Something to Lose

In the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson said that we have three unalienable rights - life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

If something is unalienable, it cannot be taken away from you, it can’t be given away by you, and it can’t be given to you.

Can someone else, or some other entity take your life? Undoubtedly.

Can someone else, or some other entity take your liberty. Physically, most assuredly. Mentally, no. And you can certainly give it away.

Can someone prevent your pursuit of happiness? Unequivocably, no! They can shape it. They can redirect it. They cannot take it away. Unlike freedom, you can’t give it up. No matter what you do, no matter how you shape your life, you are pursuing happiness as best you know how. The form may be warped. The form may be strange. It may be socially unacceptable, or destructive to you or your neighbors, but the root is there.

One out of three ain’t bad. Seriously. It’s not.

A while back Steve Olson asked when Americans became a nation of wimps. The short answer, or at least a large part of it, is fairly simple. When we began to have something to lose.

The U.S. was pioneered by many groups of people. Some came here searching for wealth. Others came here pursuing a way of life they couldn’t freely live in their old country. Yet others were forced here, either as indentured servants or criminals. Almost all were failures or discontented, but they were pursuing happiness as best they knew how.

Over time they built lives. Some made homes for themselves. Some created the types of communities they desired. Others became wealthy and respected. They grew roots, becoming part of their new land, building padding between themselves and their discontent.

Most of them, that is. Others continued to feel the discontent, to feel they did not fit their world, or their world didn’t fit them, and so they continued west. So again they went, building homes, building communities, laying the foundations of lives, pursuing happiness.

Then, after travelling the breadth of a continent, they once more found themselves faced by an ocean.

In the meantime, those who stayed home, the settlers, sought happiness through the claiming of property, the building of relationships, intellectual and spiritual exploration. They associated with like-minded people. They created social contracts, formal and informal, to enable them to live together. They became the type of people whom they had left behind in the old countries. They found themselves with something to lose.

And they multiplied. Now it is a fact of nature that those who seek to keep what they have, those who are content with their things, and their families, and the web of their relationships, far outnumber and multiply faster than those who seek freedom from the bonds of the culture in which they live. In any normal population, the search for security is far more popular than the search for freedom. Even in the infancy of the nation the number of those to whom freedom was most important was far less than the number of those who sought only to survive the next day, and to see that their children survived their next day.

So bound on the north and south by other countries, on the east and west by ocean, unable to escape into the sky, the ever increasing population of those who seek security grasped harder and harder at what lay at hand, to what they already possessed. Then, 70 years ago, an economy destroyed, much of our farmland suffering from a drought that we hadn’t faced before or since, we first sold our freedom for security in Roosevelt’s New Deal. Not 20 years ago, not 10 years ago, but 70 years ago we decided the government was the arbiter of our safety and security. It has become more obvious of late, but the seeds are long ago. And that’s okay. It is a choice that we, as a society, made. But it does show the seeds of the the attitude that many people now have.

We are not without our discontents. We are not without those to whom freedom, self-reliance, and the seeking of new worlds is most important, but they are far outnumbered by the people to whom surviving each day, and giving their children a chance to survive their day in their turn, is most important.

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