Trying to work up some old-fashioned outrage this morning reading the Wall Street Journal story about how Wal-Mart is sending HR mopes to tell managers that if the Democrats win in November, unions will come in and everything will go to shit.

But I found myself scratching my head instead of pounding the table.

Let’s see: Wal-Mart has about a million employees in the U.S. Spread across 50 states, so they average out to roughly 20,000 per. Now what percentage of those employees—and Wal-Mart’ll have to reach them cleverly, as it’s illegal for companies to electioneer to their hourly workers—are going to be moved by their employer’s political persuasion? Super-optimistically speaking, maybe a thousand in a single state?

Is Wal-Mart so strategically keen to keep the union out that it’s occupying hundreds of HR staffers to conduct these mandatory meetings and condemning the PR staff to a week in the bunker and marring its new green Sustainability Suit, all for a few hundred votes in a few important states?

Or are we maybe dealing with something a little less rational here?

My friend and colleague Tom Daly, editor of Vital Speeches of the Day, improves my mood with this Twain quote:

“Talking of patriotism what humbug it is; it is a word always which always commemorates a robbery. There isn’t a foot of land in the world that doesn’t represent the ousting and re-ousting of a long line of successive ‘owners,’ who each in turn, as ‘patriots,’ with proud swelling hearts defended against the gang of ‘robbers’ who came to steal it and did—and became swelling hearted patriots in their turn.”

—Mark Twain, U.S. writer, Notebook May 26, 1896

I’m not immune from the grinding fear that things might get real shitty, and I know for some people, they already have.

But so far, the economic downturn has:

• Raised the price of gas to the point that even the least environmentally conscious of us are thinking and talking and open to new ideas about energy and sustainability and other ideas that bored us all to death two years ago. (Gee, I haven’t heard the term "tree-huggers" in a while, have you?)

• Served us our first reminder since the sudden death of "the new economy" (remember that one?) that you can’t always get what you want. (And that banks can be sharpers, too!)

• And, as of today, put Bennigan’s out of business. One down … TGI Fridays to go!

So you’ve gotta take the good news where you can find it is all I’m saying.