For a year now I have been calling American television, sickovision. Now Michael Moore comes out with a movie called Sicko. Is there any connection?

Consider this. The Tennessean recently published a picture of a man and a woman casually leaning against a wall on each side of a Sicko movie poster and they are both smoking. What does that photo tell us?

I believe Americans have lost almost all sense of cause and effect. We think we have the right to spend our money on smoking and then we also have the right for someone else to pay $99,999.99 or even more, to cover our smoking related medical bills. Does that make sense?

We spend our money to overflow our bodies with meat and sugar many times a day (making ourselves overweight and diabetic). Then we expect somebody to step up and cover our medical costs when we have heart disease and diabetes.

We fill our minds with the mental, emotional, and spiritual trash of sickovision. After consuming huge helpings of violence, negativity, and sexual immorality, we expect someone to pay for our health insurance to cover counseling and antidepressants.

So what could the American health care system accomplish if we removed all the self-produced and preventable sickness from our society. Wow! If we would live responsibly, we could easily cover everybody with health care insurance.

So are Sicko and sickovision related to each other? Yes indeed! The things we put into our bodies and our minds have a hube impact on American health care costs! Michael Moore, why not do a movie called “Prevention — Saving Our Health Care System By Living A Responsible Lifestyle That Prevents Physical And Mental Maladies”?

If our generation had been America's Founding Fathers, the Bill of Rights might read like this:

Ratified 2007

AMENDMENT I

The right to be unkind, rude, insulting, and offensive to others.

AMENDMENT II

The right to engage in random, casual sexual behavior with any "adult" who consents -- with or without a condom.

AMENDMENT III

The right to use vulgar, profane, and offensive language whenever and wherever a person so shall choose.

AMENDMENT IV

The right to live without being exposed to religion and/or God -- especially in public schools.

AMENDMENT V

The right of mothers to hire doctors to slay their unborn babies.

AMENDMENT VI

The right to inexpensive cable TV so that everyone can afford to be entertained by watching senseless violence, sexual perversion, and deliberate decadence.

AMENDMENT VII

The right to participate in homosexual (man-to-man and woman-to-woman) marriage with the government's (and public's) full approval and blessing and financial benefits.

AMENDMENT VIII

The right to bare arms and thighs and breasts and belly button and any other body parts and thereby arouse sexual feelings in strangers.

AMENDMENT IX

The right to ignore traffic laws -- especially the speed limit.

AMENDMENT X

The right to call evil good and to call good evil and to teach and encourage others to do the same.

Now, I don't know about you, but I much prefer the original Bill of Rights!

I recently heard some statistics on one of the TV network mornings shows. They said that Americans buy one billion bottles of water a week and that 38 billion plastic water bottles go into our landfills each year. (That’s "billion" -- one thousand million -- not ”Brazilian”.)

Whew! That’s a bunch of bottled water. Think of all the plastic and money down the tubes. They also said that 24% of bottled water is tap water. But, don't worry. America has the safest public drinking water in the world according to those morning show statistics.

This is the saddest statistic that they gave. They said 1 in 6 people in the world have no access to save drinking water.

Buying bottled water wastes tremendous amounts of plastic, landfill space, energy, and money. Is it morally right for us to waste the world's resources buying bottled water when we have the world’s safest water supply in our faucets?

Commissioner Robert Goodell recently spoke about the NFL’s stricter conduct rules to all 255 members of this year’s draft class. He told reporters: “We’re making players more aware of the standards of behavior.”

Goodell also said: “We’re concerned about them (the new players) as men. How do they become not only great NFL players, but how do they become great men? How do they conduct themselves appropriately for the remainder of their life, not just when they are in The National Football League?”

Goodell’s vision of upstanding NFL players is a wonderful but extremely difficult goal. (How can you have wholesome NFL players in a society where it’s very tough to even field a class of wholesome fifth graders?) The NFL can have wholesome players but it will take a firm, consistent commitment to discipline, enforcement, and training in personal development.

The NFL teams do a great job of training men to play football. Now the league needs aggressive and effective training camps for successful living. Somehow they need to graft on to their players’ passion for football, a passion for personal morality, character, and greatness!

Goodell has made a good start. I hope he carries on. Our sleaze filled society desperately needs examples of wholesome, honest, upstanding men!

Motivation Quotation: “We may make the best of life or we may make the worst of it; and it depends very much upon ourselves whether we extract joy or misery from it.” –Samuel Smiles

Motivation Comments: One of our greatest human freedoms is the right to interpret our circumstances. We often cannot control what happens to us, but we always have the freedom and the right to decide what those happenings mean to us.

That is our freedom of choice. We can make the best of an event in our life or we can make the worst of it. And no one else can control our choice.

We can decide to pull joy out of our circumstances even if we don’t like them. Or, if we choose to do so, we can even pull misery out of pleasant events. But it is our choice!

How do you extract joy from negative or unpleasant events?

1) Ask, “What is good about this?” Then seek and find something good (even if it is only a very small good) about that event and continually make yourself focus intently on that good thing.

2) Find the humor in the negative event. One way to do this is to pretend that it is happening to a comic. I picture Lucy going through my painful experiences, and often it makes me chuckle. (It always makes me feel a wee bit better.)

3) Focus on and rejoice over what you have left. Don’t remain focused on what you have lost or suffered.

4) Determine to be joyful, not miserable and make every reasonable mental effort to maintain your joy.

5) Remember that everyday above ground is a very good day.

So how about you? Will you extract joy from the things that happen to you today? Or misery?