I stared on in disbelief as the woman yelled at both my manager and me about the length of time it took to produce her coffee. The point might be valid, considering the cost of a café latte these days, except that there were 30 people in the enormous line in front of her. Obviously it was going to take a while. That did not console her. She was bent on making a scene over how she was wronged because she decided to come to the coffee shop and wait in a long line for an overpriced luxury.
For all our country’s achievement, there is a very disturbing undercurrent of whining. One might dare say it is an epidemic that Americans love to whine about the tritest of offenses. The prime example is the coffee shop. Coffee is undeniably a luxury. No one needs coffee, but to hear some people complain, one would think they were fighting tooth and nail for a life-or-death cause of national security.
It is fitting, unfortunately. Any country living with as much prosperity as this one will be prone to such behavior. As pundit George F. Will so accurately phrased it, our country’s biggest health problem is obesity, caused by an overabundance of cheap, fattening food. What other civilization has had to complain about its people’s waistline? No country has ever been able to overfeed everyone consistently, but we have turned this abundance into a health hazard.
Not to be limited to excess food, the United States is extremely competent at improving many aspects of the “quality of life” for its people. Americans have the most innovations, the most advances and are arguably the most comfortable people in the world. The number of leaps forward in technology, medicine and even in the amount of freedom we possess should in theory make U.S. residents the happiest people in history. The United States should be just a stone’s throw away from utopia.
However, are people any happier? Or better put, is society any better of a place? The answer is very arguably “no.”
Many philosophers, politicians, activists and policy-makers have attempted to move society toward utopia, or at least toward an incremental bettering of society. The United States may be the best example of progress, regardless of how one might view its policies.
Unfortunately, in terms of utopia, the United States is a miserable failure.
However, this is not a rant — so typical of university students — on how U.S. policies are evil. It is more arguable that the problem does not lie with the policies but rather in the definition of happiness and, subsequently, people’s reaction to that excess “happiness.”
Marxists and other socialists argue that it is our love of materialism that bores a hole in our hearts. They are only half right. It is absolutely true that materialism will not buy happiness. However, the other reason that Americans are no happier than other countries’ people is that people simply cannot be happy for any sustained amount of time, regardless of luxury.
As might be intuitive, those with too many advantages are spoiled, unable to understand real problems, such as close proximity to war, famine or other disasters that cause major shifts in the direction of society. Therefore, try as they might, many Americans cannot comprehend the disasters occurring in the world today and thus settle for complaining about shallow issues such as coffee.
One might argue that at least we have freedom. And it is true, above all other things. Interestingly enough, though, too much freedom can have the same effect as too much materialism. When people don’t realize how free they are to say and do as they please, they can even take freedom for granted. As folk songwriter Ellis Paul sang, “Freedom can numb you.” When people have too much freedom, society will produce situations like the students shredding The Koala, stomping on free speech, because they have no idea what it is like to have their own free speech squelched.
At UCSD, we have it so good, in fact, that many students desperately cling to radical activism and causes because they are the closest thing they have to actual involvement in issues of substance.
This is the story of all universities: intelligent but impressionable students who realize how comparatively trite their problems are and leap in the direction of any meaning. At least they are trying.
Unfortunately, since student life at UCSD is amazing compared to other universities and life in other countries in general, students resort to exaggerating every problem and protest in order to sound more important. In this sense, they desensitize people to their cause, because they will always be “yelling about something.” Then, the non-activists, fed up with the guilt trips, will return to their decidedly unimportant problems and the university is back at square one.
In the end, it is our country’s greatest virtues that fuel our greatest flaws: insularity, lack of depth and grand capacity to whine. Unfortunately, the solution, taking away these freedoms and luxuries, is unacceptable. In other words, the goal and theme of the United States are extremely admirable and under no circumstances should they be compromised. The solution is to accept these problems as a byproduct of freedom and comfort.
It should be understood that any abundance of wealth, happiness or “easy living” does not create a perfect society, but instead, creates whiners. This is the unfortunate end to anyone looking for utopia. Not only is it impossible, it is possibly the worst thing a society could want. Misanthropy, anyone?
