Is This Satire? Or Is It On The Level? _Nation_ Reader Needs Help...
Jorge Cruz Rodriguez
of Happiness
By Walter Mosley
The Nation
September 18, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142713/
"We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men
are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among
these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
Americans are an unhappy, unhealthy lot. From the
moment we declared our independence from the domination
of British rule, we have included the people's right to
pursue happiness as one of the primary privileges of
our citizens and the responsibility of our government.
Life and liberty are addressed to one degree or another
by our executive, legislative and judicial branches,
but our potential for happiness has lagged far behind.
As the quote above says (and does not say), freedom was
once the province of white men; now the lack of that
freedom and the subsequent loss of the potential for
happiness belongs to all of us. Our happiness is kept
from us by prisonlike schools and meaningless jobs,
un(der)employment and untreated physical and
psychological ailments, by political leaders who scare
the votes out of us and corporate "persons" that buy up
all the resources that have been created and defined by
our labor.
Citizens are not treated like members of society but
more like employees who can be cut loose for any reason
large or small, whether that reason be an individual
action or some greater event like the downturn of the
stock market. We are lied to by our leaders and the
mass media to such a great extent that it's almost
impossible to lay a finger on one thing that we can
say, unequivocally, is true. We wage a "war on drugs"
while our psychiatrists prescribe mood-altering
medicines at an alarming rate. We eat and drink and
smoke too much, and sleep too little. We worry about
health and taxes and the stock market until one of the
three finally drags us down. We fall for all sorts of
get-rich-quick schemes, from the stock market to the
lottery. We practice rampant consumerism, launch
perpetual wars and seek out meaningless sex.
Through these studies we create aberrant citizens who
glean their empty and impossible hopes from television,
the Internet and stadium sports. These issues, and
others, form the seat of our discontent, a throne of
nails under a crown of thorns.
Happiness is considered by most to be a subset of
wealth, which is not necessarily true. But even if it
was true, most Americans are not wealthy, and most of
those who are will lose that wealth before they die.
Besides, money cannot buy happiness. It can buy bigger
TVs and comelier sex partners; it can pay for
liposuction and enough fossil fuel to speed away from
smog-filled urban sprawls. Money can influence court
verdicts, but it cannot buy justice. And without the
bedrock of justice, how can any American citizen be
truly happy?
Happiness is a state of mind cultivated under a
sophisticated understanding of a rapidly changing
world. In times gone by the world didn't change so
fast. As recently as the early twentieth century it
would take a generation or more for knowledge to
double; now the sum total of our knowledge doubles each
year, perhaps even less than that. As technology and
technique change, so does our world and our reactions
to it. The Internet, gene-splicing, transportation,
overpopulation and other vast areas of ever-growing
knowledge and experience force significant changes in
our lifestyles every few years.
The pursuit of happiness implies room to move, but the
definition of that space has changed--from open fields
to Internet providers, from talk with a friend or
religious leader to psychotherapy and antidepression
drugs.
If you are reading this essay and believe that you and
the majority of your fellows are happy, content,
satisfied and generally pleased with the potentials
presented to you and others, then you don't have to
continue reading. I certainly do not wish to bring
unhappiness to anyone who feels they fit into this
world like a pampered foot into a sheepskin slipper.
Some of us are naturally happy; others have had the
good fortune to be born at the right moment, in the
right place. But many of us suffer under a corporatized
bureaucracy where homelessness, illiteracy, poverty,
malnourishment (both physical and spiritual) and an
unrelenting malaise are not only possible but likely.
One cure -- for those who feel that their pursuit of
happiness has been sent on a long detour through the
labor camps of American and international capitalism --
is the institution of a government department that has
as its only priority the happiness of all Americans.
At first blush this might seem like a frivolous
suggestion. Each and every American is responsible for
her or his own happiness, whatever that is, you might
say. Furthermore, even if a government department was
designed to monitor, propagate and ensure the happiness
of our citizens, that department should not have the
power or even the desire to enforce its conclusions on
anyone.
But the suggestion here is to expand the possibilities
for happiness, not to codify or impose these
possibilities. Our Declaration of Independence says
that the pursuit of happiness is an "unalienable
right." This language seems to make the claim that it
is a government responsibility to ensure that all
Americans, or as many as possible, are given a clear
path toward that pursuit.
This is not and cannot be some rocky roadway through a
barren landscape. Our world is more like the tropics,
crowded by a lush forest of fast-growing knowledge. The
path must be cleared every day. How can a normal person
be happy with herself in this world, when the
definition of the world is changing almost hourly?
What we need is a durable and yet flexible definition
(created by study and consensus) that will impact the
other branches of government. If we can, through a
central agency, begin to come to a general awareness of
what we need to clear the path to the pursuit of
happiness, I believe that the lives we are living stand
a chance of being more satisfying. If we can have a
dialogue based on our forefathers' declaration, I
believe that we can tame the shadowy government and
corporate incursions into our lives.
What do we need to be assured of our own path to a
contented existence? Enough food to eat? Health? Help
with childcare? A decent, fulfilling education? Should
we feel that the land we stand on is ours? Or that our
welfare is the most important job of a government that
is made up by our shared citizenship?
These simple interrogations are complex in their
nature. All paths are not the same; many conflict. But
we need a government that assures us the promise of the
Declaration of Independence. We need to realize that
the ever more convoluted world of knowledge can flummox
even the greatest minds. We need to concentrate on our
own happiness if we expect to make a difference in the
careening technological and slovenly evolving social
world of the twenty-first century.
c 2009 The Nation
James A. Donald
<jxr...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Why We Need a Government Agency to Defend the Pursuit
> of Happiness
On the level. It is a standard tactic to co-opt libertarian arguments
and slogans into totalitarian arguments and slogans by reversing the
meaning of relevant words - thus, for example, "liberation"