You really can't have a "sense of proportion" and be terribly put out by the world today..
"Trin Tragula — for that was his name — was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.
And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion."
Deep Thought of the Day brought to you by the Permian-Triassic extinction and Soviet casualties in WWII.
I don't think the future is particularly rosy, but it ain't gonna be that bad.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I visited the USSR back in 1986, went with my grandmother as part of a peace group. Everywhere we went there were statues and reminders. Even in the smallest schools there were plaques on the wall for those from that school were killed in the war - and special collections, which the children were expected to study, of the history - and memorabilia. They want to make sure that no one forgets.
We stopped once for a meal at a retreat way up in the Caucasus Mountains (we heard later that it was KGB, but it was the only place to eat for miles!) and even they had a small museum dedicated to the war...
Since we were a peace group, we met with other peace groups. And at the time there were still quite a few who had experienced the war among them. I remember one older lady especially - she'd been a nurse during the war - and she asked us that when we went home to be sure to tell our president that they wanted peace. Still chokes me up to remember her, she was so emphatic and sincere.
I know we have issues with the government, as we had then. But the people remember and they never want to experience that again. 
