"America is Not a Happy Place"

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“America is Not a Happy Place”

February 23, 2024

 

“…happiness depends more upon the internal frame of

a person’s mind than on the externals in the world.”

                                                                                                                George Washington (1732-1799)

                                                                                                                Letter to his mother, Mary Ball Washington

                                                                                                                February 15, 1787

 

“Last Sunday the rain was making a fair imitation of Noah’s flood, so I

stayed in to read the paper. After ten minutes I’d lost the will to live…”

                                                                                                                Tom Cunliffe (1947-)

                                                                                                                British yachting journalist

                                                                                                                Classic Boat, January 2024

 

I am an optimist who looks to the sunny side, no matter personal or national setbacks. However, that attitude has become more difficult when looking at the state of our nation, especially when listening to and reading the news. We are angry. As a white male conservative, I am labeled a white supremacist. We have been divided into victims and victimizers. The individual has been subsumed by his or her identity group. Laughter is hampered for fear of upsetting someone or some group. In colleges and schools, books are censored for fear of being offensive, and safe spaces are offered, including segregated college dorms. The idea of an American mixing bowl has become passé. While George Washington, rightly, warned against “the imposters of pretended patriotism,” love for America is now ridiculed as the refuge of scoundrels, or MAGA Republicans. 65% of Americans feel the country is headed in the wrong direction. 

 

A 2021 study in the medical journal The Lancet found that 59% of America’s youth, aged 16-25, were “extremely worried” about climate change. More than half reported feeling sad, angry, helpless, and guilty about the changing climate. Yet the International Disaster Database reports that the number of deaths around the world related to climate change have fallen 98% since 1920. There is no question that climate is changing, as it has for millions of years. Yet the media and climate fearmongers suggest that by altering people’s behavior climate change will cease or moderate. It has become an industry, enriching thousands. Swedish activst Greta Thunberg who has made climate her life’s work, now has an estimated net worth of $18 million – about half from speeches – and travels the world on a 60-foot yacht.

 

According to the CDC, and with the exceptions of 2019 and 2020, suicide rates among Americans have risen every year since 2012. A 2022 study found that 88% of U.S. college students believe there is a mental health crisis on America’s campuses. A recent CDC study found that 13.2% of Americans are on anti-depressants, a 65% increase in the past twenty years. With the death of George Floyd in 2020, “defund the police” became popular and crime increased, especially in Democrat-run cities. 

 

We are told our country was built on the backs of slaves and that European settlers exterminated indigenous populations. There is no denying that slavery existed and that native American tribes were decimated and/or displaced, a history we should not forget. But we should also remember that those early settlers left Europe’s farms, towns and cities, with their homes, stores, and streets, for a desolate wilderness. Most were religious refugees, almost all were poverty-stricken serfs. They left for opportunities and the ability to pray as they chose. As well, ignored is that the Founders created a unique form of government, which provided people with more freedom than was available anywhere else in the world, and which it still does. And disregarded is the fact that immigrants continue to come from almost every country in the world, and that, with the passage of time, they become Americans – not British, French, Germans, Chinese, Ecuadorians, Nigerians, Liberians, Swedes or Indians. They come for the opportunities and freedoms America offers. Over the years, the image of a mixing bowl accurately captured the American experience.

 

Political leaders on the progressive left offer the false assurance of equity – equal outcomes – rather than what America promises – equal rights and opportunity. We are all different. Outcomes rely on ability, aspiration, and diligence; they can never be guaranteed except in a totalitarian state. And none of those states have standards of living approaching that of ours. Guaranteed incomes, free healthcare, and free college tuition sound wonderful but are not possible in the real world, and certainly not in a country where success is based on individual initiative, the rule of law, the right to own property, and free markets. 

 

A recent survey of elites by pollster Scott Rasmussen, conducted by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and reported by Michael Barone in The New York Sun, had some surprising findings: 47% of elites and 55% of Ivy League college graduates say the U.S. provides the American people with too much freedom. 75% say that energy, meat, and gas should be rationed to fight climate change. Half those polled would like to ban gas stoves, SUVs and gas-powered cars, despite the high costs of alternatives. Not surprising to those who pay attention to the changing demographics of the political parties, 73% of those polled identify as Democrats. This class divide is a consequence of progressive policies. To put a twist on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line from The Great Gatsby: Today’s rich are different – they have what they don’t want you to have.

 

Optimistic people tend to look to the future, marry and have children. Yet the number of Americans over 18 who have never married rose from 17% in 1970 to 31% in 2021. Fertility rates have halved over the same time. The Pew Research Center, in September 2023, reported that only 4% of Americans believe our political system is working extremely or very well. When asked how they think about politics, 55% say they are angry. Our borders are over-run. Church attendance has plummeted. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Lance Morrow wrote that it is not history that is false, it is when “grievance gets stuck in permanent rage, a tradition of hate that forestalls essentials of flourishing life: goodwill, acknowledgement of the facts of progress, the grace of forgiveness and what ought to be the healing effects of time.”  

 

Why are we in this funk? Is there a way out? Each of us will have his or her own answer. In my opinion, the tentacles of octopus-like government have consumed our lives. Our individuality has been sapped. We are members of different groups, be they religious, racial, sexual, or national, yet we are each discrete with varying degrees of aptitude, abilities, aspiration, beliefs, and work ethics. We should not be molded by the group with which we identify. Politicians find it desirable to compartmentalize us into easily identified groups, one source of our funk. Another is the media, more interested in propagandizing than in reporting the news. And a third are elites, those well-educated, woke, and financially well-fixed men and women, who too often express anti-bourgeois behavior as a way to signal their virtue.

 

As for a way out, just because the exit is not obvious does not mean one does not exist. In 1980, after a decade and a half of scandal, war and inflation, a good-natured and humorous Ronald Reagan appeared, who focused on the Soviet Union as the enemy, not Democrats. With luck, such an individual will reappear.  

 

Our Declaration of Independence states that the pursuit of happiness is a self-evident truth, an unalienable right that has been granted us by our creator. But just as our Constitution emphasizes restraint, our happiness should not be considered boundless, but “bounded liberty, to make wise choices that help us best develop our capacities and talents over the course of our lives,” as Jeffrey Rosen put it in The Pursuit of Happiness.  

 

But America is not America when she is not a happy place.