I write a lot about happiness and striving to be a good person, but unfortunately there is still a lot of bad stuff that happens in life. We all go through hard times, loss, suffering, pain, grief. It sucks. The Buddhists realize this and that is why the First Noble Truth is that we must suffer (dukkha). It is part of life.
I recently read a great book called Sarah's Key by Tatiana De Rosnay (I actually read it twice in a row I liked it so much). It was about the Holocaust and specifically about the arrest and deportation of Jewish families in Paris at the Vélodrome D'Hiver. I had never even heard of the Vel' D'Hiv before, but after reading De Rosnay's book, my eyes were opened to a whole new level of suffering through the eyes of a little girl during the Holocaust. The story was fictional, but the suffering was real. All of that pain and suffering during the Holocaust (or Shoah) was experienced by many many people.
I don't think suffering is something to be ignored. It should be remembered, always, like the Buddhists seem to say by putting it as the First Noble Truth, not the second or third. Remembering the pain of others is a huge theme in Sarah's Key. Never forget. Alas, many people do forget and choose to live in ignorance. I think this is the wrong way to go about it.
Alan Watts talks a lot about waves in his lectures. The waves of materiality, how particles act in waves and how this affects everything in our universe. The wave implies the trough, just as much as the trough implies the wave. You can't have one without the other. You can't have white without black, and you can't have light without dark. Life implies death, and death implies life. If we take this view on suffering, it can be looked at without the horrible connotations we normally associate with it. We don't need to be depressed in the face of brutality, suffering, and death. The bad implies the good.
We have many good things in life. Amazing moments, beautiful moments, wonderful relationships, and adventures, and experiences. But all these good things wouldn't be good if we didn't have something bad to compare them to. Everything is in relation to something else. So the next time you are having a bad day, remember that you have probably been through worse, and a lot of other people certainly have been through worse. And also remember that good days will come again, no matter how bad this moment is. It will pass. The trough implies the wave, the bad implies the good.