Dennis Prager Show - After a Year Of Lockdown, What Is the State of Your Happiness?
Aired: 2021-02-12
Duration: 09:44


=== The Unhappy Are Taking Over (09:15) ===

[00:00:00]  taking place in the U.S. Senate.
[00:00:01]  You can watch it anytime, I'm sure.
[00:00:02]  And it's worth watching, ultimately.
[00:00:06]  I won't get into the politics of it next hour.
[00:00:11]  I will.
[00:00:12]  Right now, I'm opening the lines for you to talk to me about the state of your state.
[00:00:19]  That's a good way of putting it.
[00:00:25]  Covenants give state-of-state addresses.
[00:00:30]  What is the state of your state at this time?
[00:00:35]  I have talked on Happiness Hours now for the course of practically a year of lockdown.
[00:00:42]  Greatest mistake in human history, not greatest evil, greatest mistake.
[00:00:46]  Made that clear when I first mentioned this fact last, I guess, March or April.
[00:00:55]  I am stunned.
[00:00:57]  Kids have not been to school.
[00:00:59]  It's stunning.
[00:01:01]  We are governed by fools and frauds, and I hate saying it.
[00:01:06]  It's not my vision of America.
[00:01:09]  What does it have to do with happiness?
[00:01:11]  That's the issue.
[00:01:13]  I have addressed that on a number of occasions on the Happiness Hour.
[00:01:19]  How does one manage in these difficult times?
[00:01:24]  And my answer is, not in order of importance, just as they come to my mind, kindred spirits in my life, and fighting.
[00:01:36]  Those two enable me, not just that.
[00:01:40]  I also retreat, if you will, into my hobbies, my passions.
[00:01:51]  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.
[00:02:07]  Hardest of all the books to do.
[00:02:10]  Contains 200 laws.
[00:02:12]  There is no narrative.
[00:02:14]  There is no story.
[00:02:15]  The only story in the entire fifth book...
[00:02:18]  Of the Torah, the five books of Moses, is Moses dying.
[00:02:24]  It's very touching because, which very few people know, you know who buries Moses?
[00:02:31]  God.
[00:02:33]  It was truly one of the most touching representations of God in the entire Bible.
[00:02:42]  Old Testament for Jews, old and new for Christians.
[00:02:46]  It's quite a remarkable verse that God himself buries Moses.
[00:02:55]  Anyway, this is the issue here.
[00:02:59]  You know, I always begin by saying the happy make the world better and the unhappy make it worse.
[00:03:06]  We are living through that as the unhappy are taking over.
[00:03:16]  The task of the left in America is to make people unhappy.
[00:03:22]  And the way you do that is by fostering ingratitude.
[00:03:27]  Ingratitude is the mother of unhappiness and ingratitude is the mother of evil.
[00:03:36]  Ungrateful people do a lot of harm.
[00:03:39]  Ungrateful people are all unhappy.
[00:03:42]  I am grateful for being an American.
[00:03:45]  That's it.
[00:03:47]  The division in this country can be summarized as between the grateful and the ungrateful.
[00:03:52]  You realize that?
[00:03:55]  That's the most bottom line distinction in the country.
[00:04:02]  Not one leftist is grateful for being an American, and every conservative is grateful for being an American.
[00:04:11]  There is no other 100% guarantor.
[00:04:16]  Not race, not gender, nothing.
[00:04:20]  Gratitude is the great dividing line.
[00:04:25]  And I have a special disdain for ingrates, to be perfectly honest.
[00:04:32]  It's totally attached to the happiness hour because the ungrateful are not happy by definition.
[00:04:39]  They cannot be happy.
[00:04:43]  It's one of the ugliest of the human traits in gratitude.
[00:04:48]  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.
[00:05:01]  That they complain all the time.
[00:05:04]  My task in the Rational Bible, the name of my series of five books, is to...
[00:05:14]  Make relevant these laws and stories of 3,000 years ago.
[00:05:22]  Can you think of a more relevant story than God being ticked off at complainers?
[00:05:29]  At ingrates?
[00:05:33]  It cracks me up.
[00:05:37]  Yes, that's what we have here.
[00:05:40]  Ingrates, complainers.
[00:05:45]  They had it too good.
[00:05:48]  So, they're tearing down what is so good.
[00:05:57]  How are you doing?
[00:06:05]  How is your family doing?
[00:06:07]  You have kids or grandkids not in school?
[00:06:10]  How are they doing?
[00:06:13]  Have you found kindred spirits?
[00:06:16]  I've been advocating kindred spirits the entire lockdown, indeed my entire career.
[00:06:22]  I don't know how long one goes through life without it.
[00:06:26]  Yet there are a lot of people who don't have that.
[00:06:31]  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.
[00:06:43]  We're friends.
[00:06:46]  What is your experience in the happiness realm?
[00:06:50]  That is the subject of today's Happiness Hour.
[00:06:56]  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.
[00:07:09]  That's the way that's a rule of life.
[00:07:11]  I Am amazed at my good fortune That's how I go through my life.
[00:07:23]  Quite amazed.
[00:07:27]  Because I know how bad things can be.
[00:07:29]  That's the reason that I worry about America.
[00:07:32]  I know how bad things could be.
[00:07:37]  And I know that when you tear down what is essentially good, you don't get anything better.
[00:07:48]  All right, everybody.
[00:07:51]  And let's see what you folks have to say.
[00:07:56]  Let's go to Sherry in Atlanta, Georgia.
[00:07:59]  The state that unfortunately gave us a bad situation.
[00:08:04]  Hi.
[00:08:06]  Hi.
[00:08:07]  Hi there.
[00:08:10]  Hello, Dennis.
[00:08:11]  Good to talk to you.
[00:08:12]  Thank you.
[00:08:14]  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.
[00:08:27]  By the way, you had a lot of background noise.
[00:08:31]  Are you on the road?
[00:08:34]  We're in a car.
[00:08:36]  We're driving.
[00:08:38]  My husband's driving.
[00:08:41]  Oh, I hope you can hear me.
[00:08:42]  We're very happy.
[00:08:46]  I'm sorry.
[00:08:46]  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.
[00:08:57]  And, of course, now we can go inside restaurants.

=== Rules That Blocked Restaurants (00:44) ===

[00:09:00]  We're grateful we have a Republican governor that did not try to control every move.
[00:09:07]  And we're both still very happy.
[00:09:10]  Well, God bless you both, and that's a big deal.
[00:09:16]  The rules that Californians accepted lying down, you can't even enter a restaurant for much of this past year.
[00:09:28]  You couldn't even dine outside for much of the...
[00:09:31]  No, no, no.
[00:09:33]  Inside was blocked for most of the year, nearly all.
[00:09:37]  Outside was blocked for about half the year.
[00:09:40]  Until just a few weeks ago.
[00:09:43]  It's all political.