Would We Rather Be Right Or Be Happy? (or Being Right Makes Us Mad!)

So we have been at war for ten years and how is it going? How did this happen? I have to admit, initially I was for it. It was like hey we are going to catch or kill the people who financed, planned, and oversaw the 911 attacks. Well we accomplished that but, who knew it was going to take this long and cost this much and get so many people killed? I would not have agreed to the deal we got. I remember drawing a cartoon of a cruise missile flying up Osama Bin Ladan's butt, and thinking it was pretty funny. Of course cruise missiles cost a million dollars each and we were using them like a kid uses bottle rockets on the Fourth Of July. So now we're broke and we have not eliminated terrorism. It could be argued that with our drones and special operations we have become terrorists ourselves.

How is it that we become what we hate? I think it's because we hate. Still can we just decide to become a nation of loving people and never again sucker ourselves into going to war? I doubt it. I wrote about it once before but not in any detail. It's the grudge building thing, our national pastime, but probably not just ours. People all over the world seem to have this problem. Those idiots who attacked us ten years ago were grudge builders. Now we're suffering the inevitable consequences of our own grudge building. So why do we do it? Why is getting totally pissed off so damn popular? I think part of it has to do with our love affair with being right. We love to be right. We love it more than just about anything. I'm not sure we love being angry, maybe some people do. For some reason though it seems we have a need to justify our anger. It's like you're not supposed to get mad unless you have a really good reason. So if we're pissed off we better have a really good reason for it! It kind of makes sense until you really look at it.

We want to be right more than just about anything, and we need a good reason to be angry or we're foolish. So we justify our anger. You cannot get over your anger while you're busy justifying it. I think this is how we start a grudge, by justifying our anger. It's bad enough when individuals do it. When an individual builds a grudge it can have serious consequences. The worst kind of these we call "going postal." Nowadays it's not just Post Office employees who go berserk and start shooting people, and it's no longer a purely American phenomenon. School children do this shit, and it happens all over the world. As bad as this is it is nothing compared to what happens when whole countries engage in grudge building.

Every time a country starts a war it builds a grudge first. The politicians and the media collaborate in doing this. I'm not sure how conscious the effort always is but I suspect it's usually fairly deliberate....

(To be continued)

Russell