If you want to be unhappy, it’s easy.
Focus on all the bad shit.
Gianni Infantino is unhappy. Really unhappy.
Infantino is the president of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association. He’s hosting the Qatar World Cup.
He’s unhappy about 3000 years of European oppression, the rapacity of capitalism, and the rapid enfranchisement of women in various cantons of Switzerland, just to name a few things on his list.
(And, yes, there are other people unhappy about the lack of beer.)
A lot of shit to be unhappy about for sure.
But jeeeeez. So many good things: extraordinary athletes from all around the world united by their passion for the game. Thirty-two nations together. Competition, celebration, dance. And for millions of spectators, joy.
This brings me to Thanksgiving.
A holiday in the U.S.
There are lots of people who are unhappy about it.
Some are unhappy about the holiday itself: the travel, the inconvenience, the social pressures.
(Oh, and the overeating and over-drinking. You see, there’s definitely no lack of beer.)
Others are unhappy about the holiday’s etiology: colonialism, oppression, genocide.
This camp sees Thanksgiving as a commemoration of conquest and subjugation, as Pamela Paul of the New York Times suggests.
But jeeeeez. There is so much goodness about Thanksgiving: a holiday unencumbered by gift-giving, the gathering together of families, and celebrations of joy around a festive table (many, for the first time in long pandemic years).
I do not diminish Infantino’s concerns or Paul’s truths.
But it’s easy to see bad.
Everywhere you look.
And good too.
A Ukraine refugee who gets to watch the World Cup from a shelter in a foreign land, and experiences a moment of hope.
A homeless family in Philadelphia that gets to enjoy a warm Thanksgiving, and sees the kindness of strangers.
This isn’t popular to say: But the world isn’t binary; it isn’t divided into good and bad.
Anne Frank, hiding from the Nazis, wrote, “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”
You can focus on the bad.
Or you can focus on the good.
What you focus on you’ll surely see.
Happy Thanksgiving.