Thursday, May 18, 2006

Happy versus Unhappy (Rebuttal to Rob)

Here is the column as it appeared in the May 17th Dodge City Daily Globe.

A while back I wrote a column about being happy. I was for it. I received an e-mail from an old friend of mine. He was against it. He said being happy was over-rated and actually works against mankind. Part of his theory stated happiness leads to complacency and complacency leads to a kind of stagnation. He said Thomas Edison was angry about stubbing his toes on the furniture in the dark and that was why he invented the light bulb. According to my friend negativity, not necessity is the mother of invention.
I see his point of view. I am quite happy when I am sitting in my chair listening to good music and doing almost nothing else. At those points of my life I may be happy but I am not doing my part to end world hunger, promote a greater sense of understanding amongst people of different races and religions, or develop a clean renewable power source to save the environment. Then again, on my most productive days I might get the grass cut, some dishes washed and the laundry folded. None of which is exactly Nobel Prize winner material.
Negativity probably is a wonderful motivator. This great nation of ours was founded by a group of rabble rousers set on tossing out the king. We should thank them for being negative. If not we would have to drink tea everyday of our lives (yuck), even more of our friends and neighbors would think Benny Hill was actually funny (ack), and Wimbledon would be more important than the Super Bowl (gasp).
When you really think about it unhappy people probably have done more good for mankind. Susan B. Anthony wasn’t happy with the way things were. Mahatma Gandhi wasn’t happy with the way things were. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t happy with the way things were. George de Mestral wasn’t happy with the way things were. Who is George de Mestral you ask. George de Mestral was an amateur mountaineer from Switzerland who was not happy with the way things opened and closed so he invented Velcro, and now the world is a better place.
It is not just in the grand scheme of things that unhappy people effect the most change. It happens in the homes of normal everyday people all the time. If you are a parent of almost any age child this will be familiar to you. A grown person with logic and intellect calmly and politely explains to a young person the benefits all parties involved in the situation would enjoy if the young person would turn the music down and remove the dirty gym clothes from the dining room table so the family can enjoy a meal together. That style of approach elicits a blank stare akin to the one Alan Greenspan would get explaining how the Nikkei average affects the price of gas in Boise to Paris Hilton. (Heck, Alan Greenspan explaining Nikkei averages to almost anyone would cause blank stares.) The parent who has absolutely had it with the child’s slovenly manner and has resolved to create a Norman Rockwell moment around the dinner table even if it kills them, will yell at the kid to “get his junk off the table this very minute or he will be grounded until Chicago Cubs win the World Series.” This causes the child to move her/his lazy behind and do what s/he is told. Happy, calm parents may be what Dr. Spock and T. Berry Brazelton recommends, but frazzled and annoyed parents get results.
I will not go completely over to my friend’s way of thinking. I still think it is better to spend extended periods of time with people who are happy. Getting stuck in a room with people who believe (as Woody Allen once stated) that life is divided into two categories, the horrible and the miserable and one should be thankful if they are simply miserable is not my idea of a great Saturday afternoon. I do not want to go too far the other way either. I want to spend time with folks who are reasonable in their happiness, not so gleeful they make Kelly Ripa look like a character from an Ibsen play. If I am on a transatlantic flight I do not want to be sealed into the cabin of a 747 with a youth group singing camp songs and trying to talk the stewardess into making s’mores. Moderation is the key to all things.

Christopher Pyle once flew to London on the same plane with a youth group. There were no camp songs but the level of “cute happy” in the cabin caused him to contemplate using his seat cushion not as a floatation device but rather a suffocation device.

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