8. A shift by the United States away from unilateralism toward multilateralism. The relative loneliness of the United States in Iraq has underlined the need for cooperation with other nations on specific issues and initiatives. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, clearly with the approval of President Bush, is cultivating alliances with European powers, and nations like Russia and China, as these coalitions seek collectively to curb the nuclear weapons ambitions of North Korea and Iran. There is even recognition of the helpful role that international organizations like NATO and the United Nations can sometimes play.

9. Corporate executives who have bilked their shareholders by diverting millions of dollars of profit for personal gain have paid severe penalties in fines and imprisonment, thus hopefully setting the stage for higher ethical conduct in the upper ranks of the private sector.

10. Finally, we can all be grateful for the freedoms we enjoy that are nonexistent in some other parts of the world. We may take freedom to follow our respective religious faiths as we will as a matter of course. We may exercise freedom of speech as a given, affording us the right to speak out against our government, our leaders, our politicians. We assume it is normal to travel in our own country without documents and identity cards. We consider it a given right to change jobs and professions without having to gain permission from some bureaucrat. Yet such basic freedoms are unknown, or carefully regulated, and subject to severe punishment if contravened, in various other countries.

In a world overladen with the dark shadows of conflict and disharmony, it is well to remember the goodness, generosity and idealism that pervades much of mankind, and the freedoms that some of us enjoy and seek to extend to those yet to achieve them.

(Finally a note of apology to those readers who wrote to correct a misstatement in my column last week. In referring to Plymouth, Mass., I said it was the site of the first European settlement in America in 1620, thereby overlooking the settlement of Jamestown, Va., some years earlier. I should, of course, have called it the first European settlement in New England.)

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John Hughes is editor and chief operating officer of the Deseret Morning News. He is a former editor of the Christian Science Monitor, which syndicates this column. E-mail: hughes@desnews.com