Laughter eases woes

Recently, I got into a crash with my dad's Jeep. After getting bawled out for a good two hours, there came a point where we both realized insurance would cover the damage. Despite the increase in premium he'll get, I was all right and that's what mattered. At this point my dad turned to me and said, "This is what I get for being such a difficult adolescent."

We both had to laugh at that.

The world could learn a lot from this type of incident. While the US fights two wars and a recession, things look pretty glum. It is at this precise moment, however, we must have a sense of humor. Amid all of this news, it's important to find something that is a little funny about the situation.

The U.S. has spent the last 60 years in relative good times, and we've been taught if we support business, we'll all be better off. Well, so much for that.

Companies ship jobs overseas. Our country is frantically trying to hang on to the last of our manufacturing enterprises. Taxpayers are essentially paying the wages of auto workers, who through no fault of their own, work for corporations that cannot compete in the same economic structure that we tried to convince the rest of the world would bring exorbitant wealth to the Earth.

American International Group (AIG), an insurance company, decided to give its upper echelon workers $165 million in bonuses. I wouldn't care about that, except it's coming from the federal bailout money. The bailout money is coming from my taxes, and I'm also paying these idiots $1,000 for a deductible on my dad's truck. Maybe they could use 1/165,000 of the money to spot me.

OK, it's not hilarious, but in a tragic way it is sort of funny.

With the news that writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel (and his charitable organization) lost everything to Bernard Madoff, I had to notice a certain irony. Wiesel survived years as a prisoner to the Nazis, but in the twilight of his life he couldn't survive one evil man. I hope Wiesel can take a look at that fact and have a morbid chuckle. It would be good for him.

Plenty of people can laugh at their own misfortune. If you have a chance (and a somewhat vulgar sense of humor), visit www.fmylife.com Every day, people log on to anonymously share their tales of misfortune. Topics range from sex to kids, from work to love. Every person has a two or three sentence anecdote to tell of an unfortunate event. These people, however, have found a site where they can share in the collective awfulness of their human experience and laugh about it.

Money isn't everything, but in our society it has become so incredibly important to us. The worst part of this economic crisis is people have lost sight of that. When the news of Madoff's Ponzi scheme hit Wall Street, people jumped out of buildings, realizing they had lost everything. That is not funny. I only wish those people could stepped back and take a look at the bigger picture. There's more to life than all of this bad news.

Almost every day, you can find one thing in the news that is so incredibly ironic you have two options: laugh or cry. Our mission as humans should be to keep to laughing. Get others to laugh. Encourage happiness in your neighborhood.

For now, you'll have to excuse me, I'm going to go watch the news and laugh at our national debt, Bill O'Reilly and Buffalo sports teams. After that, I'm going to think about the newspaper job that won't exist for me when I get out of college. Ha-Ha.