Columns

I think that most people today are, unfortunately, very negative and downright unhappy and it seems few individuals have anything positive to say anymore.

I have had numerous conversations with friends or family where all they did was complain and complain some more, and it really makes me wonder why. Why are we so unhappy and dissatisfied?

Recently, I spoke with someone close to me who struggles with depression and anxiety. A counselor told her to make a list of all of the good things in her life; things that she was thankful for and a general counting of blessings.

Another year has come and gone and as 2012 leaves and 2013 enters at least as I write this we face the fiscal cliff. With regard to this topic and what astounds me is how many people don't seem to get it. This is not a matter of whether tax rates should be changed and on which class of citizens or should I say which wage earners should be hit for the bill. This is a matter of 538 out of control senators and representatives who are hooked on spending other people's money. Yet people are not mad enough at them yet. Instead they choose to fight with each other.

Jim:

Dogs were a part of growing up in Jim Thorpe in the 1950s. We shared a back yard with my grandparents. Midway between our house and theirs was a dog coop with a pair of beagles. When I was five, my parents bought me a fox terrier we named Buttons. He was a frisky little guy, short of hair and springy of leg. He liked to run around the yard, while I shot plastic balls at him from a bazooka-like air gun. I don't think those balls had anything to do with what happened to him on Christmas Eve 1953.

We'll never know the reason why a near-genius 20-year-old would invade an elementary school with an assault rifle and slaughter 20 innocent children and several adults.

"He was smart," a friend said of killer Adam Lanza. "He was like one of these real brainiac computer kind of kids."

Shockingly, the so-called smart kid began his spree by shooting his mother in the face several times. But we'll never really know why the disturbed young man of small-town Connecticut was so evil.