Kissing Goodbye to the Zeitgeist of Unhappy.

[David Zephyr]

I know a lot of you sense it. It's as thick as mud in the air all around us. It's like there's one bad story after the next, one blow following another.

This afternoon I told a co-worker that it's like there is a pervasive Zeitgeist of Unhappiness everywhere. Like a green, thick fog of chemicals choking the oxygen away from us.

Whether I speak to friends or business associates or family, it just seems like we are all living in a really rough edged piece of time/space fabric. Most of us don't like to complain because we know so many are far worse off than we are, but it really does seem like life is just a grind these days.

First, there's the "economy" (I'm just so sick of even the word). All of us now people who have been hit by this depression (another word I'm just sick of). Those of us who are fortunate to be working have probably never worked harder and longer hours in our lives...and yet we are grateful for it.

I notice people are less cheery when I'm out in public, it seems like the smiles are fewer, the stress is greater. Turn on a television or radio and it's a collective psychological soup of bad economics, two wars. And there are these creepy attention-seeking, teabaggers screaming for the cameras, we see racists, xenophobes and these vile "birthers" all barking and barking.

Touchstone institutions that we were falsely instructed were towering reference points in our lives and long considered "too big to fail" have failed and are failing: General Motors, CitiBank, Chrysler, British Petroleum, AIG, Wall Street, Fannie Mae, the Catholic Church.

Foreclosures. Joblessness. Destitution. Bad news all around.

And then, of course, there is the corker of this Gulf of Mexico catastrophe. The psyche just strains at the heartache. My brain hurts more than Xanax can every dull.

I feel like Gene Hackman hanging on that single piece of pipe at the end of "The Poseidon Adventure" screaming to the heavens, "What else do you want? How much more can you deal out?"

Oh yeah, there's a Zeitgeist of Unhappy out there.

And yet, as the Buddhists might ask: is this truly reality?

I wonder.

Tonight I came home from working fifty long, hard hours this week and will have to go right back again tomorrow for another 10 hours on Saturday. But something finally hit me tonight. I'm not going to buy into the collective swarm of bad energy anymore.

OK. Expectations are lower or have vanished. So what? We are not the sum of material things and how we scratch out a living does not define us.

Our character does. Our ability to love does. Our capacity to be a friend does.

I'm stepping out of the bad acid trip tent where it seems so many are gathering.

Yes, there is a lot of bad out there. But there is also a lot of goodness, too.

And all of my cursing the darkness is never as good as lighting a single candle.

Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me.

The first smile we give out is the hardest, but they come easier and easier.

I can't change the world, but I can change myself. Voltaire told us in Candide that we can always tend our garden.

That's a great place to start.

And remember...

The sun will come out tomorrow,
Bet your bottom dollar
That tomorrow, there'll be sun

Peace to you all here at the DU.