To listen to the news or especially in reading social media for your news, you can be wading into a sea of negativity, criticism or often, outright hatred.

Daily dosing yourself with this detritus of the human mind can feel like you are walking straight into Lake Michigan. It gets deeper and deeper until it’s too late to turn back, just as negative or yellow journalism rots your soul until it’s too late to think clearly.

You need to be up on the news, but you must read with discernment. Considering discernment, author Aldous Huxley said, “The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim … he believes himself to be free.” Roman author Pliny the Younger said, “Everyone is prejudiced in favor of his powers of discernment.”

It seems to me that this contributes to the friction and strident tone of today’s politics. I’m right and you are wrong, now get with it. Most of us have our opinion on myriad subjects and there is very little use of discernment.

My first tool of discernment is to determine if the speaker is positive, not Pollyannish, but genuinely positive. Because being positive can shape outcomes to the benefit of all, just as negativity can to our detriment.

As promised, let’s look at how the great minds of the past have weighed in on this subject:

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity. An optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty,” Winston Churchill said.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.”

These two men had an awful lot to be negative about around July 1940 through the summer of 1945, but they never gave in, gave up or quit. (Did you know they were cousins?) Finally, Helen Keller said, “Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.”

I choose to meet the challenges of the day in a positive way. Always. Unflinchingly. Where do I get my general philosophy of optimism? I am an optimist because I know that God is in charge. The world is in His hands and I am special to Him. Luke 12:7 declares, “But even the very hairs on your head are all numbered.”

When the world seems to be spinning out of control, our leaders are repeating mistakes we should already have learned, when we see history repeating itself and recall that man learns nothing from history, I am greatly comforted by the fact that God cares so much about me, that he numbers the hairs on my head. “If God is for us, who can be against us?” – Romans 8:31. So I surround myself with positive people and do my best to be that person to others.

And remember what another author, Herm Albright, said, “A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.”

• William Peterson recently retired to Ottawa after working in the hotel industry for 40-plus years. He can be reached at dbarichello@shawmedia.com.