Happy or Not?

I’ve got writers block. Having recently found myself with some extra time on my hands, I’ve decided to concentrate on finishing the book that I’ve been half-heartedly working on for more years than I want consider. It feels good to be back at it and its moving along nicely, thank you. I’m getting pretty excited at the prospect of actually finishing a first draft. Those poor characters deserved better than to have their lives left hanging in limbo all this time.

No, my writers bock doesn’t have to do with the book, I’m glad to say, but with this little exercise in self expression, this blog thing. Every time I sit down to write a post I draw a total blank. Like I said in my first post, I’m very opinionated, so you’d think it wouldn’t be so hard. But it is.

I suspect that I may have reached that pinnacle of cynicism where, despite my strong beliefs in my correct opinions, I’m quite certain that no one really cares. Moreover, it is beyond impossible to change someone else’s opinion because they, like me, are married to them. And the things I’m so passionate about are the same things that people dig in the most about: politics and religion.

It seems that those are subjects where reason and rational thought get squeezed out of the picture by a real determination to hang on to your beliefs no matter what. And facts? They’re always in dispute in those arenas because no matter what you believe, there is someone spouting some pseudo-fact that will back up pretty much any ridiculous idea.

A friend once tried to convince me that it’s okay to believe anything you want, whether it’s true or not. I understand her point in that it really doesn’t matter that much what is or isn’t true because the world will just keep on spinning and people will do what they do and nothing really matters and what if it did. (Thanks to John Mellencamp for that line.)

“Do you want to be happy or do you want to be right?” she kept asking, since apparently those two concepts are well known to be mutually exclusive?

But back to my original point. Before this silly oil war started, I forwarded some information to pretty much everyone in my address book as to what I thought was an intelligent and worthwhile way to peacefully tell our government that we didn’t want to die to make Exxon (who just posted the largest quarterly profit in the entire history of the friggin’ world!) or Halliburton richer.

The shit storm that followed blew my mind! My friends and family are all nice, reasonable, rational people. They wouldn’t be my friends if they weren’t and my family is made up of some of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet. So how could they not see the truth of what I was telling them?

A friend started a message board where he posted all the message traffic and responses from the people I’d originally messaged plus a bunch of people that they forwarded to. I heatedly defended my absolutely correct position for a while until the futility of it all really began to sink in.

The war went forward and nobody’s mind was changed. If anything, people just entrenched themselves deeper in their positions and a lot of hard feelings pointing a lot of different directions resulted.

So, you tell me, dear reader, would you rather be happy or would you rather be right?