Take a break from pessimism

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened. –Thomas Jefferson

…it has never been my way to bother much about things which you can’t cure.
– Mark Twain – A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

I watched too many political vids on youtube tonight.
The idiocy, ignorance, paranoia, doomsaying, etc. was just too much for my tender sensibilities.

Although I cannot claim to rising above feeling anxious and threatened by the many ominous challenges of the future (Chinese world dominance, terrorists with nukes, collapse of the dollar and following right behind it like a booby prize in a box of Fruit Loops, the dreaded Amero) I’m trying to realize on a conscious level that all these macro problems can go fuck themselves. Like Jefferson wrote, most of these things never happen, and when they do, the terrifying tiger behind the door often turns out to be a kitten.

So then there’s hope:

…it is a blessed provision of nature that at times like these, as soon as a man’s mercury has got down to a certain point there comes a revulsion, and he rallies. Hope springs up, and cheerfulness along with it, and then he is in good shape to do something for himself, if anything can be done.

– Twain – Connecticut Yankee…

Although I can’t prove it, in the frequent absence of hope the human will still abide, because no other creature is interested by half in seeing what happens next.