I'm a fairly upbeat person, but I have a bad habit that's responsible for the "fairly" part. Every morning, I check out CNN.com. This prevents me from being a "completely" upbeat person. If you want to put yourself in a dour mood, look no further than CNN's homepage. There you'll get a healthy (unhealthy?) dose of awful news: wars still raging, economy still sliding into the toilet, natural disasters killing thousands of people in some Third World country, politicians getting busted for doing something illegal, some horrific crime committed against a child, Chris Daughtry recording another album, etc.

This kind of stuff never used to affect me. It bothered me, of course, but there was a time when the bad news was like rain off a turtle's back. Yes, the world had a pretty high level of suckage, but as a young healthy educated working American male, I could be reasonably sure that awful things would probably not happen to me, or if they did, I could handle it. Having kids changed all that. Now I wonder, and worry, about what kind of world they're growing up in. These days, everywhere you look you see strife - we've become a nation of shouters, yelling about this cause or that belief, quick to judge those who don't see things the way we do, who look different than us, who believe in a different God (or no God at all).

Lucas, being four, and Zoe, being seven months, know little of our messy, gray world. He's geeking out over tomorrow's holiday; he sorta gets that we live in a country called the United States of America, and that generally speaking it's a great place to be. He's blissfully unaware of everything I mentioned in Paragraph One (although, at some point, I will need to sit him down and explain to him that his love of the music of Led Zeppelin and The Jonas Brothers is something that can't be reconciled, like matter and anti-matter). For him, July 4th is all about the beach and hot dogs and fireworks. He's not yet reached the point that I think many of us, regardless of our politics, have reached; we wonder about where this country's heading, and are not at all confident that our collective future is as bright as we once thought.

And yet, I was struck this week by the fact that perhaps we're moving past all the divisiveness. Lucas' new school is racially and culturally diverse; his teacher's an African-American woman, his classmates are black, Latino, Asian, Indian. This past weekend, I had the honor of being a member of Lucas's godparents' wedding party. Excuse me - I should say his GODMOMMIES' wedding party. When Lucas is old enough to vote, an African-American or a female Presidential candidate will not be a novelty, but a common sight. (Let's hope that the reverse becomes true of Old White Guys. On both sides, I should add.) To quote the great Randy Watson, I believe that children are the future (c'mon, y'all - you didn't think I'd get completely heavy and deep on you). If Lucas is any indication, I think that the country will be OK, and we're gonna have a lot more July 4th's to celebrate. And we'll possibly see D.J. Lance take the Oath of Office on January 20, 2023.