Accentuate the Positive!
By Theresa Camoriano
Our daughter just announced two weeks ago that she plans to marry the young man she has been dating for the past few years, and they would like us to make the arrangements for them to be married this July. We are very happy for them and now are scrambling around trying to get the arrangements made for the wedding. We have reserved the church and reception venue and the band. I have ordered the bridal gown for one daughter and the bridesmaid’s gown for the other, and we have bought a tux for my husband, so, as of today, I am the only one left without proper attire for the event. (I think that’s pretty good progress in only two weeks!) Unfortunately, it can be depressing to try to shop for clothes when you are as fat as I am, and I have not been looking forward to having to do it. I could obsess about that, become very frustrated at my inability to lose weight despite substantial efforts, and allow it to drag me down and diminish the fun of such a wonderful event. However, I am not going to do that.
Instead, I will acknowledge that life is not perfect, keep struggling to lose weight, find some dress that I hope will look alright, and focus my attention on the positive – how great it is that our daughter is marrying such a wonderful young man and how nice it will be to celebrate their wedding with family and friends and to meet many people who are special to our future son-in-law. By keeping the negative aspects in their proper perspective and appreciating all the positive aspects, I hope to have a great time myself and to provide a much better time to all the guests than they would have if I lost perspective and obsessed about the negative.
It is an unfortunate part of human nature that we often take for granted all the good things in our lives and focus our attention on the few negatives that bug us. Of course, such a negative focus makes us more unhappy, and isn’t so great for the people who are unlucky enough to find themselves in our company, either. If we could just change our focus toward appreciating all those good things, we would be much happier and, as an added benefit, we would behave in more positive, productive ways that would improve the lives of everyone around us. This is true not only on a personal level, as in the case of our daughter’s wedding, but also on a societal level.
For example, we live in a country that provides the best health care in the world, and we are very fortunate that entrepreneurs and businesses are continuously developing new medications, devices, and treatments that improve our lives even further. People like my mother who, in the past, would be in wheelchairs, are now able to participate in athletic events thanks to hip replacement surgery. These kinds of “medical miracles” occur so often that many of us tend to take them for granted.
So, instead of appreciating the amazing medical miracles that are available to us and appreciating what has enabled and encouraged these miracles to take place, many of us are obsessing on the negative aspects of our health care, such as the fact that some people do not have enough money to pay for the most advanced treatments. Unfortunately, those people who obsess on the negative and do not appreciate the positive aspects of our health care or keep these aspects in proper perspective tend to promote destructive policies that will end up making things worse for nearly everyone. They want to reduce or destroy the freedom of patients to control their own health care and reduce or destroy the ability of people to earn profits by providing good health care services, which will result in reducing the quality of services for the vast majority of people.
Just as Lyndon Johnson’s failure to appreciate the importance of having a father in the home as a foundation for successful children led to the “Great Society” welfare system that created incentives for mothers to have children out of wedlock and resulted in tremendous harm, so too will the current plan to destroy what is left of our free market in health care result in great harm.
When we take for granted all the positives and assume they always will exist no matter what we do, we are making a big mistake. That is not to say that we should ignore the negatives in our lives and in our society and not try to make improvements. To the contrary. Just as I will bite the bullet and go buy a dress and keep trying to lose weight, we also need to keep improving our society and trying to make health care services more affordable and available to more people. However, we need to make our efforts in the context of the big picture – not obsessing about the negative to the point that we fail to appreciate and even end up destroying the positive.
As the old saying goes, we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In the case of health care, the stakes are very high, because an out-of-perspective focus on the negative and lack of appreciation for the positive may very well result not just in greater unhappiness and human suffering but also in the premature deaths of many real, living people. That’s why we need to fight against the passing of legislation to implement Obamacare, and that’s why I plan to attend Tuesday evening’s candlelight vigil to oppose it, even in the midst of all our wedding planning!
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