Laissez les Bons Temps Rouler

My thought for the evening is one of thanksgiving. I'm not entirely sure why: my family and I are staying in what is truly one of the five worst hotels I've stayed in over the course of my entire life (and that includes the "Gent River Hotel", for those who remember one of my last humor blog posts, over a year ago). And yet something reminded me about human nature.

Why is it that we look for reasons to be unhappy or dissatisfied?

We Americans of the early 21st century are truly very blessed. We mostly have food on our tables and roofs over our heads and clothing on our backs. We generally don't go to bed hungry or die of exposure to the elements because of a particularly harsh cold snap. While food shortages affect other parts of the world and the rise in food prices makes some poorer of the denizens of Earth struggle with privation, we merely have to tighten our fiscal belt a little bit, but generally not our literal one.

It is only in an era and a society of such plenty that we could possibly care about some of the hot button issues in our political landscape today. Think back to the days of the Great Depression, when starvation and want were very real things in the United States. Can you imagine an issue like flag burning gaining any traction at all? If one politician promoted a plan which would make it easier for us to provide for our families and the other suggested that we should make banning public burning of the flag our top priority, who do you imagine would win? If the party in power failed to address the issue of starvation, would not the pendulum of public support naturally swing to the other side, to give them a chance to solve the problem?

Or consider the era of indentured servitude, when people would be trapped into a job by earning so little pay and having to purchase literally all of their basic necessities from the same company at greatly inflated prices that they simply dug themselves in deeper the harder and longer they worked. Can you imagine such a person supporting a public policy to ban gay marriage as anything like their top issue?

No, the truth is that we've become convinced of our own worth, that we some how deserve the plenty that we have, and that anything which threatens the merest fraction of the icing on the smallest tier of the cake is somehow a personal affront. There is not a one of us who will ever read this essay who works as hard as the slaves of colonial times, and so it is with a great deal of hubris that we complain when some of "our" excesses are taken away for one program or another to help those less fortunate.

And yet we will continue, because it is human nature, to take for granted what we have and forever look with yearning at the greener grass in our neighbor's yard, entirely unable or unwilling to recognize that he looks with longing at us lying in our hammock instead of sweating long hours over our own lawns. Which means in times of need we will vote for leaders who will help fill that need, and in times of plenty we will find something to feel dissatisfied over and then vote out the incumbents after every so many years for failing to address the trivial and pointless, even while they kept us from any but the most trivial of wants.

And in truth, there is a positive side to that coin; the need to forever find fault keeps us always looking for ways in which to improve. Perhaps without that side of our collective psyche, we might stagnate and die as a race, or not bother to take on the big challenges like launching objects into orbit or curing the big diseases, the things that underpin some of the very basis of our excess.

Still, though, every once in a while, we should stop and step back and think about how very lucky we are to live in this country at this time, when so many of our basic needs are being met that the very worst problem we can think of to argue over is whether two people who love each other should be allowed to formalize that love relationship, if their particular body types aren't a pairing we consider "naturally" paired.

Let us stop to think about which issues are actually actively important and which are simply proof that we have it too good, to be able to consider such things as in any way important.

Let us realize how great we have it. Then, and only then should be be allowed to emulate the Cajuns at Mardi Gras and say "Laissez les Bons Temps Rouler."

Liam.