Good morning, digital neighbors! Happy Monday, ADD Irregulars, Coffee Talkers, and WSN Curators. Hey there, Phamily, all you Misfits and Politically Homeless, and finally, all our Friends & Refugees, Early Birds & Late Dayers, Conversants & Lurkers at the Rubin Report. How about a few quotes and thoughts about humor and laughter this week? After faith, few things matter more to me than a good sense of humor, shared laughter, and a willingness not to become totally bogged down in the drama of culture and society. Be aware, but don’t be held hostage by the spirit of the day.

Burt Bacharach wrote that what the world needs now is love, sweet love, and he wasn’t entirely wrong. But these days, what the world needs now is a sense of humor. It used to be the Uptight Right, the Religious Stiffs, and Moral Prudes that had no sense of humor. Move aside, Moral Majority, and make room for the mentally ill, the emotionally mired, and indoctrinated minds of every bad relational frame spawned from our broken colleges and universities of higher contamination. As Thomas Sowell is fond of saying, “Some ideas are so bad only an intellectual could believe them.” I think he is paraphrasing George Orwell. Either way, it is amazing that in my lifetime the Right was passed on the inside lane by the Left and its moralizing wokeism which has contaminated so much of our culture in the West.

We were chatting at Coffee Talk the other day that people don’t have a right not to be offended. Someone, somewhere is going to disagree with you. GASP! Say it isn’t so! They may have a different or opposing opinion. Worse yet, if they have a sense of humor, they may direct laughter at your most treasured ideas and poke fun at things you take so seriously you can’t joke about them. Sure, humor can be mean-spirited and demeaning, but I think that has to be illustrated; just having hurt feelings is not enough to say it is mean-spirited. You can’t go through life always waiting to be offended and ever arrive at the shores of contentment.

No amount of medicine or therapy can fix a broken attitude and a wounded perspective. You must want to change; many do not. I don’t understand why so few seem to ever ask if the way they are seeing things, their expectations about relationships, or interpretations of the world might be the problem. The one thing you can actually try to change is yourself, your attitude, your expectations, and what you choose to focus on in life. Laughter and humor can help defuse the temptation to make too much of ourselves and our self-importance.  A few quotes about laughter and humor, and off to your Monday, dear neighbors!

"The most wasted of all days is one without laughter." — Nicolas Chamfort

"If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane." — Robert Frost

"There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor." — Charles Dickens

Lake Blanche Trail- Salt Lake City, Wendi Wells - Unsplash