LIFE A SERIES OF PLEASANT SURPRISES

As we look forward to the new year, 1996, bright with the promise of hope for a better tomorrow, a new beginning in which we can put aside our fears and build a more perfect world, I would like to add, as a personal note, my own sincere, heartfelt belief that this is really a crock.

I know, the approach of a new year is the time to make optimistic noises about how day by day, in every way, we should be getting better and better. But I’m sorry, folks: Things are not going to get much better.

The overwhelming probability is, 1996 will have pretty much the same quantity of meanness, deceit and boneheadedness that 1995 had.

This is the kind of comment that earns you tsk-tsks of disapproval. “How can you be so pessimistic?” people say to me.

Well, I find it very easy to be so pessimistic, because I’m a pessimist. And glad to be one, too.

There is this image of the optimist as a sunny soul with a smile on the lips and a song in his heart, and of the pessimist as a Gloomy Gus moping around with a perpetual cloud over his head.

I don’t see it that way. If I were an optimist, I’d be miserable.

After all, an optimist is a person who believes that things can get better. If I thought that things could get better, I’d be driven crazy by the fact that they hardly ever do.

As my tough cousin Rocco, up in New Jersey, put it: “If you’re gonna bet that things will get better, they’d better give ya at least 8-to-5 odds.”

Here is a realistic forecast for 1996:

There will still be wars being fought here and there around the globe, because one bunch of people doesn’t like another bunch of people’s looks, or doesn’t like the words the other bunch mumbles when it prays, or wants to graze its cows where the other bunch is grazing theirs, or because they believe getting rid of the other bunch will make the world the more perfect place we were talking about in the first sentence of this column.

There will still be lots of people ready to conk you over the head or stick a gun in your face so they can rob or rape you, or simply because conking you over the head is their idea of a good time.

There will still be huge numbers of people who are sick or homeless or starving.

And huge numbers of people who could help the sick, homeless, starving people but just can’t be bothered.

And the New York Jets will still have a lousy football team next year.

If you’re an optimist, this is a tough row to hoe.

But if you’re a pessimist, this doesn’t get you down so much, because it’s no more than you expect.

Instead, you are pleasantly surprised whenever anything good happens.

So, I go through life being pleasantly surprised whenever someone displays some kindness, or a plan actually works out the way it was supposed to, or two warring factions take a step in the direction of peace, or a politician chooses honesty over demagoguery.

Life is a series of pleasant surprises, which improves my disposition immensely.

And it makes me happy that my efforts can make things a little bit better, not wringing my hands because I can’t solve all the world’s problems.

I’ve got half a mind to start a Pessimist’s Club. Its motto will be, “Whoopee! Ain’t it great that things aren’t always as rotten as we have every right to expect them to be?”

Folks say an optimist will see a glass as half full, while a pessimist sees it as half empty. That’s true.

But what they don’t say is that the pessimist also feels lucky nobody stole the whole glass while his back was turned.