Get a grip, then grab a drumstick

Congress is on vacation. Maybe it’s time for the rest of us got get a grip…

Despite the yowls and caterwauling from left and right the country’s not in the dire grip of demonic forces nor do we face imminent and total inundation by whatever manner of bad-stuff the fever-minded partisan of the moment may dream up.

We may be going through somewhat of a self-inflicted rough patch, but the truth is, we all have it pretty darn good.

Anybody who doesn’t think so didn't grow up with a Grandma Miller to set them straight.

Actually Emma Miller was my great-grandmother, and she was old before I was born.

She died before I made it into third grade, but by that time she'd managed to let me know I had things pretty darn good. It was a lucky boy who kept warm without shoveling coal. Who had a sandwich without baking the bread. Who had a bus to ride to school.

She let me know that things weren't so good when she was a girl and how I'd do well to hush up and quit my complaining.

She had a point.

I think to her dying day she thought of electricity as a luxury and couldn't see how a self-centered 7-year-old could take it for granted.

But we take a lot of things for granted. Then we complain about them.

Like chlorinated water. We've scorned the water from the tap in favor of buying it by the drink, griping that city water isn't good enough for our taste. But then, never having to deal with cholera, we have that luxury.

From grandma's point of view, we have more luxuries than we probably deserve. Waking up in the wee hours of the morning with a need and not facing a long, lonely walk down the garden path is no small luxury. Not having to bathe in a wash tub on the kitchen floor is another.

We don't have to build a fire in the stove to brew the morning coffee ... don't have to split the wood for the fire either.

No doubt about it, the world is a cleaner, safer, nicer place than Grandma Miller remembered.

Cleaner? Consider -- we grouse bitterly when the neighbor's dog occasionally does its business on our boule vard. Grandma remembered the streets full of horses and not a pooper-scooper in sight. Our kids don't know what coal smoke smells like, and how many of your friends bathe more frequently than once a week?

Safer? Nowadays it’s headline news when two kids get in a fight on the playground, but she lived with Jesse James, Al Capone and Ma Barker -- a rogues' gallery to hold its own against the worst we can come up with.

The rest of the world is a lot less risky as well. Diphthe ria, measles and polio are just names on a vaccine bottle. Airplanes do a much better job of staying in the sky than they used to. And though we might not want to know what they put in cheap wieners, whatever it is, it's probably not deadly. Statistically, the most dangerous things any one of us is likely to encounter in the course of a day is our steering wheel, dinner fork or cigarette lighter – using any of those things still has a good shot at killing ya.

And are we nicer? Why sure we are. We've pretty much quit lynching people. There aren't any black-face minstrel shows and even schoolyard bullies are minding their Ps and Qs.

Cars stop for pedestrians. People don't smoke where other people can smell it, and guys don't pin up pinups any more. Yeah, politicians are nasty, but what else is new?

For most of us, life is good. Real good.

It's something to give a little thought to before we sit down to dinner tomorrow.