Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

I’ve always tried to be an optimist, but I think my natural state tends toward realism with a hint of pessimism. Sometimes, optimism is at odds with the current state of reality.

If you spend much time reading the news lately, you might think there’s an ongoing civil war. My opinion is that you’d have to be incredibly ignorant to look at current events and not understand how decades of racial injustice, oppression, stagnant wage growth, and decreasing opportunities have led to social unrest. Add to that a new populist movement with authoritarian tendencies, and you’ve got a recipe for social tension.

I’ve spent a lot of time learning about history, particularly studying the events around the Second World War. By the way, there are multiple good WW2 documentaries on Netflix. I also recommend Oliver Stone’s “Untold History of the United States” series for an accessible way to consume historical content with some interesting perspectives.

One thing that fascinates me about WW2 history is the amount of positivity that remained against all odds. Life was incredibly difficult for anyone living in Germany, France, Britain, Japan, or any other place that became the site of battle. Countries were literally dropping huge bombs on major populated cities, and civilians were left to fend for themselves. Most people focus on the military aspect of war, but few tend to think about the ordinary citizens just trying to live their lives and get by while bombs were falling on their heads.

In occupied France, for instance, people created underground newspapers, helped downed Allied pilots escape, and maintained morale through small acts of resistance¹. The British “Keep Calm and Carry On” slogan exemplified this spirit, though interestingly, the now-famous poster was rarely displayed during the war itself².

I think about what’s currently going on in the world, and while it worries me, I also think we live in a relatively peaceful time with less to worry about compared to those darker periods of history (in the first world at least).

One thing that gives me hope about the future is the way people have decided to reject authoritarian tendencies through civil disobedience. This is something that, to the best of my knowledge, didn’t occur as widely in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power. For the most part, he consolidated control with relatively limited organized opposition.

The Internet and social media—for better or worse—has made it much more difficult for governments to act with impunity, because it’s relatively easy to share information. As long as people are free to share information unobstructed, governments face greater accountability for their actions.

A world without censorship is a free world. And perhaps that’s the bright side we can all look to—that despite challenges, we have greater tools for transparency and resistance than ever before. As the Monty Python song reminds us, sometimes the most powerful act is to whistle and “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”