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A very excited reader named Charles Harner had a question:
Why not just be happy?
Which wasn’t so much a question as it was an epiphany, a plan, a resolution, if you will, for the impending new year.
“We have started complaining too much,” he said. “We see things in such a negative light.”
And it is bringing us – all of us – down.
He thought of this before the sun rose Dec. 21, the day that was supposed to be our last, according to ancient Mayan lore, which we can now assume was translated incorrectly.
He had rousted his family out of bed, too, and at exactly 4:12 a.m., a minute after the world was supposed to end, they all posed for a photo and smiled.
They look happy.
Eventually, I assume, they all went to bed, assured that there would be a tomorrow.
“And then I woke up with such a positive attitude,” he said. “I saw a path of healing.”
He saw that it was time for a new beginning, not an ending. A time for each of us to commit to being more positive, which, he theorizes, can in turn make the world a happier place.
“No more hate,” he said in subsequent emails. “It starts with one family at a time and one city at a time. Teach your family not to hate, and we will not have the tragedies that have recently plagued us.”
Charles Harner, third from right, poses with members of his family at exactly 4:12 a.m. Dec. 21 in Albuquerque. Although the world did not end, as some predictions warned, it was the beginning of a goal to live life in a more positive way, Harner says. (COURTESY of CHARLES HARNER)
I suspect that many of you might have taken a call like Harner’s and thought: What a goofball. And I did, too, a little.
I also thought of how impossible Harner’s quest for positivity seems in a world that has of late made us cry more than sitting through a matinee of “Les Miserables.”
I mean, really, how are we supposed to be so gosh darn positive while falling off the fiscal cliff and bumping our heads on the debt ceiling? How do we smile weeks after a troubled soul walks into an elementary school and guns down 20 children? How do we laugh when firefighters are shot dead trying to save the burning home of a madman? When Mother Nature rips apart whole communities? When our leaders let us down again and again and again? When it’s easier to get a gun than a good psychiatrist? When homeless people die alone on our streets?
How do you do positive in the numbing negativity of 2012?
You look, Harner said, to 2013. You change your perspective, clean the slate, refocus. You hope. You try to make others happy. The rest, he said, will follow.
Perhaps.
Days after the Dec. 14 shooting in Newtown in which those 20 angels and seven others were slaughtered, I watched with interest as shock turned to grief, then to rage, then to wanting to do something, anything to make it all better.
Many people sent their thoughts and prayers. Some raged against guns and lack of mental health care.
Others hoped things could fill the void. An Albuquerque radio station collected thousands of teddy bears to send to the children of Newtown. An Albuquerque high school penned more than 1,000 signatures on a 70-foot banner to send to a school in Newtown.
Similar items came by the truckloads from across the country to tiny Newtown, population 27,500 or so. Such an outpouring led Newtown officials recently to beg the public to please stop burying them under mountains of stuffed bears and gifts and other gestures of good meant to turn something negative into something positive.
Positivity, it appears, needs to be spread out a bit more.
Then there was also NBC News correspondent Ann Curry’s suggestion to commit 26 acts of kindness to honor those who died that day. The idea has gone viral, spawning the frequently trending #26acts on Twitter and a “26 Acts of Kindness” Facebook page that has, last I checked, 87,123 “likes” plus thousands more on the more than 70 similar Facebook pages.
Think of that. Positivity fanning out across the country, thousands of kind acts inspiring thousands more, good deeds creating good, creating a little happiness out of despair.
Maybe Harner, with his similar idea of spreading joy by being joyful, is on to something.
“How high that highest candle lights the dark,” goes a line in one of my favorite poems by Wallace Stevens. “Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.”
Happiness may not change the world, as Harner imagines. It almost certainly will not prevent the next Newtown, the next financial crisis, the next random act of stupidity or hate. That will take work, common reason, courage.
But, for now, maybe the best we can do is gather together in kindness and compassion and hope that something better will follow.
So here’s to 2013. Be happy.
UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Joline at 823-3603, jkrueger@abqjournal.com or follow her on Twitter @jolinegkg. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal
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