What plays out in our daily news today would have been very shocking only a few years ago. We hear and see things in the news that violate all civil rules for good taste and decorum. Social mores and acceptable behavior have changed dramatically in less than a generation.

Some folks go through life singing, no matter what their circumstances. Such was a friend of mine, a little lady named Elsie, who died May 8, 2009 at the age of 95. One of the last things she did was to sing a hymn with her friends at her nursing home.

Hers was not an easy life. Reared in poverty in Dallas, Texas, she and her older sister, Jessie, who died a few years ago at the age of 94, as children entertained themselves by singing. They sang the songs of their day and they made up their own songs, most of which they never forgot and continued to sing much later in life.

The doctor's words hung lifeless in the air. Each of us gathered in the waiting room tried desperately to translate what our ears were hearing into coherent thoughts. All eyes stared about the room at faces that did not register the weight of this proclamation. Jackie was dead.

Zimbabwe. Iceland. Greece. Is America next? The growing weight of an overwhelming national debt combined with at least twenty lethal, economic "trigger mechanisms" has created a financial "nuclear time-bomb" for America. And, as the world just witnessed in Greece, debt can devastate a nation.

Perhaps you have heard the saying, "If you are happy, you are not paying attention"? Look at the world around us. Billions of people are living in abject poverty. Starvation, disease and violence are bringing countless lives to a premature end. Millions are jobless, unable to provide for their families. Many more are stuck in low-paying, unfulfilling jobs, struggling under crushing debt. Hard-working people who have saved for decades are watching their life's savings dwindle away.  Economic stress adds to pressure on relationships, while millions endure unhappy marriages or experience painful conflicts between parents and children. If you are unhappy, you are certainly not alone. As we see so much unnecessary pain in the lives of people we care about, can we think of three good reasons to be unhappy?