It is hard for producers of news programs to decide which fatal circumstances to put at the top of the hour. By the time you get to the happy story about the kid or the dog at the end, it is easy to wonder if it’s even worth it.

For the individual who begins with a sour view of humanity as the point of origin, none of this is a surprise.

Imagining that the human species was created fully formed as inherently and inerrantly good only to be sullied individually and perpetually by the momentary bad judgment of a single common ancestor makes beheadings and assassinations and murdered children something to be expected.

We need an intervention – maybe daily, even hourly – to prevent us from slipping further downward into a pit filled with vice and vermin. Ugh. Who wants to believe that?

I know what the adherents of that worldview say: you can believe it or not believe it, but it doesn’t change whether it is true. We have an authoritative document that describes our pitiful state, the stains on our souls, the marks on our foreheads, the sin crouching at our door.

Paradise is lost, and it cannot be regained in this woeful world. Or, without abandoning a realistic view of the challenging behavior of the human race, we can choose to aspire.

I don’t care if we were dropped from the heavens or evolved from the “lesser” creatures. It is when we do not succumb to our worse instincts that we rise above our proclivity to misery. That’s a choice we can make and being able to choose against those instincts is what makes us different from murders and massacres and missiles.

I know and admire lots of people who devote almost all their time to resisting the wrongs in the world. My wife sums them up in three words: they’re just mad.

A beautiful Sunday afternoon is made for carrying an angry sign about a political cause. A night at the theater must be only to see a brilliant work by a marginalized playwright. Your brand of ice cream is a political statement. And do not laugh at the foibles of others, especially if the humor is at the expense of people unlike yourself.

I am not a righteous enough person to live a life so principled. And I don’t know if I am a hedonist or just lazy, but I spend plenty of time hoping that when the history of this blue marble is discovered by the residents of some other planet, I will have been witness to and celebrant of what they find to admire.

Some very rich men who likely could have eradicated some scourge or disease if they had so chosen decided instead to spend 10 minutes in weightless rhapsody beyond the pull of gravity. In fact, they did privately what governments have done with public funds since everyone alive today can remember. They used their privilege to reach for the stars, carrying their symphonies and their poems and their dreams.

I have long appreciated the insight of Robert Ardrey who said, “We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were killers besides. And so, what should we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties, whatever they may be worth, our symphonies however seldom they may be played, our peaceful acres however often they may be converted to battlefields, our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk, but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”

Against good evidence, I am a person of faith.

I don’t mean faith in God – I have that, too. I mean faith that there will come a time that we will be known among the stars, as Ardrey said, not by how far we have sunk but how magnificently we have risen.

So, I am doing my part by limiting the time I spend fretting and fussing and fixing so that I make sure there is time enough to love.

(PS – Yes, I know where the phrase comes from!)