Be Grateful, Dummy

It seems that almost everyday, there is a story in the news suggesting the national mood has deteriorated even further. People of every ideology have their unique paranoid fantasy culminating in the inevitable decline of the US as an economic / military / political power. For people on the left, China and India are popular fixations of anxiety. In the other day, I read a piece in the New York Times actually entitled Western Men Are Doomed, which was long on provacation and short on actual substance. It even tried to fit supposed Chinese cultural / intellectual superiority in seamlessly with the fact China spent the 1800s under the heel of various European colonial oppressors. Fareed Zakaria, who has the conspicuous qualification of looking sort of like a middle-eastern vampire, seems to be marketing himself deliberately (in his Washington Post column) as a focal point for this sort of anxiety.

On the right, we now have the tea party movement, whose constituents seem to think they are facing a crisis as urgent as Soviet troops, aliens, gay zombies, etc. running loose in middle America. In addition to more reasonable complaints, some tea partyist believe that a conspiracy of rich douchebags is secretly running the world. Duh! I thought everyone knew this sort of thing had been going on since the beginning of time.

Some people are so pissed off that at least one of them felt the need to light his house his on fire and fly his plane into an IRS building. This is the house where his WIFE and DAUGHTER live, and its his PRIVATE PLANE he's flying into a building. What a jackass. You'd think this guy had something to live for, but apparently if you can't declare your house as a church on your taxes, life isn't worth living. I have all possible sympathy for his wife and daughter, I hope they are able to move forward with their lives, and its a tragedy he did this to them over something as eternal and as boring as taxation.

People need to be grateful for the what they have. Life in the US today, put in perspective, is about as good as life has ever been anywhere. I am a graduate student, and I make a lot less than the average American, but I can still eat as much as I want, drive around in my car, surf the internet on my computer. I can go basically wherever I want whenever I want, I can express any kind of opinion I want, I can associate with anyone I want. I enjoy more material abundance and political / intellectual freedom than almost all humans that have lived, ever.

The world isn't perfect, and there is a lot we can work on, but the life isn't that bad either. I disagree with much of the of anxious hand-wringing I discussed above, but even if you don't, you should put your troubles in perspective.