The search for good

In case you don't know me well enough to know this, I'm a glass half-full kinda person.

My husband has told me on more than one occasion that I'm delusional, that's I'm too trusting, that I have no filter, etc, etc, and that the world is basically full of mean people who will take what they want and stab you in the back just as soon as look at you.

What a sad, sad way to look at things, isn't it? I think he believes it to a point, but I also think that, somewhere in him, he wants to believe that it's not really that way, that people aren't that bad. He's a good man with a bad outlook.

The fact is, there were many years when I subscribed to that very train of thought myself - angry at my lot in life, full of negativity, resentment, suspicion - and I couldn't have been more miserable. As I got older, and heard and read more about all the evil in the world, I began to find myself searching more for the good.

I work in the news business, and in the news business, bad new sells. Murders, robberies, fraud, muggings...all the worst that we have in us is what makes the front page...and the next page. The bottom line is, we, the media, focus too much on the negative and not nearly enough on the positive. It's disheartening.

I have a younger brother who sees the worst of man every single day at his job. He sees the lowest of the low, and has for the last 10 years. And he feels despair on a regular basis. That's no way to get through this precious life we've been given. I had to practically talk him off the ledge a few months ago, when he told me he feels we are all doomed. He said he felt the world will end soon, and it will be a result of mankind's own foolishness and hate.

You can't look at life from only that angle, I told him. Those things you read online or hear on TV are the very worst of it. There is so much more to our existence than what we get from the news. I tried to tell him that life is so full of joy and beauty and yes, you have to look for it, because it's just behind all the shit that gets pushed at us every day. There are men (and women) who are evil. Mankind, as a whole, is good and caring, and full of hope and only wants to be better than yesterday.

He said I couldn't possibly really believe that. But I do believe it.

Years ago, I went into Boston for an appointment. I sat in my car, in an unknown area filled with homeless people. I saw five or six men sitting across the way, as I put a cigarette in my mouth and felt around my pockets for my lighter. One man, an African American man, hurried over to my car, and came around the driver's side. I yelled through my closed window that I didn't have any money. I was scared shitless.

"I'm not here to hurt you," he said through the window. I leaned away from him as I eased the window down just a crack. "I'm not going to hurt you," you repeated. " I was just wondering if you could spare a cigarette."

I felt so stupid. And judgmental. I pushed two or three cigarettes through the crack, and he thanked me and said, "We're not all bad, miss. We're just down on our luck, some of us." And I apologized.

Now, I know if my mother OR my husband were reading this, they'd admonish me for even speaking to him or letting the window down at all, and they'd be right. That could have been a very dangerous situation for a woman alone in an unknown area. If one of my own daughters did it, I'd probably freak.

And although I don't believe for a second in being outright foolish our putting myself or anyone else potentially in harm's way, I feel that we are all struggling through this life together, some with less opportunities than others, some with more, and we should not always assume the worst of people. I still have faith in mankind.

I still hope.