Last night my wife and I attended a play at a local theater in our little town of Winona, Minnesota.  Locally written and produced, it represented the conflict between recent immigrants of Polish and German ancestry during World War I.  It was a delightful performance, complete with a love story, yet laced with the realization that life isn’t perfect as we struggle to make sense of it.  Today the religious and ethnic conflicts that existed in 1914 in a small Minnesota town seem laughable, but they weren’t trivial at the time.  Indeed, the short-run view is often bleak, but in the long run everything works out for the best.

Speaking of short run bleakness, while I slept last night eighty Chinese miners were killed in a gas explosion, an over-loaded ferry sank in a squall in Indonesia, and sixty Democratic senators in Washington decided to debate a proposed health care bill that could portend a medical and economic nightmare.  Meanwhile, this week we learned that US Attorney General Eric Holder is going to conduct the show trial of the century in the heart of New York City by giving Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a world stage to blaspheme against democracy, the United States, and Islam.  We know this will be a show trial because President Obama has predicted the outcome and the Attorney General himself has stated that “failure is not an option” with respect to the conviction of these suspects.

The preceding paragraph represents just one week of bad news.  It occurred to me this week that all of us might be better off to look at the positive (long run) side of life, rather than to be bogged down by crisis after crisis.  As shadowed by comments of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, it is the purpose of the Obama administration to continually foster an atmosphere of disaster, calamity and emergency to achieve its political ends.   After all, even the most wrong-headed legislation can be passed during a crisis.  Throughout history the world’s most notorious despots and dictators have used short-term crisis and panic as a reason to convince their fellow countrymen to abandon individual freedom and liberty.

Free men and women, be of good cheer!  Be vigilant.  If your local congressmen have partaken of the purple cool-aid served to them by Commissar Barack, you have no choice but to use your financial resources and persuasive skills to abruptly end their congressional careers in 2010.  Be not discouraged!  Remember that discouragement and hopelessness are precisely what the Obama administration depends upon to control its subjects.

When I look into the faces of my students at the University I’m not prepared to tell them that their future will be one of energy shortages, unemployment and futility as they struggle to exist on a doomed planet.  I’m not one to tell them that they won’t have the incentives or capital to start their own businesses and they should instead aspire to some dead-end government job.  You’ll not hear that pessimistic garbage from me.  I want them to be entrepreneurs, inventors, captains of industry and proponents of freedom and prosperity!  Don’t preach pessimism.  While we are now in a dark valley that our (elected) masters have created, we need not stay there long.  The dawn of a new day begins on Tuesday, November 2, 2010!