Progressives to Americans: Don’t Be Happy

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Commentary

In recent weeks, there have been news reports about surveys showing record low levels of happiness and high levels of depression and pessimism among Americans. Those reports indicate that progressives’ plan for America is working well. They don’t want us to be happy.

Woke progressives remind me of hyperconscious moms constantly hovering over their kids, micromanaging their lives and taking away all sorts of things from their kids on the grounds that “that’s not good for you” even when it really isn’t bad for them.

For example, take the recent brouhaha about government plans to ban (some) gas stoves. It turns out that a lot of Americans like to cook with gas stoves. The Biden administration has been trying to downplay such a ban with Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm claiming that “half the gas stoves that are on the market right now wouldn’t even be impacted.” Assuming she’s telling the truth (pardon the cynicism), her statement implies that half the gas stoves would be impacted. That’s a lot of stoves! And what does she mean by “stoves that are on the market right now”? Does that mean half of gas stoves for sale won’t be affected by the regulations the Department of Energy is contemplating, but that perhaps a much larger percentage of stoves that have already been bought, and so aren’t “on the market,” would be?

Another well-loved consumer product that progressive elites believe isn’t good for us is the gasoline-powered automobile. The Environmental Protection Agency is trying to force Americans to buy electric vehicles by raising to unattainable levels the fuel efficiency standards on American-sold cars. But many Americans are happy with their gasoline-powered autos. They like the longer driving range on a tank of gas and the quicker time to refill instead of recharge. They also like not being vulnerable to electricity brownouts/blackouts that could render their vehicles temporarily unusable. They also like the idea of not being dependent on minerals mined by slave labor in China and other foreign countries.

Americans like relatively cheap, reliable energy and all the economic wealth that such energy has generated, yet progressives insist on subsidizing more expensive alternative and intermittent sources of energy. That callously ignores the fact that making Americans pay artificially high prices for electric power leaves them less able to afford other products. Indeed, progressive policies have kept us poorer than we need to be. But to the progressives, too much prosperity is a bad thing and belt-tightening is good.

According to woke progressives, the reason we allegedly need to curb our use of gas stoves, gasoline-powered cars, and relatively cheap energy is the threat of climate catastrophe posed by carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels.

One of their main mantras is, “Carbon dioxide isn’t good for us.” Oh? Over the last century-and-a-half, during which the concentration of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere rose from ~290 parts per million to ~420 ppm, the benefits have been considerable. The average global temperature has risen a couple of degrees. That has been a boon to human well-being, for although cold-related deaths still far exceed heat-related deaths, the number has been declining. Plus, the modestly warmer temperatures have led to longer growing seasons for agricultural products, increasing the supply of food. And best of all, the carbon dioxide-enriched atmosphere has resulted in a significant greening of the planet (which I have detailed before)—but we aren’t supposed to be happy about that according (most ironically) to the self-styled “greens.”

So mesmerized is the progressive herd by “Demon CO2” (Demon Rum never had such a bad reputation!) that they’re even telling us to curtail our consumption of some of our favorite foods, particularly meat and dairy products. They say that producing such foodstuffs increase greenhouse gases. While true, that is a false alarm. We have essentially exhausted CO2’s capacity to warm the atmosphere due to the logarithmic rate at which CO2 absorbs infrared radiation (i.e., traps heat), but the really good news is that the world can get a lot greener with continued CO2 enrichment.

The animus against meat and dairy is just plain weird. We are mammals, our babies are nourished with the food most natural to our species, namely milk. (And who doesn’t love a good ice cream cone on a summer day?) As for meat, it’s more than a cultural fixture; it’s tied up in our zoological taxonomy: We are predators—our eyes are located in the front of our heads, as is the case for carnivores and predators, and not on the side as is the case with herbivores. And yet the woke elite tell us that what’s good for us is bad for us. Actually, there’s an underlying message here: Human life itself (at least, life beyond limits deemed acceptable by the misanthropic neo-Malthusian woke mob) is bad—a point that radical greens make explicit when they characterize humans as “vermin,” “a cancer,” “a plague,” etc.

The woke progressive left is in the grip of some jarring ideas. As discussed in my recent article on the degrowth movement, the left thinks too much prosperity isn’t good for us. Their “solution” is to deprive us of things we like. To do that, they need to have more control over us. Thus, they believe that we Americans have too much freedom.

Finally, many of them believe that human life itself isn’t such a good thing. Thus, some young people have said they will never have children. These poor people are in the grip of the ideas of green neo-Malthusians who view human procreation as a sin against the environment. Disturbing numbers of young women in our country are choosing to sterilize themselves to make sure that they never offend radical environmentalists by having children.

The existential question about this woke movement that seeks to lessen Americans’ prosperity, freedom, and fertility is: When are the millions of people who currently vote for such leaders going to wake up to the lies they’ve been told about how we’ve had it too good? When will they awake to the self-defeating absurdity of believing that virtue consists of the decidedly un-American agenda of having an “enlightened” government chip away at our God-given rights of life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness? What a great day it will be when the American people wake up from the mass hypnosis that has them believing the political ideologies that say we need less of the things that we like and that have enriched our lives—everything from gas stoves to liberty to children.

The Bible says, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20). And woe unto them who fall under the spell of those who turn reality upside down. It’s no sin to enjoy life, folks.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.