There are two ways to look at life.

One is to fill your days with bitterness.

The other is to see it for what it is: Literally a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Approach it to your last day as if it is all an endless pit of despair, your last thought certainly will be you were right: It was pure hell on earth.

If you do nothing but see evil, talk evil, and listen to evil all you will do in life is see evil, speak evil, and hear evil.

Those who seem to bellow the most — TV’s talking heads, disgruntled tweeters, boorish bloggers, career anarchists and their kissing cousin outrage du jour protestors, and old-fashioned in-your-face types eager to pick verbal fights one-on-one — are in overdrive.

They feast off the darkness and rue the light.

The bitterness many of us seem to harbor as the nation slouches toward the mid-term elections would perplex my grandmother.

Just 80 years ago, the nation was approaching its first mid-term election since the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

It was a dark foreboding time.

War was raging in Europe and the Pacific as the nation was plunged into World War II. Sons were going off to war where maiming and death awaited.

This came on the heels of my grandmother Edna Towle having struggled through the depths of the Great Depression abandoned by her husband while raising eight kids on a working ranch in Nevada County.

Then after losing the ranch she moved into Lincoln with four of her children who were still too young to go off into the world. In Lincoln, she worked three jobs while building a home for her family with her own hands.

There was a lot to fear of the unknown ahead. But she didn’t take to the streets complaining, cursing, getting into people’s faces or resorting to outright intimidation because things weren’t going her way. Nor did she start writing rant after rant bemoaning how the world was going to hell.

It was not because grandmother and her generation lacked Internet, social media or universal access to TV where people make a living 24-7 clucking as if they were Chicken Little on speed.

It was because they were too busy trying not just to survive but to make things better.

They would live with rationing. They would collect whatever materials needed as part of community drives to aid the war effort.

They would work overtime every day to supply the war effort. They prayed loved ones and neighbors flung across the globe in harm’s way would return home safely.

They didn’t have time to keep whining about politics. There was a war to win and a way of life to preserve. Had they resorted to wallowing in their fears and anxieties as many are doing now in this country, the outcome of World War II would have been different.

A can do attitude devoid of bitterness is a powerful thing as is bitterness magnified on the hype of fear.

They knew they could ill afford to spend their days cursing the world’s political situation. If they did, their dreams and all that their parents and they worked for would be gone and their children’s future darkened significantly.

We are not at the doorsteps of hell but a lot of us act as if we are.

Try toning down the rhetoric. Go on a verbal diet and cut out the cursing. Think before opening your mouth and closing your heart.

You alone cannot change the world but you alone can change your attitude.

No one is saying you need to overdose on sugar or drip your life in saccharine. Life requires balance and it certainly doesn’t need fakery.

More people, however, respond more eagerly to the sweet than they do the sour.

Throw acid on someone and you do indeed get their attention. But rest assured you also will create a bitter enemy determined to extract vengeance to even the score or at least make you pay for your attack.

My grandmother was no nonsense. She often did what was considered a man’s job running a ranch, building a house, and working multiple jobs while raising a family.

She could get angry but it was anger that was well focused and not cheapened by employing it with frequency over every perceived transgression.

Grandmother worked to hammer home three points that she learned as she made her way through the Great Depression and World War II that was handed down by those before her who braved sailing to a new world and then heading west to California long before there was any promise of gold to lure people here.

*Don’t carry a chip on your shoulders.

*Do something to another person because they did it to you, you are just as bad as they are.

*Be sweet.