^{Originally published on BabyCenter.com December 11, 2015}

My bus ride into work the other day featured somebody behind me who was very upset at the driver. Over and over, he kept muttering to the person next to him, “That f***ing foreigner.” It was one of the more depressing ways I could have started my day.

Effing foreigner…spoken as though the word foreigner was a slur. As though being a foreigner was a bad thing and as though the driver was less of a person because of the place he was born. The venom with which the person spat that word lingered in my head for the rest of the day.

Certainly, there are about a million worse words that could have been said, but sometimes the way somebody uses a word speaks louder than the word itself. And since America has seemingly lost its collective mind over the past couple of weeks, this extra dose of xenophobia was the straw that broke my back.

In addition to my wife, who is always an amazing sounding board for my thoughts, three people helped me get out of my shocked, depressed funk and move on with my week. Two of them are under five years old, and one of them is in his 90s.

The ones under five are my kids, of course. As real people (not just politicians, who I rarely classify as people) spout some of the most insanely ignorant and hateful things I’ve heard in years, my kids are happily oblivious to that bigotry.

Kids are the future, and the future can be excised of some of the uglier baggage that burdens our present. The more overwhelming the world gets, the more effort I put into spending time with my kids. Hands-on parenting works wonders, so hopefully having enough hands-on parents today will make tomorrow a happier time.

Further away from my home, the other thing I found uplifting this week is that former President Jimmy Carter’s metastasized cancer has gone into remission. For those who missed his story, he had melanoma which had spread to his liver and brain. He’s not cured, because a cure doesn’t exist, but he is in remission.

As somebody whose day job places him close to the cancer field, this news blew my mind. To a person, just about everybody who I talked to about this when his cancer was made public said something along the lines of, “Well, at least he’s had a good long life.”

All logic says that Carter should be on his deathbed. Fortunately, he kept fighting and listening to his doctors, and now he’s got more years in front of him [Editor’s note: he lived to 100]. The story is uplifting in both what it says about the human spirit and what it shows about how modern medical science can create miracles.

There’s some connection between Carter’s situation and the general depression that hit me due to the “foreigners” thing – probably some metaphor about bigotry being a cancer on society. But I’m not really going to reach for that. I’m just trying to gather some uplifting current events to combat the frightening and depressing recent news.

Hope for the future combined with actual proof that perseverance pays off even when things look bleak. Right now, that’s all I have to offer, and it’s what works for me right now.