Politics: Please Stop Yelling at Me.

People to Avoid This Week: Rabid Republicans, Deluded Democrats. Crazed Conservatives, Lunatic Liberals.

I've been putting off this entry because it dredges up just what the Cheerful Heart attempts to avoid: Anger. But really, the Cheerful Heart blog was born from my struggles with friends and family who feel it is their mission to convince me, and those like me, that their political views are truly right (and I use that word on purpose) and unless I, and my ilk, don't see the error of our ways, the country, the economy, my family and my own personal self and soul are doomed.

If you haven't guessed it by now, I am a liberal in most things, and those who badger me are conservatives. I have very few friends of this persuasion, although I am surrounded with a passel of in-laws who espouse these views. A few of them understand how I feel and don't push their views on me. For that I am grateful. I guess there are extremist liberals who pelt their family with rabid political missives, but I don't know any. Really, let's be honest, those portly folks with the red faces, men or women, poking their fingers in some politician's direction and shouting at the top of their lungs are almost always conservatives of one stripe or another. Tea baggers. Haters. Whatever.

As I age, and those around me age, I find that these people, the ones who spend their time on politics, watching political shows on TV and listening to ranters on the radio, have grown more and more bitter about their lives. When they retire it opens up vast new spans of time for them to cruise the Internet searching for kindred souls and new people and ideas to hate. These are not, necessarily, stupid people, some of them are quite smart, but being folk of little introspection, and being limited as far as intellectual pursuits are concerned (art, music, writing), and not even having much in the way of hobbies they sieze upon the one thing that they are really good at, the thing that makes them feel most alive: hating. Anger. Fury. It gives them satisfaction of the smug sort, allows them to look down on entire classes of people, to feel superior, usually after a lifetime of feeling inferior. It gives them purpose.

They are sad, little people. And I could feel some pity if their seemingly God-given purpose in life wasn't to attempt to enlist me in their cause by sending intellectually purulent, angry material that would be laughable were it not so mean spirited. Years ago when I would get these ridiculous messages in my in-box, I would run them by Snopes.com, and respond to the senders with the truth and a gentle admonition to check the veracity of the info they were sending out. Were these attempts to help them not make public fools of themselves met with gratitude? Never. Only sneering rejoinders like, “Well, it may not be exactly true, but it ought to be true!” (All quotes are real.) No thanks for straightening out a misconception, just more invective, more hate because even they knew they looked faintly, or blatantly ridiculous, unable, or, really, unwilling to apply even the commonest of sense, or simply check with a real authority.

After awhile I saw that any attempt to stem this tide was a lost cause, so I asked these posters to quit sending me any political material. I was interested in their families, their well being, but not their political or religious opinions. They were unable to stop themselves. “Well, just don't click to open it!” they said. “You don't have to read it!” (They always speak in either explanation points or ALL CAPS. They have no notions of Internet etiquette. Even here they point fingers and shout.) Or they would agree to desist. By the next day more would come in. I realized then that they were so Internet un-savvy that they probably didn't understand how to remove someone from their great swaths of addresses. I told them, gently, how to do so. I received back more invective because I was, “Trying to tell them what to do.”

Here's the only thing you can do, you seekers of the Cheerful Heart: block them from your computer. Completely. Irrevocably. Trust me, if someone gets sick, or there's bad news, they, or someone else will call you on the telephone.

This is the only way to keep their hard, black little souls from infecting your Cheerful Heart. Seal them away as you would any pathogen.

They can't stop themselves. If they didn't have their hate, they would have nothing.

And Then it Snowed

Warning! This entry contains references to a smiling baby.

People to Avoid This Week: All those morons who say these heavy snowfalls prove that there is no such thing as Global Warming.

The Cheerful Heart is not a think-yourself-happy blog. It is a place for exploring strategies to simply not be angry. I am suggesting that if we are not angry, we will be cheerful. Maybe not actively happy, certainly not happy all the time. But cheerful is a pretty good place to start, to be, whenever possible.

It was a few hours before the oncoming Big Snowstorm and I was headed into the 12 Items or Fewer line at the grocery store when a young lady pushing a cart with a baby and at least 40 items rushed in line in front of me. She was chatting on a cell phone. She moved around to the front of the cart and began piling her items onto the belt. The checker said not a word about the number of items, they never do. Nor did anyone in the long line behind me (all of whom had fewer than 12 items). Over the years I have learned not to express my righteous indignation. It never helps when I do and aften gets me into trouble.

The cashier finished ringing up the items. The woman took out her money. She had what looked like to me, around 30 dollars. The checker began subtracting items, slowly, one by one, discussing the merit and worth of each item as they went. I was not happy.

The strategy of this blog is to avoid anger-producing situations, but there was no getting out of this one. I decided to look at the baby, rather than cast furious glares at the woman. The baby and I stared at each other.

He smiled.

No, the clouds did not part, there was no shaft of brilliant sunshine. The birds did not begin to sing. I was still angry at the woman who put herself above everyone else and still didn't have the brains to check her money beforehand and keep a running tally in her mind as she shopped. But I smiled back and had a thought.

The baby had no particular reason to smile at me except, perhaps, because he naturally had a cheerful heart. Sure, it's not a bed of roses being a baby, you depend on others for food and keeping you clean, you have to cry to get anyone's attention, there are few things you can do to amuse yourself, but maybe you are so un advanced that you're just naturally happy. That the default setting for our hearts, as a species, is Cheerful. Rather than Angry, or Suspicious.

Perhaps there is an evolutionary reason that simple cheerfulness is a good strategy to enhance and propagate the species. I'm sure that 50,000 years ago early man had plenty to be afraid of, that fear was a natural response to a difficult environment, but I wonder, if there were moments when the tribe sat around the fire, they've had enough food, nothing was actively trying to eat them and they just felt good about things? I'm betting yes. I enjoyed this mental image.

The woman paid her bill, and pushed her cart out the door. I bought my items, went to the liquor store for a bottle of Gin, the Drink of the Cheerful Heart. As I was climbing into my car, I noticed the woman pulling out of her parking space. She had abandoned her cart in the middle of the street, not even pushing it to the side out of the way of traffic. I got out and moved the cart to the cart corral. I didn't do it for the woman, she still pissed me off. I didn't really do it for the people who were having to dodge the cart in their cars. I didn't even do it because I'm basically a nice person who goes around doing good deeds. I did it for the kid. And the smile that made me think of other things for at least a few minutes. And while I was distracted, my heart forgot about the selfish woman and clicked onto its default setting: Cheerful. And I thought about that stone age tribe, sitting around, doing whatever the hell they did when they were happy.

I went home, it snowed, a lot, I had a drink and it was a good evening.