“Smile Darn Ya Smile
You know that this big world is a big world after all.”
That is the song and title of one of the early Warner Brothers cartoons, which came out in 1931. In today’s world it’s a little tougher to not be worried about what’s going on in our world and SMILE. My father would always say that positive thinking was so crucial to getting better, possibly the most important ingredient to getting better from ANYTHING.
We all need to keep positive, and try to keep our spirits high. Yes we’re going through something of epic proportions, and it’s hard to know what exactly will happen, but our grandparents (or at least SOME of our grandparents) had to go through the 1918 Spanish Flu, and we’ve gone through essentially 100 years of nothing of that epic nature happening again. There’s a tendency to think that this is a whole new experience to man, but it is just to several generations down that haven’t had such a horrible calamity. It’d be wonderful if it wasn’t happening, and at times this seems like a bad nightmare we’ll wake up from, but we will come out of this. We always do.
In Walt Disney’s classic “The Three Lives Of Thomasina” Patrick McGoohan plays a disillusioned vet who’s lost his wife and despite loving his daughter has lost a lot of his worth and love of living. When he first encounters Susan Hampshire, the local girl who happens to take care of animals at her cottage, she has just found a badger who has been caught in a metal spring trap, and possibly going to die. He looks at it and arrives quickly at the futile conclusion that the badger is beyond help, and that it would be more merciful to put it out of its misery. She insists to him that he has to try; that even if the creature goes through some pain that it’s always worth trying. As she states, “and wonderful to give him his life.” Life is always worth it, no matter what challenges are presented to us.
In Walt Disney’s classic “Pollyanna” the title character of Hayley Mills, an orphan, creates the “Glad Game” whenever obstacles are put in her way in life, to make better of any difficult situation and see the positive possibilities. It’s tougher to find those things right now, but it can be done. In that film Karl Malden plays the parish priest who likes to hammer into his congregation fearful sermons that will jolt them so the message will linger on until the next week, like “Death comes unexpectedly!”, making them more dour and negative than uplifted by God’s messages. Through Pollyanna he finds out that accentuating the “happy passages” in the Bible he can give and affect his parishioners so much more powerfully in a positive way. As he tells Pollyanna’s Aunt Polly Harrington (Jane Wyman) after the girl gets injured that the presence of Pollyanna in that town has made them all become better people:
“Let me tell you something Polly Harrington. Someday a miracle happened in this town… YES this town right out there:
The people are smiling at one another. Go on take a look for yourself, it’s very contagious.
Just think Polly if she had never come to this town.
We ought to get down on our knees and thank God for sending her to us.”
At the end of “Pollyanna” she is being taken away to get surgery for the paralysis on her legs, and the town, trying to encourage her, and realizing the effect this one person has had on their town, puts up a sign under the town’s name of Harrington, “The Glad Town”. We may never get this to be the Glad Earth, but we have to try to do so as much as we can.
We have to do things that will keep us positive for ourselves and all those we care for. Listen to music, try to watch some positive things, and DO positive things. Yes we have to watch some news, but we don’t have to watch it 24/7. It doesn’t change quickly enough for that.
My father said it to so many people all of his life. He said it to me so many times. We all have to be like Pollyanna during this time. We have to find positive thinking and play essentially the Glad Game. We have to do it to keep ourselves in the right frame of mind, and for those we love and care for. If we do we will come out of this much better for it, since life is so precious.
God help us all.
“Make life worthwhile. Come on and SMILE DARN YA SMILE!”
“The Glad town”