By now, I'm sure we've all heard Anne's famous quote about "in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." It's one of those lines that I can attribute only to naïveté based on her youth.

I thought for a while that I was becoming an optimist. Things were good with me in life, so I had a positive outlook on things. Now I see only that because things were going well for me, I was wearing the rose-colored glasses.

There are some good people out there. I try to be one of them. It's basically a rule of "if I wouldn't want anyone doing this to me, I'm not going to do it to them." But far more often, we hear about the bad things that happen and not the good things. A friend of mine told me today that she is the victim of identity theft, and one of my co-workers' car was stolen out of our parking lot this afternoon. The Ten Commandments state "thou shalt not kill," but we kill often in the name of God and the grand sanctity of our Way of Life. And it just gets me that people act this way -- they see nothing wrong with stealing or killing or what have you. There's no little voice in their head that tells them, "Hey, maybe we should join a bowling league instead of doing this."

I guess I'm just kind of disgusted with things and people. It makes me wonder how technological progress I'd give up to go back to a time when manners and kindness meant something, but then again, there's always been bad parts of society like slavery and Jack the Ripper. I think I'm about ready to go find my secluded breakaway Island in the Sun republic. Who's with me?