Some Thoughts From A Former Student

Nobody can truly be happy any more. Some people accumulate great wealth and do a great many good things with it, but there must be some unhappiness that drives them to do good. Maybe it is possible that there are poor, dumb people out there who have everything they need and are happy. They can only be relatively happy for there must be little annoyances, drama, and/or loneliness in every body's life. No in the postmodern world that we live in happiness is just a construct of a previous era like 'truth'. It is not something that can be truly attained. In fact there is no longer reason to believe that it is something to be obtained, or that it is even an 'it' at all. Happiness is a feeling with which we identify, but some of us have become aware that our use of grammar implies a lot about subject and object. That is to say we pose happiness as some kind of goal, at least I know I do, and we ignore the fact that we can only identify happiness as a feeling, but we cannot know when we are going to find ourselves in that state, and we certainly do not know how to put our selves permanently in a state of happiness. Still we say it is what we want. Misery can become a constant state of being in a way. Humans can suffer to the point where the slightest bit of good news can never outweigh the overwhelming problems at hand. This is the indifference of nature at times, but it is also the problem that the thinkers of the enlightenment and all of modern society set out to solve. The problem of poverty. And it has not been solved, and has only gotten worse to where we have a global 'Dickensian-ism' of sorts currently on our hands. Without poverty happiness might become something that holds weight again. It might be a reachable goal. Unfortunately there has yet to be a truly sustainable solution to poverty. Because of this impoverished mind set our whole race is rapidly becoming extinct along with millions of others. What I am saying here is that whatever it is that has made us unable to care for all of humanity has become an entity that is now destroying our planet. Obama is not facing his 'Katrina' in the gulf of Mexico, but rather his '9-11'. There is not a great evil out there that is perpetuated by some individuals, at least not in nature's view. We can sight specific incidents like the one in the gulf as the problem. But what leads to creating the system that allows such a disaster to happen. No I think we have to all take blame for what is happening to the world because this is the only productive way to move towards sustainability as a culture. Right now I pose that we work towards this goal of happiness with soft eyes and humility. This is a serious incremental approach to a problem that has never been solved and we should not expect this approach to appease nature, or be what we hope it could be, but I applaud any attempts to really work on a global community in the true sense of the words.