and in our country.  Yet our leaders are setting are pretty bad example.

This morning I read an article, "The Paranoid Style," by Paul Krugman.  Paul's NY Times article had this to say.

More generally, Mr. Hastert is a leading figure in a political movement that exemplifies what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously called “the paranoid style in American politics.”

Hofstadter’s essay introducing the term was inspired by his observations of the radical right-wingers ...

As a result, political paranoia — the “sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” Hofstadter described — has gone mainstream. To read Hofstadter’s essay today is to be struck by the extent to which he seems to be describing the state of mind not of a lunatic fringe, but of key figures in our political and media establishment.

I think maybe that's what I liked about the Canadian system which ran pretty well even without a constitution. Things just muddled along, and they even figured our how to provide universal health care.  I'm not saying we don't face problems, I'm saying life is too short to obsess on all the bad things that can happen.  We need positive possibilities to balance some of the negative scenarios that we hear about all the time.

Our time in life is short.  I don't plan to measure my life by how safe I've been.  When I'm sitting back a few years from now looking back at what I've done, I don't want worrying to be my number one activity or even in my top ten.

Now walking on the beach should be well up on the list.  It's a great way to restore the soul and to think about how to achieve things most people assume are impossible.