Optimism?

I wanted to do a rant today, but everything I wrote turned out to be crap, so I scrapped it, writers block is rough sometimes, especially when you have to get up in the morning.

I've been feeling strangely at ease this last week or so, my sense of outrage has diminished. It's not like there aren't reasons to be outraged either, the refugee crisis is ongoing, the president of Planned Parenthood spent five hours being questioned by an oversight committee as a result of clearly edited and misleading, at best, videos, the Pope may be a Kim Davis supporter(unconfirmed as yet) Ted Cruz is still an asshole, Russia just gave Putin the go ahead to send troops into Syria, and so on and so forth.

Oh yeah, Donald Trump still exists and has a better than zero chance of being president.

I guess it says something about the the emotional resilience people have, we are, or can be, exposed all day long to horrible things, but even so we can still be happy, at least a little bit.

It's important I think to keep that idea in mind, that bad things exist and should be fought against, but that good things also exist, and should be celebrated, even if it is only in the privacy of your own head. The 24 hour outrage machine that is our news cycle makes it hard to do that, and a certain type of person will get really mad at anyone who spends any time at all talking about good things.

An example I see on my Facebook feed a lot is regarding the Pope, someone posts an article about some nice thing the guy does, and inevitably one or more people will chime in with how he totally is still really conservative and terrible and how we should be ashamed of ourselves for looking at anything he does as good.

They are right in a way, the Pope is pretty conservative, I would disagree with most of his political views, but when he does do something right, it should be celebrated, just as if he does something wrong, it should be condemned.

There is a phrase "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good" and while that can be used in an apologist fashion to excuse any number of things that are not good enough, I think that it is something most people can benefit from internalizing a little bit.

It may not be applicable in all cases, in some things, settling for the less than ideal outcome is and should be entirely unacceptable. An example being any result of the ongoing fight in our government to defund Planned Parenthood, any result that causes that to happen is unacceptable and should be combated at every turn. There are many others.

But just because there are battles to fight doesn't mean it is wrong to spare a few moments to watch a cute video on the internet, hang out with friends for no reason other than to have fun, or even to write some sappy crap on your blog before going to bed. In a perfect world we win all our battles, in a good world we fight our battles, and maybe smile once in a while, think about something else for a minute. The battle will still be there afterwards.