By Carl Sampson
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about all of the things that are bad for me. Most food is bad for me, so are most drinks. So are things like television and rap music. Don’t forget about all of that other dangerous stuff, like fire-eating and tightrope-walking.
Oh, and surfing, especially when great white sharks are around. That’s really dangerous.
Almost every day, I go for a walk in Salem during my lunch hour. I’ve found the single most dangerous thing I do is try to cross a Salem street. Drivers actually speed up when they see me. It’s as though I have a target painted on me, even when I’m in a crosswalk and have the light.
That’s a lot of bad things, but there are more. Lots more. I Googled “things that are bad for me” and got 1.51 billion results.
If I were to eat, do or even think about something bad for me every minute, it would take me 2,872 years to get through the entire list.
Ugh. What happened to our world? It used to be a bright, wonderful place, filled with possibilities. If it rained today, we all would just assume that the sun would come out tomorrow. Now, if it rains, we start talking about climate change, the oceans rising, and that we will all die because of it.
A whole industry has been created just to tell us about all of the things that will give us heart attacks, strokes, bad teeth, zits or just plain kill us.
Go to a bookstore some time. Half of the books tell us what’s wrong with the world. The other half help us escape from all of the bad things.
That got me to thinking even more. I’m one of those people who thinks that nearly everything is related to money. A fundamental corollary to that is that no one ever made money by telling people that everything is OK. They make money by telling us about the terrible shape the world is in.
I subscribe to Netflix, the online video service. It offers a bunch of “documentaries.” I put quotes around the word because most of them really aren’t documentaries as much as they are propaganda. They tell one side of a story and completely ignore any other sides.
And the gist of every one of those things is that something or someone is trying to hurt, kill, maim, cheat, swindle, hornswoggle or bamboozle us.
Maybe it’s just my unrelenting optimism — call me the Mary Poppins of columnists — or maybe I’m an idiot, but I really don’t believe that negative claptrap. I believe that most people have good hearts and are trying to do the best they know how. I believe that most people want the best for themselves, and for their neighbors.
I also believe that people make mistakes in judgment and in their actions, but that their heart is still in the right place. I also believe that many people confuse information with wisdom. And that intellectual laziness is far too prevalent among us.
I believe that the vast majority of businesses, and individuals, believe that the best way to do well is by doing good.
Carl Sampson is an editor and freelance writer.
His two novels are available on amazon.com.
