It’s that time of year when we sit back, reflect, and take in what’s happening in the world around us, now and over the course of the last year.
Sure, it’s possible to get down when you do that. After all, as I’ve stated many times in this column, the media loves to play up the doom and gloom, the “if it bleeds it leads” philosophy. After all, “the sky is falling” sells. If you watch CNN or Fox News, they will, quite frankly, tell you everything that’s wrong in the world from their points of view.
Sure, there are real problems in the world. Between drug wars, terrorist insurgencies, ethnic conflicts and civil wars, there are 30-plus going on right now. There’s a land war in Europe for the first time since the 1940s. There is an awful war in the Mideast, where violence seems to beget more violence.
According to the World Health Organization, there are more than 700 million people starving in the world today. On the domestic front, we seem to be more divided than ever, and both sides of the divide are being led by older men who have seen sharper days.
But this is supposed to be a positive column, so here goes.
Despite all the seemingly bad news that is thrown at us, it helps to remember that there is a lot of good news happening that we don’t often hear or think about. That’s why I try each day to write down a few good things that happened to me that day. I also strive to look for good things that happened and are happening in the world.
Covid has not gone away and it won’t go away. Best-case scenario is it becomes endemic. But we understand how to deal with it much better now. And, like it or hate it, Operation Warp Speed showed how fast the world can come up with a vaccine these days.
While the way the world handled covid was far from perfect, we learned a lot about the best ways to handle future outbreaks. (I hope) Modern medicine has become quite apt at handling life-threatening emergencies that could have easily meant the end of life 20 years ago. Stents and arthroscopic surgery have turned many procedures that used to be long hospital stays into outpatient procedures.
There are, for the first time, medicines that appear to help reverse some of the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. There were several other medical and science breakthroughs this year. Heck, NASA landed a spacecraft on a moving asteroid millions of miles away in 2020, and that spacecraft returned a sample to Earth in September of this year. Wow!
We live in a world where everybody has 24/7 access to a lot of information, as well as being able to communicate instantly and easily with people all over the world. I choose to look at this as a mostly good thing.
By some accounts, knowledge in the world is doubling every 12 hours now. Other estimates say knowledge doubles every year or so. A lot depends on how you define knowledge. But this is all pretty incredible.
On any given day I will chat with people in California, Florida, France, China, Russia, Ukraine, Jordan and Spain. This allows me to keep in touch with family and friends all over the world. It keeps us close even when we’re far away.
Finally, we carry mini-computers in our pockets that, for example, let us look to see if it’s worth galvanizing our new car seconds before we purchase it. Spoiler: It was not.
Is the world perfect? Nope. But if you look around some, you will find some good things. Am I an opportunist?
Well, you have to be when you write a column called “Positive Vibes.”
John Zakour lives in Geneva. He is a freelance humor writer with a bachelor’s in computer science from SUNY Potsdam and a master’s in human behavior. He is a chief happiness practitioner. He has sold thousands of gags to strips and magazines and had over 50 books published. He writes his own syndicated comic, “Working Daze,” which has anywhere from 30K-100K daily readers. His “Positive Vibes” column runs every Thursday. Contact him at johnzakour@gmail.com. Or, check out his blog at workingdaze.blogspot.com.
POSITIVE VIBES: Being positive despite things
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14.12.2023
It’s that time of year when we sit back, reflect, and take in what’s happening in the world around us, now and over the course of the last year.
Sure, it’s possible to get down when you do that. After all, as I’ve stated many times in this column, the media loves to play up the doom and gloom, the “if it bleeds it leads” philosophy. After all, “the sky is falling” sells. If you watch CNN or Fox News, they will, quite frankly, tell you everything that’s wrong in the world from their points of view.
Sure, there are real problems in the world. Between drug wars, terrorist insurgencies, ethnic conflicts and civil wars, there are 30-plus going on right now. There’s a land war in Europe for the first time since the 1940s. There is an awful war in the Mideast, where violence seems to beget more violence.
According to the World Health Organization, there are more than 700 million people starving in the world today. On the domestic front, we seem to be more divided than ever, and both sides........
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