Tragic events involving crocodiles seemed to co-incide yesterday. As the media noted the first anniversary of Steve Irwin’s death, they were also reporting the death of a girl in PNG, dragged from her village by a crocodile. Awful stuff.

If that wasn’t enough, the night before, the new Mythbusters series started on SBS, with the first episode covering the Hindenburg, and… how to escape from crocodiles.

Two thoughts spring to mind:

A couple of months after Irwin’s death, I was chatting to a journo who had spent a fair bit of time with him over a few days. He said he really was the larger-than-life, full of enthusiasm person he appeared to be on TV. You can poke fun at him and the whole Australia Zoo phenomenon, but he does appear to have been a genuinely nice person who loved life, his work, and his family.

When it all comes down to it, most of us in the western world have pretty cushy lives. Okay, so some of us are facing health issues or homelessness or other things like that. But most of us have it easy. We might never have all the money we’d like, or all the stuff we’d like, but we’re not going to starve to death, be sent to work into factories among noxious chemicals, die in senseless violence, or be dragged from our homes by crocodiles.

All in all, we’ve got nothing to complain about.

So cheer up.