A Pretty Crappy Week...

Nothing makes things better
like hugging your horse.

Unless you've been living under a rock or in the one place on the planet untouchable by the vast reaches of the Internet, you know what a craptastic week it's been in the US.  How is one supposed to just trudge along through the day to day grind when it seems every day on CNN some new tragedy unfolds?

Do you ever just want to tilt your head back to look at the sky and scream, "What the heck is wrong with people??? Why can't we all get along."

I don't have the answers.  Greater minds than mine have wrestled with these questions and come up without answers.  I just try to be as nice as I can as often as I am able, and do my best to bring a smile to someone's face each day.  That's it for me.  I just try to establish a connection with people, and hope that connection comes back as good karma.

Because despite all we've seen recently, I believe people are basically good.  Shortly after the first Persian Gulf War, I was backpacking throughout Europe with my future husband.  We wound up in Turkey, working in a resort town refitting a yacht for the tourist season.  We met some wonderful people.  Many of the people we spent time with would ask us why we were so friendly with them, because they were Muslim and they knew the US mainstream media tended not to portray Muslims in a good light.  (I'm painting this in a very simplistic light because it's too darn long to reduce the whole area's history to a blog post.)

We were recent college graduates, knew nothing about politics, and were probably dumber than hell to boot.  We didn't know bupkus.  All we knew was these people invited us into their homes. They had kids that they cared about, whose futures they wanted to provide for.  They had older family members they cared for, jobs they worried about.  Long story short, although their culture and religion was vastly different than ours, we were still able to find common ground.

When ugly events happen, I try to remember that time and the fact that at the root of it all, people are the basically the same.  And remembering that, I try to keep putting good out into the world, with a smile, a cup of coffee, or a helping hand.  Because I have to believe, naive as that belief might be, that behavior like that has to win out over the kind of senseless crap we saw this past week.

Take care out there, and go hug your people and your ponies.