By Brendan McLaughlin

So many days have passed since my last post extolling the virtues of El Taconazo in Seminole Heights, some readers have considered the ironic possibility that I had been incapacitated somehow by that spicy fare. Not to worry. I am blocked, but only in the literary sense.

The truth is the news  has been so depressing lately, it has sapped my desire to add to the discussion. This has been one of those weeks where the litany of cruelty and stupidity chronicled in the morning newspaper and across the web has caused paralysis instead of the usual anger.

The Bin Laden tape triggered it. How depressing that so many have died since 9-11 while he lives to gloat and taunt. The administration's bait and switch from Osama to Saddam worked perfectly and it's still working. They’ve convinced us that attacking Al Qaeda along the Pakistan border lands (where the real Al Qaeda actually lives) is off the table. Barack Obama was ridiculed for even suggesting it.  Instead,  Congress obsesses over the surge as if a few thousand troops one way or the other is the central issue. And the President keeps advancing the fiction that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the plotters of 9-11 are fungible entities in the War on Terror.  I worry about this.  I also worry that the Trump Tower Tampa project won't get financing- which is idiotic.

This brand of media melancholia is common among those of us in the news business who are constantly consuming and regurgitating reports of murder, rape, extortion, child abuse, scams and scandals. It gets to you. Add to that the propensity of the media to report potential disasters that haven’t actually happened  but lurk just over the horizon and you develop a case of what  head-shrinkers call "free-floating anxiety".

The antidote for this despair is to look at your own life.

Health? Good

Spouse? Still (claims to) love me

Children? Free of visible tattoos and piercings

Then look at the circumstances of your friends and neighbors.  Chances are few, if any of them are chronically unemployed or have SARS. So if you're doing pretty well and people around you are doing pretty well, how bad could it be?  You'll never see that in the news.