Try to find an uplifting story in current events. It will take awhile.
My daughter came home with a school assignment that should have been easy but turned out almost impossible.
"I'm supposed to bring back a story about good news,'' she said.
Loyal readers know I reference my 12-year-old daughter frequently. If it's too often, I apologize, but she does offer a perspective not found in of my other circles that are dominated by aging, hardened souls.
She also has a positive, can-do attitude. She must get it from her mother.
Finding good news these days is not an assignment, it's work for a masters thesis. She looked in the newspaper and online and came up empty.
"Everything is about Ebola,'' she reported.
The underlying message of this brief experience bothered me. When I was growing up, my father was in Vietnam for a year and race riots spread across America, so I know what it's like to be young and surrounded by bad news.
What I don't remember is the saturation level that exists today. There is more media, of course, a 24/7 cycle that makes gloom virtually inescapable.
It's more than that, though. It's understandable, but it's not healthy.
Mark Twain gained fame during the tempestuous post-Civil War era as the only American who could still make people smile. We could use him today.
The Twains of the 20th Century were once found in the Republican Party. While Democrats spoke of poverty, injustice and threat of annihilation, the GOP reminded us we were still Americans, which meant it would all work out in the end.
Jimmy Carter spoke of a "national malaise,'' and heard he was the cause of it. Carter was derided as a mope, and Ronald Reagan rode into the Presidency with a promise that it was "morning in America.''
If it's morning again, America acts as if it's paying the price for a 48-hour bender. Maybe it's the media's fault, though I am told the nicey-nice stories that do get some play are generally overlooked in favor of big viewing numbers for crime, disease and economic misery.
Purveyors of cheerful, anecdotal stories are generally older, often octogenarian. The younger adults, stressed to the max with demands of a modern society, often have no interest in being patted on the head, and no sense of humor about it, either.
Candidates for office often don't describe a tomorrow that will be better, only one they think can be less bad.
Even I may be succumbing. A MassLive.com commenter wrote that I always sound angry.
I got angry just reading that. Which proved his point.
What bothers me most is that the old Republican "it will all be OK'' mantra was self-serving to their goals, but did serve a purpose. Being overwhelmed by the depressing news will make our days worse without making the news better.
I worry about how it's affecting kids. In an ideal world, they would be allowed to cling to a naive optimism at least for a while.
My daughter is extremely well-read, but turning her loose on the news makes me nervous. I would rather she not absorb the details of a beheading when she is 12.
To satisfy her assignment, though, we dug into the news. Gas prices have dropped below $3 in some places, and most people would consider a good thing.
A MassLive.com story by Nick O'Malley told us there are more flavors of M & M's than ever before. She was pretty happy about that, but she didn't think that was her ticket to an A.
"What about the Kansas City Royals?'' I said. "They hadn't made the baseball playoffs in 29 years, they were one of the worst teams for almost all of that time and now they're going to the World Series. It's a great underdog story.''
It reminded me of former Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren's remark that the sports pages reported the achievements of men, not their failings, which could be found in the news section.
Maybe that's still true, unless you're reading about the NFL, where an arrest a day keeps the good feeling away.
Last I heard, my daughter was worried she would flunk. I asked why.
"I did the Royals,'' she said. "I hope the teacher wasn't a Baltimore Orioles fan.''