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Feb. 12, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
09:44
After a Year Of Lockdown, What Is the State of Your Happiness?
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taking place in the U.S. Senate.
You can watch it anytime, I'm sure.
And it's worth watching, ultimately.
I won't get into the politics of it next hour.
I will.
Right now, I'm opening the lines for you to talk to me about the state of your state.
That's a good way of putting it.
Covenants give state-of-state addresses.
What is the state of your state at this time?
I have talked on Happiness Hours now for the course of practically a year of lockdown.
Greatest mistake in human history, not greatest evil, greatest mistake.
Made that clear when I first mentioned this fact last, I guess, March or April.
I am stunned.
Kids have not been to school.
It's stunning.
We are governed by fools and frauds, and I hate saying it.
It's not my vision of America.
What does it have to do with happiness?
That's the issue.
I have addressed that on a number of occasions on the Happiness Hour.
How does one manage in these difficult times?
And my answer is, not in order of importance, just as they come to my mind, kindred spirits in my life, and fighting.
Those two enable me, not just that.
I also retreat, if you will, into my hobbies, my passions.
I've spent the whole lockdown, actually, finishing, which is a long time to finish something, my commentary on the third book, the third book of my commentary on the Bible, and that is Deuteronomy, the fifth book.
Hardest of all the books to do.
Contains 200 laws.
There is no narrative.
There is no story.
The only story in the entire fifth book...
Of the Torah, the five books of Moses, is Moses dying.
It's very touching because, which very few people know, you know who buries Moses?
God.
It was truly one of the most touching representations of God in the entire Bible.
Old Testament for Jews, old and new for Christians.
It's quite a remarkable verse that God himself buries Moses.
Anyway, this is the issue here.
You know, I always begin by saying the happy make the world better and the unhappy make it worse.
We are living through that as the unhappy are taking over.
The task of the left in America is to make people unhappy.
And the way you do that is by fostering ingratitude.
Ingratitude is the mother of unhappiness and ingratitude is the mother of evil.
Ungrateful people do a lot of harm.
Ungrateful people are all unhappy.
I am grateful for being an American.
That's it.
The division in this country can be summarized as between the grateful and the ungrateful.
You realize that?
That's the most bottom line distinction in the country.
Not one leftist is grateful for being an American, and every conservative is grateful for being an American.
There is no other 100% guarantor.
Not race, not gender, nothing.
Gratitude is the great dividing line.
And I have a special disdain for ingrates, to be perfectly honest.
It's totally attached to the happiness hour because the ungrateful are not happy by definition.
They cannot be happy.
It's one of the ugliest of the human traits in gratitude.
Again, if I may revert to my Bible commentary, the thing that really ticks off God about the Israelites in the wilderness and the desert is their ingratitude.
That they complain all the time.
My task in the Rational Bible, the name of my series of five books, is to...
Make relevant these laws and stories of 3,000 years ago.
Can you think of a more relevant story than God being ticked off at complainers?
At ingrates?
It cracks me up.
Yes, that's what we have here.
Ingrates, complainers.
They had it too good.
So, they're tearing down what is so good.
How are you doing?
How is your family doing?
You have kids or grandkids not in school?
How are they doing?
Have you found kindred spirits?
I've been advocating kindred spirits the entire lockdown, indeed my entire career.
I don't know how long one goes through life without it.
Yet there are a lot of people who don't have that.
And if they have the courage to tweet what they believe, or to put on Facebook what they believe, they lose friends that they thought.
We're friends.
What is your experience in the happiness realm?
That is the subject of today's Happiness Hour.
You have to admit that I have never been quite as vindicated on my belief that the happy make the world better and the unhappy make it worse as right now.
That's the way that's a rule of life.
I Am amazed at my good fortune That's how I go through my life.
Quite amazed.
Because I know how bad things can be.
That's the reason that I worry about America.
I know how bad things could be.
And I know that when you tear down what is essentially good, you don't get anything better.
All right, everybody.
And let's see what you folks have to say.
Let's go to Sherry in Atlanta, Georgia.
The state that unfortunately gave us a bad situation.
Hi.
Hi.
Hi there.
Hello, Dennis.
Good to talk to you.
Thank you.
I just wanted to say that we're very happy here in Atlanta, my husband and I. We, of course, have been, you know, experiencing everything else that everyone has with us.
By the way, you had a lot of background noise.
Are you on the road?
We're in a car.
We're driving.
My husband's driving.
Oh, I hope you can hear me.
We're very happy.
I'm sorry.
We're very happy because when, like, the restaurants supposedly could not go in, we supported them by going out as much as possible and doing pickup.
And, of course, now we can go inside restaurants.
We're grateful we have a Republican governor that did not try to control every move.
And we're both still very happy.
Well, God bless you both, and that's a big deal.
The rules that Californians accepted lying down, you can't even enter a restaurant for much of this past year.
You couldn't even dine outside for much of the...
No, no, no.
Inside was blocked for most of the year, nearly all.
Outside was blocked for about half the year.
Until just a few weeks ago.
It's all political.
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