Accentuate the Positive

I don't have a problem with being negative.  Now, I am positive in most parts of my life.  I get along with most people; I try to appreciate the good in them, and in things that happen.  I have a lot to appreciate and be thankful for.  I try to make sure to point out the positive.  From stopping to smell the roses, to bigger things in life and the world.

Like America- there is lots of good in it.  But in conversation, and on here, I often point out the negative in politics, history, etc.  If you don't want to talk about the negative, if you want to sweep things under the rug, then you are not really talking about reality.  If you want to ignore things... Well, then, I am not on your side. I want to talk about it.  People say things like "slavery was a long time ago- why talk about it?"  Because its effects are still being felt, and we need to understand what happened in order to understand what is happening.  If you say things like that, you obviously don't understand much about it, so we definitely need to talk about it.   If there are problems in your town, your relationship, your business, you need to talk about them in order to make things better.  If you ignore bad things they create more problems later on.

South Africa had a "truth commission," where stories came out and the public learned, and was able to move on.  We never had that, and many people wanted to sweep the past under the rug.  And now, we have generations who are ignorant of history, and not only don't want to talk about bad things, but will vociferously insist that they do not exist, and never have.  

Plenty of Republicans nowadays want to "make America great again."  It's hard to figure out when, exactly, they want to take us back to, but the '50s seem to be a common time, when they think things were great.  There was a lot of good stuff going on then, but there was also a lot of bad.  I think people tend to think of their childhoods as "the golden age," and a lot of conservatives now must have grown up then, like Trump, thinking things were good for them so they must have been for everyone else.  Yes, the '50s, when you could beat up protestors, and call people before Congress for being "un-American."  Such pleasant times.

A lot of reality is negative.  There's positive too, and we need to build it up.  But we can't ignore the negative, because ignoring it doesn't make it go away.  Talk about it, learn from it, move forward and make things better.