The Chocolate Philosopher

I was eating some Dove dark chocolate pieces the other day. There are messages on the foil wrappers which can be read on the occasions one does not destroy them in the process of extracting the chocolate. Often they are very dull, not exactly, but along the lines of, "Mmm... isn't chocolate tasty?" On this occasion, however, I got "Love is the master key which opens the gates of happiness." These are, apparently, the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes; he is uncredited on the foil, but I've googled it.

Prior to the googling, I was wondering whether the statement is, in fact, a correct one. I'm sure it says something about me that the knowledge someone other than an employee at Dove had said it first instantly made it more dependable. Still, my immediate thought on first reading the wrapper was that it seemed more accurate backwards: happiness is the master key which opens the gates of love.

So I've been flip-flopping between the two for a week or so now. Then I happened to read something in my daughter's geometry text book about contrapositive statements and that set me off googling again. The version of the statement I initially preferred is the converse of the original (coincidentally, in addition to converse statements I also prefer Converse shoes and have just bought some). When the converse of a statement and the statement itself are both true, I have just learned that the relationship can be said to be biconditional. So, throwing poetry, for the moment, out the window, we are left with: Love ↔ Happiness. Which is, at the very least, much more reassuring than Love → Building on Fire.

Being Happy

It occurred to me a few days ago that while everyone is guaranteed to experience some sadness in life, experiencing or having sadness is quite a different thing from being sad. Being sad, a state where sadness is a defining characteristic of who a person can be said to be, sounds more or less like depression, except that even depression sometimes goes away.

So while sadness is a necessary and important part of life, being sad is to be avoided at all costs. But what about being happy? This sounds like it would be a good thing, but is it? It just crossed my mind that maybe it was better to just experience all kinds of emotion, rather than letting any of them define my life. Then again, maybe being any kind of positive emotion could get me through those times when I'm experiencing the negative ones. Yeah, I think that sounds like the ticket.

This is all reminding me of the Pet Shop Boys song "Being Boring," which is making me think about my daughter (who is always being bored).

Where Would America Be Without the War on Christmas?

Senator Chris Buttars wants the Utah Legislature to pass a non-binding resolution encouraging retailers to say "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays." Ignore, for the moment, that there is almost no point whatsoever in passing any kind of non-binding resolution. Ignore also the obvious First Amendment issues that people will insist on bringing up.

Buttars says "I'm sick of the Christmas wars—we're a Christian nation and ought to use the word." So, first question: what makes us a Christian nation? Ignore, for the moment any of the arguments that we are not that may come into your mind. This country is a Christian nation because, by and large, the people who founded it were Christians of one or another stripe. As every school child is taught, our founding fathers came to the New World from England to escape religious persecution. The thing is, one reason the English couldn't stand our pilgrim forebears is that they kept trying to ban Christmas. As good protestants, they knew Christmas to be an evil mixture of papacy and paganism. Christmas met with little enthusiasm in the United States until the nineteenth century when Irish and German immigrants brought their love of it with them.

If it weren't for the Puritans' utter loathing of Christmas, America as we know it might never have come to be. And any talk of America being a Christian nation can be discounted by one glance at our relationship with Christmas—we're a Capitalist nation and have been so proudly since the nineteenth century descendants of this country's Puritan fathers overcame their distaste for the holiday when they discovered that Christmas actually made quite a workable excuse for picking the pockets of their Irish immigrant workforce every twenty-fifth of December.