Back in the ’40s, Woody Guthrie stuck a message on his guitar: This Machine Kills Fascists. Today’s humble home troubadour might go with a different slogan: This Machine Kills the Global Entertainment Complex.

The best defense against the stream of mediocre, soul-crushing, at at times downright wicked content our media assails us with in the name of “pop culture” begins at home. Keep a guitar around. Learn to play. Have sing-a-longs. Get your kids to play. Start a family band.

Whatever happened to just being wrong? “Spreading misinformation” is what we like to call it now, a passive-aggressive way of saying “you’re lying but you’re too stupid to realize it.” It’s patronizing and it portrays skepticism (about certain handpicked, sacrosanct views, at least) as immoral. Those questions you say you’re “just asking”? People will die. The people most vocal about saving us from misinformation never seem to be concerned that they’ll fall for it.

In his conversion memoir Surprised By Joy, C.S. Lewis attributes his early vocation as a writer to his utter inability to do anything else with his hands: “It was this that forced me to write. I longed to make things, ships, houses, engines. Many sheets of cardboard and pairs of scissors I spoiled, only to turn from my hopeless failures in tears.”

The importance of gratitude cannot be overstated. How can we cultivate it during the other 364 days of the year? Mindfulness is one popular suggestion. Savor each breath, each bite of food, and live in the moment. But despite its widespread reputation as a benign, “science-based” cure-all, mindfulness has its pitfalls.