"Clean-Cut Optimism"

My beautiful wife regularly reminds me, I am a cynical man. However, I argue that I am also an optimist. Sure, many of you might not agree with me or even find it feasible that a man can be a cynic and an optimist but it is true. I inherited my optimism through my Mormon ethnicity, as TIME wrote in 1997 Mormons are an ideal “combination of family orientation, clean-cut optimism, honesty and pleasant aggressiveness.” I love it when I read or hear the members of my faith described as “clean-cut optimists.” However, recently I noticed two areas where many of my fellow Mormons were not as optimistic as one might expect.

First, the recent presidential election. Barack Obama, a content family man with two children ran against a divorced gentleman whose second wife was only a couple years older than his eldest son. Obama’s platform harnessed the words of “Hope,” “Faith,” and yes, even “Optimism.” Mormons love these ideas and logically they would traditionally find this type of candidate appealing. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be, over 60% of Utah voted for McCain. Even more astonishing is how many “clean-cut optimistic” Mormons I have heard pessimistically describe the new president using words such as “afraid,” “fear,” and “hopeless,” hardly the vocabulary normally utilized by us Mormons.

The second thought derives from a recent book I read. I find it interesting that every time war is mentioned at church we “clean-cut optimistic” Mormons love to use the phrase, “wars and rumors of wars,” then emphasize how the world is full of so much violence. Granted, the USA has real problems with internal violence, but overall the world is a peaceful place. Think about it, Europe has not seen a major war since World War II, South America has not had a serious conflict in a couple decades and Central America experienced a round of civil disputes in the ‘80s and ‘90s but have been relatively quiet since then. Meanwhile there has been a lot of saber rattling in Asia but not much more than that and thus far we have been able to keep the Canadians at bay.

So where are these “wars and rumors of wars” that everyone keeps talking about? As Fareed Zakaria explained:

“A team of scholars at the University of Maryland has been tracking deaths caused by organized violence. Their data show that wars of all kinds have been declining since the mid-1980s and that we are now at the lowest levels of global violence since the 1950s. Deaths from terrorism are reported to have risen in recent years. But on closer examination, 80 percent of those casualties come from Afghanistan and Iraq, which are really war zones with ongoing insurgencies—and the overall numbers remain small. Looking at the evidence, Harvard's polymath professor Steven Pinker has ventured to speculate that we are probably living "in the most peaceful time of our species' existence.”

“Why does it not feel that way? Why do we think we live in scary times? Part of the problem is that as violence has been ebbing, information has been exploding. The last 20 years have produced an information revolution that brings us news and, most crucially, images from around the world all the time. The immediacy of the images and the intensity of the 24-hour news cycle combine to produce constant hype.”

In other words quit watching and listening to ALL NEWS but especially jerks like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, pretty much all of FOX News and perhaps the biggest pessimistic clean-cut Mormon of them all, Glenn Beck, they are negative to the bone and truly not helpful. I find it shocking how many of my fellow Mormons regularly indulge in these nay-sayers who definitely do not personify a “combination of family orientation, clean-cut optimism, honesty and pleasant aggressiveness.”

So…to conclude here is a picture of everything that exemplifies my optimism, my boy, Henry and his stuffed dog.