REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL

You don't really need a reason to be cheerful, it is its own reward. When you consider that the only alternative is to be cheerless, it seems like a no-brainer. Yet there are many among us who need concrete reasons to be upbeat. They look around and see their banks collapsing, their globe warming, the world in general either at war with one another or starving to death, their gas tanks representing a major investment and the fact that the leader of the free world is the mildly retarded puppet of a gang of homicidal corporate thieves. Sure, it can look bleak out there, with Russian Roulette seeming more and more like a viable option. But be of good cheer, people. Nobody likes the company of a sourpuss. There's one more reason to either cheer up or get even more depressed. It's your call.

Let's take a walk on the sunny side of the street and examine the reasons to be cheerful, shall we? There's the crisis in the Middle East, for example, or rather, the many, many crises that continually plague the Middle East: tribalism, racism, sexism, poverty, suicide bombings, religious governments, extremism, warfare, you-name-it and if it's bad they've got it over there. What's to be cheerful about all that? Simple: You don't live there! Unless you're unfortunate enough to be a soldier in today's world, you'll never have to go to the Middle East and experience the human misery and the tragedies of misunderstanding that plague the tribal dimwits that inhabit that godforsaken dust bowl. What's not to like about that? You're here and they're over there! Beautiful. Life is good.

Oh, but the economy at home is in a shambles, you say. Oh yeah, is that why you're so overweight? If the economy is in such dire straits, how come you're not missing any meals? You want to see lousy economies, look at the international news reports where what you notice most about the people in some countries are their ribs and their skeletal facial features. You don't hear them complaining about the high price of gasoline. To them, gasoline is what their government uses to fuel the trucks and helicopters that bring the soldiers to their villages to shoot them dead before they burn their villages to the ground using more gasoline, so to those unfortunates, the higher the price of gas, the better off they are. Why be anything but horrified by this state of affairs? Once again; Bingo! You don' live there! Send Sally Struthers ten bucks to shut her up and go back to channel surfing for another rerun of Law and Order.

But what about global warming, you say? Well, what about it? Has anybody ever actually met a Polar Bear? Very few that did have lived to tell the tale. They'd just as soon eat you as look at you. It seems those behemoths are rarely anything but ravenously hungry, and beside, with them all drowned and out of the way there'd be a lot more baby seals around for us to club to death for their attractive pelts. Not that we'll need them to keep warm in the new hot climate, but they will make nifty beach blankets for the oceanside resorts in Ohio and Nevada. California and Florida will be a scuba diver's paradise, problematic New Orleans will be gone for good and Cincinnati just might be the new Venice, with no competition from the old Venice, which will finally meet it's inevitable fate and sink into a watery grave!

There's a whole lot to look forward to! There will be a lot less land around but on the other hand most of the world's population will have drowned with the polar bears so that means fewer mouths to feed! The glass will be nearly full! The endangered species of ocean fish will bounce back strong with all the food they'll have to eat, the formerly starving human masses and whatever other land animals join them in the drink. And America will have pretty much most of our nuclear arsenal still intact so we can keep on bossing the world around, however much of it is still above water. And think of all the hydroelectric power we'll have on tap! With Canada ice melting, the Mississippi will be a two miles wide and moving like the rapids in the Delaware River. The Gulf of Mexico will be twice the size with half of Mexico under water and the Rio Grande will become a raging torrent so the problem of illegal immigration is solved too!

And if you happen to be a map-maker, well, there's boom times ahead since none of the continents will look remotely the same. They'll be tiny in comparison to today's world and we'll need new maps for everywhere on earth. And if you live in the Sahara, the good new is that it won't be a desert anymore. Of course the bad news is that it will be it will be part of the Mediterranean Ocean, which will graduate from being a mere sea, but your vexing days of trying to eke out a living in the burning sands will be over. Permanently. Drought won't be a problem anywhere anymore, good news for Arizona and the rest of the dusty American Southwest, and that's a plenty good enough reason to be cheerful.

Those of you who make a living charting the oceans will be very busy indeed since there will be so much more of them to chart, and the great oceanic currents that determine the planet's weather like the Gulf Stream will be altered too, so meteorologists can look forward to boom times as well. Our huge skyscrapers like the Empire State Building, Petronas Towers and the Shanghai Bank Tower can be converted to lighthouses in the portion of them that rise above the waves, navigational aids for mankind's seafaring survivors. And winter coats and snow shovels will become curious antiques from a bygone age. Who knows, maybe even global warming will spell the end of hockey, that most vexing and boring of sports. Now there's a real win-win situation and another sound reason to remain cheerful.