From today’s post to the Jack’s Winning Words blog comes this quote – …“The world is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel.” (Horace Walpole)
The world has become much too scary a place recently to laugh at, especially right here in the United States. With the loss of civility in our country has come the return of the 
Wild Wild West mentality that seeks to resolve issue with guns and mayhem. Unfortunately, as a nation we have a long history of bowing to corporate and other special interest groups until it is too late and people have died. We bought into the message through much of the 20th Century that Dupont and other chemical companies could bring us “Better living through chemistry”. We now know that they brought us almost indestructible cancer causing chemicals and pesticides.
Certainly the pharmaceutical industry, the automotive industry and many other industries have always put the interests of profit above our safety and have lobbied our politicians successfully to look the other way and ignore us, too. Perhaps no lobbying group has been more successful at preventing or delaying changes that would help make us safer that the gun lobby. Even in the face of multiple mass shootings year after year, the NRA has been successful in blocking any and almost all attempts to limit access to and ownership of weapons that have no purpose other than to wreak havoc. The thought of a hunter stalking a deer through the forest with his semi-automatic assault weapon, so that he can unload a full banana clip into the hapless animal is ridiculous; yet the NRA continues to defend the sporting nature of ownership of assault weapons.
I won’t even start on the circus that is going on in Washington. Both thinking and feeling people have to be crying at that mess. Fortunately, we have another opportunity in 2020 to correct some of that and perhaps return to at least a sane approach to the governing of
our country. Until then, the nightly news will continue to be a litany of mass shootings and goofiness, prejudice and hatefulness from the clowns in Washington.
Until changes occur to return a semblance of sanity and civility to our country, there is a tendency to just hunker down and wait things out. That is not the right thing to do. There are many needs at local levels, from helping people recover from severe weather events to doing what you can to aid those in needs of food and shelter in your area. You may not be able to fix things at the national or world level, but you can reach out and touch those at your local level who need help. If enough people did that, things would start to change at the higher levels, too.
So, turn off the TV news. You know that it’s going to have stories about some mass shooting somewhere or some stupid thing that those in Washington just did. Instead, 
pick up your local paper and see what groups are asking for volunteers to help distribute food or to provide shelter or perhaps to offer help and counseling to troubled youth. Find a role and a place to help someone else. You may still have a need to cry, when you see how big the need is; but, you’ll end up smiling at the end of the day that you helped fulfill that need.
Yes, the world is not a funny place; but it needn’t all be a tragedy either – you can make a difference in your little patch of the world. Just do it!
NormsMilfordBlog 
It’s good to be receiving your blog again. Good words.