The Nugget Newspaper - News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

We as Americans are given a free claim to Life and Liberty but we are only entitled to the pursuit of Happiness.

Pursuit requires action, and it requires a level of individual persistence. It isn’t meant to be easy, and it isn’t meant to have shortcuts. Unfortunately, we have been prepared as a society to want things without a difficult pursuit, so we willingly hop into any creepy, white government van with a driver offering sweet Kool-Aid, claiming that they can provide quick happiness through their truth. It is a mental and social kidnapping.

Our naivety to the dangers and deficiencies around us should be concerning. The art of debate is deteriorating under the projected expectations for us to “fall in line for the sake of everyone around us.” Our ability to grow, to learn, to pursue truth that ultimately leads to happiness, is being suffocated under the biased media hammer of fear.

We are all firsthand witnesses to the breaking apart of friendships and family over the bidding of someone else’s truth. We are sacrificing life bonds for entities that are more concerned for their financial well-being than for our individual rights. The incompetence that we are witnessing in our capitals by “public servants” demonstrates that they don’t have a single agenda that is purified of any special interests. They have yet to show that they work for us.

Nothing exemplifies this more than our current struggle to pursue truth in the smoke cloud of confusion around COVID-19. We need to understand the seriousness of the decisions that involve the short-term and long-term well-being of our health, and that requires we endure the uncomfortableness of challenging the delivery of the Kool-Aid to really find out the underlying truth. It is out there if we take the time to identify stranger-danger in the white van and continue along the difficult path to what is pure and real.

There has never been such a split in the medical community, where very intelligent people have different opinions. That should drive us to pursue a deeper truth and it begins by ignoring our political biases and media-conditioned opinions so we can embark together on what could be a life-changing journey. We need to end the shaming and fear-based approaches to conversion and start encouraging the art of debate to challenge the one-sided data and “expert” opinions that our ego surrounds ourselves with. If we don’t, we will just be reverberations of the conditioned thoughts we insulate ourselves with, confining us to a place void of growth.

The biggest limitation in escaping our personal silo is the censoring of information that doesn’t fit a political narrative. It creates an academically lethargic society full of fear-based banter that eventually births the rhetoric for “putting our liberties…and rights on hold.” A frightening place for a free country because history shows us that the switch can flip at any time and once you allow those limitations, there is no going back. Today it may work in your favor, but then there is always tomorrow.

In front of us is the opportunity to gain a panoramic understanding and awareness that may change the course of our lives and the future of this country. We can no longer settle for tech companies and obscure fact checkers that only give us access to “their experts’” opinion. We can no longer settle for the ever-changing and contradictory words of a public institution that is unwilling to engage in debate with all sides getting the opportunity to present their case for the public to be fully informed. We require debate for a presidential election because it affects the whole country; why shouldn’t we all be demanding that for this? Remember that they work for us.

When we find the truth, we will be free. If we don’t come together in this pursuit, we will all have the unfortunate and unwelcomed honor of a front-row seat of the greatest nation in the world imploding from within. We will be traveling in the opposite direction from the pursuit of Happiness and not realizing it until it is too late. We will get to be the generation that says we screwed it up for generations to come because we were too afraid to pursue the truth for Happiness, so we settled for the happiness our “employees” designed for us.