This Week in Windsor Park: Beautiful Thoughts for Difficult Times
By Tony Mussari

“If you have a dream, go after it. Don't let anyone tell you, you can't do it.” D.J. Gregory

For the past two months, Kitch and I have been working on our new project, Beautiful Thoughts for Difficult Times.

The premise is simple. Just about everyone we know is hurting in this economy. Beyond that, all of us have road rashes caused by mistakes, misjudgments, life experiences, and sometimes, just plain old bad luck.

We live in a society that is changing in ways no one ever dreamed possible. Family life, gender roles, churches, schools, neighborhoods and media are much different today than they were when I was a youngster.

The digital revolution has made life better in some ways, but far less personal in others. We are connected 24-7, but we are very unconnected in ways of the human heart.

We live in a cycle of all news all of the time, but so much of the news is about people who do outrageous and horrible things.
This is not just an opinion. In April, Kitch and I did a study of the evening news. Every night, for thirty days, we watched the news with a pen and paper in hand. We not only watched and listened, we classified the stories.

Night after night the plot was the same, man's inhumanity and indifference to his fellow man. The impression was the same, we live in a threatening world. Only the characters changed.  They were more ingenious in the way they violated every rule of human decency.
At one point, Kitch swore off the news. "It's too depressing," she told me. What a comment coming from someone whose professional life was spent covering the news.

By the end of the month, I had a much better understanding of why many people feel so alone. Why others feel threatened by a cycle of crime and violence that fills the headlines with stories that make us lock our doors and worry about our safety.

Layer on top of this the way the "Great Recession" is limiting our choices and you get a pretty good picture of the ways people are hurting.

People need encouragement, something that will remind them of the power of the human spirit. Something that will counter the notion that everything is going to hell in a hand basket.

Beautiful Thoughts for Difficult Times is our attempt to fill the vacuum. It is our attempt to showcase people, places, things, ideas, values and experiences that will give people hope. It is our attempt to sound a note of optimism that tomorrow can be better than today.
Beautiful Thoughts for Difficult Times will be positive in tone, encouraging in nature and refreshing in outlook. It will be peaceful not contentious. It will look at things through a different lens.
It is not an attempt to change or alter the news. We need to know what is going on in our cities, towns and states. We need to better understand the complexities of the world.

On the other hand, we need to know that every thing and every one is not evil personified. We are surrounded by good people doing good things. Even in these challenging times, we live in a world of beauty, grace and opportunity. Beautiful things are everywhere, you just have to open your eyes and your heart to find them.
So this week we launch Beautiful Thoughts for Difficult Times because we believe that people need hope. We believe in tomorrow, and we want to build bridges that will connect people to a better tomorrow.

Like all undertakings that come from the heart, there have been some false starts and disappointments. But we are determined to move forward because so many of our friends have encouraged us not to give up on the idea.

We do not have a Beautiful Thoughts web site, but we have licensed the Beautiful Thoughts for Difficult Times URL. We do not have a major sponsor, but we do have a friend working on a syndicate. We do not have a media sponsor, but we do have one or two radio stations broadcasting the 8 demos we produced for radio. Four other demos we produced for television are playing in the Windsor Park Theater. Another friend has arranged to have our Beautiful Thoughts published on a regional web site.
 
All of our Beautiful thoughts material will be available in the Windsor Park Theater. (www.windsorparktheater.com <http://www.windsorparktheater.com/> )

We ask you to help us make Beautiful Thoughts for Difficult Times a reality by sharing stories, pictures, and poems of encouragement and inspiration with us. We will incorporate them into Beautiful Thoughts that will give people hope during these difficult times. Please send all materials to our gmail address. tmussari@gmail.com

Attached to this e-mail you will find two of the radio demos we produced. We ask you to listen to them and provide feedback to our gmail address.tmussari@gmail.com
Until the next time, we hope that all of your stories have happy endings.
 
Tony & Kitch Mussari
Musari-Loftus Associates, LTD
www.windsorparktheater.com
tmussari@gmail.com