“Everyone’s so depressed,” a friend said to me recently about the months since the Bush re-election. They must be glum if they’re looking for cheer from me, one of nature’s misanthropes. But I’m all you’ve got.

Here goes.

Only very dim people, who have clearly failed to grasp the situation we’re in, aren’t depressed. So good for you. Intellectually, you’re in good nick.

Here’s a list of reasons to be cheerful; no, scratch that, ways to trick yourself into laughing. Other generations have managed it. The Lost Generation barnstormed through the 1920s to slam, full speed, into the Great Depression. But some had the wit to move to Paris to write novels, sleep around and, okay, drink themselves to death. It may not sound uplifting, but it’s better than doing what we’re doing, moaning that the polar bears will be extinct by the time we get off the couch in 2008, by which time the rising waters of global warming will already be lapping at the porch door.

You had four years to make sandbags. Hessian was cheap. Sand was free. Your job had been outsourced by globalization; you had nothing better to do with your hands.

But no, you were numbing your mind with the worst Idol This, Idol That television ever made while the years leaked away. Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Andrea Dworkin and Susan Sontag died and Abu Ghraib wasn’t levelled. All plastics were revealed as poison. One of my favourite websites, the witty, fearless and lefty rabble.ca, explained to me that my moisturizers are killing me. Yes, phthalates are leaching into my brain. That explains a lot.

Here’s what helped: books, music, friends, friends’ children, food, laughter.

Rufus Wainwright, the ex-Montreal son of Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright, made two new CDs, and I listened in awe and elation. Once a druggie, our Rufus used to go blind and cry all day (much as I do when forced by my job to read something by the Fraser Institute). And now we are all the better for a scruffed silk voice and a little cabaret in rock music.

I read strange books feverishly: acres of political satire and dissections of the Bush administration, every one of an odd 1990s publishing bubble on the subject of rats, and the galleys of a Rebecca Solnit book called Hope in the Dark. Yes, she thinks there is some.

Ms. Solnit posits that good people should rejoice in tiny bits of progress instead of despairing at the lack of giant leaps. For instance, she might suggest you hail Nike’s finally revealing its secret list of sweatshops, sorry, factories, for Canadian goods rather than complaining that they didn’t hand over profits to destitute shoe-assemblers. Can’t win everything.

Tomorrow marks the 20th anniversary of LEAF, the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund, which has fought since the birth of the Charter and Rights and Freedoms for the rights of women and girls, autistic children, aboriginal residential school kids. . . . You name the stomped-on and LEAF has done its bit.

Good things can come from pain. This month saw the 20th anniversary of the Toronto killing of Barbara Schlifer on the night she celebrated becoming a lawyer. The clinic established in her name has been helping bruised and bullied women ever since.

So has Dr. Henry Morgentaler, who will be given an honorary doctorate on June 16 by the University of Western Ontario. What a gleaming honour for the university itself. Western, no offence, but I used to think of you as six degrees of stodgy, instead of young and fearless. But with this, you’ve outdone every university in Canada and made your students look awfully good.

I bought Sorry Everybody, the coffee-table book of American Democrats apologizing to the planet for their election results. A hilariously depressed teenager writes: “I missed the voting age cutoff by a few months. I’m sorry my parents didn’t shag sooner.” She didn’t ask to be born. She asked to born sooner. You’ll go far, Queen of the Stroppy Teenagers.

I visited my friend Tennyson, who is 4, autistic and getting smarter every day with her educational therapist. She rubbed her face against mine and gave me one of her Lauren Bacall looks. Mmmm, baby.

My friend Buzz, who is 6, sent me an Easter gift of a painting of a tree growing sunshine.

I prefer children to adults. Admittedly, adults don’t make you play Tent in the backyard, and kids have little to say on the latest Chomsky. Still, it’s an animal love.

Then I went to an oyster restaurant. I hate food, generally, but it keeps me typing. The owner’s eerie resemblance to Paul Bernardo always ruins my meal, but it’s not his fault, poor man. The night was a disaster and exemplified why Toronto irritates Canadians: Attitude combined with cash-hunger. The Malpeques were out of stock, the corked wine smelled like a bear’s armpit, and then we were asked to leave for sitting at our table past an unannounced economic deadline for eating units; new spenders wanted it.

So we went to Rodney’s Oyster House, where they’re friendly, the wine is fine and the oysters lie back and sigh happily.

Stay strong. As someone once said, step right, step left, breathe, repeat. Try to be kind. Donate money to a good cause. Smile at a street hooker as though she were an actual human being. Welcome a new Canadian. Treat your senses, buy good books, listen to Rufus and his sister Martha. Vote. Eat in places that treat you well even though you are nothing but shambling lovers in a dangerous time.