Soon, you’ll be jumping with a lack of joy./Image: Licensed Adobe stock, Prazis Images.
Salutary and Salubrious Salutations, traditionalist health-seekers!
One of my, Deepika Choprawalla’s colleagues here at Spread Your Right Wings (SYRW), the one who was its Wellness columnist before moi, wrote a while back about Blue Zones, or places in the world where people are the happiest, as determined by the confluence of a several metrics, a concept researched an advanced by Dan Buettner in his book, The World’s Blue Zones: Eating and Living Like the World’s Happiest People. In that book and other publications, Buettner and other researchers put forth the idea of “The Three P’s of Happiness”: Purpose, pleasure, and pride. According to those, to put it oh-so-Alt-simply happiness comes from being motivated by something more than basic survival, having a little fun, and behaving in a way that causes you to respect yourself. We, at Spread Your Right Wings (SYRW)–mostly I, Deepika Choprawalla–added to that list of “P’s” two more: people and piety. By those, I mean that happiness also comes from healthy relationships and a belief in something bigger than oneself. That’s all well and good for the Liberal Loonies, but I want to tell you today about how to live a life in which you seek not to be happy, but to be Alt-right…as Alt-right as possible. Below is your simple, five-point plan!
Related: Commercial scripts Mick Mulvaney’s considering to help prostitute his political services.
#1: Ignorance
Ignorance is the foundation, the bedrock, the underpinning for a miserable life, dear SYRW readers. The most abject of miseries, it seduces its sufferers by inducing in-the-moment pleasure. You get hooked on that, and then your fall from the goodness you were born with is rapid and guaranteed, much like a predatory homeowner’s loan. Take Appalaxahoochee, West Virginia, a decaying mining town filled with victims of mesothelioma and opiate addicts who, despite their illnesses being worsened if not caused, at least in part, by the policies of the right, continue to vote Republican. Ninety-nine percent of this town’s residents didn’t advance beyond a high school education, dropping out of school before the twelfth grade to work low-paying jobs that require constant, grinding drudgery to support themselves and usually other family members. The most damaging, long-term effect of this cruel reality is that it restricts this town’s residents’ access to quality information and the skills to consume it in a way that betters their lives, leading them to find life completely unbearable. The moral of this soul-crushing story: don’t stay in school, Alt-righters!
#2: Ill-Health
Excuse me while I cough up some black phlegm. My, look at my manners! I should die of pollution-induced emphysema in a politely! Anywho, being sick, particularly with chronic illnesses that make each moment painful and torturous in their predictable horror, is the second requirement of a wretched existence. The best ways to guarantee this are a sedentary lifestyle, a diet high in processed foods and chemical-laden treats that amount to poison, and lots of booze and tobacco. And of course, living on the planet we’ve turned into our personal trash can, Earth. Again, all of these things feel good in the moment, but they’re awful for literally a slow suicide during which you’re constantly miserable. Just ask the residents of Lowrenta, Kentucky. They’re all overweight, under-nourished, and sit in smoky bars drinking, starting at 9:00 a.m. and 99 percent of them hate their lives.
#3: Ignominy
In other words, shame, ill-repute, doing things that make you hate yourself. If you don’t hate yourself, how can you hate anybody else? And if we can’t hate anybody else, what are even doing here? That’s actually a thread we should probably not pull at, so let’s move on. Anyway, make sure to fill your life with acts that kill your soul, such as: pushing LGBT folks into “reparative therapy” programs; not giving a homeless person money, because he should just get off his ass and get a job; calling the cops on two African-American men waiting for their orders at a local coffee house. See, the world is your toxin-filled oyster, and there are no shortage of terrible, evil things you can do to avail yourself of the toxicity, and even add to it–pay it forward, with interest, if you will.
The people of Dumbfukk, Texas know this. In a survey of 1,000 mid-to-large-sized cities in the U.S. of A., 99 percent (there’s that number again!) of the residents of said hamlet were asked, on a scale of one to five, the frequency with which they did things to make the world. Ninety-nine percent of them filled the little bubble on a scantron sheet beneath five. And 99 percent of them also reported total dissatisfaction with their lives.
An easy go-to to achieve this height of human-hood is to ask yourself, “What would Mother Theresa do?” Then do the opposite!
#4: Indifference
One of the many devastatingly beautiful things Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. said as he advanced the cause of civil rights was this: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” I, Deepika Choprawall, and indeed all my coworkers at SYRW, despite our Alt-ishness, believe that everyone is born not only good but united with all other sentient beings. We can nurture that union or fracture it as we age, and the world sure seems to do everything possible to encourage us to dissolve our connections to others. And that leads to hating life and yourself, which is what the Five I’s of Right-Wing Happiness are all about.
When you see injustice, exclusion, and full-on abuse of others, make sure to turn the other way, like 99 percent of those who call Blase, Louisiana home. They think only of themselves; advancing their self-involved, right-wing life project; and shun connection and community. Ninety-nine percent of respondents in a poorly-conducted, bias-heavy survery said they “strongly agreed” with the statement: “Everything f—–g sucks.” You can, too, if you’ll just believe. In nothing. And don’t act on it.
#5: Illegality
The most fun of all! Breaking the law is, I bet, not something you expected to find on a list of ways to make yourself right-wing happy, dear readers. After all, the Republican party to which most of us belong was once the law-and-order party. But with the ascent of President Donald J. Trump to its throne, a complete and total disregard for the law, particularly as it interferes with your advancement of self-congratulatory, self-serving, and self-self-self projects, is the new Alt-normal. You’re above the law, because you’re above…well, everything. So operate below the radar, unless of course you can surround yourself with a coterie of apologists and yes-men-and-women. Then just let it all hang out!
Fifty-percent of the so-bad-they’re-good people in Lawless, Nebraska, our last but certainly not least, total s—hole, said they have little or no regard for the law if it interferes with their advancement of the goals of a little, big person called, “I-Me-Mine.” Forty-nine percent say they have some regard for it, but if it suits them, and they think they can get away with it, well then to hell with those codified rules of behavior vital to the social contract! 99 percent of Lawless-ites said they were “highly likely” to want to pull the covers over their heads in the morning and curse the sunlight, wishing they could disappear into the darkness inside the blankets and their souls. In imitation of the
In the Interest of “I”
Now go forth, into the darkness, and revel in how stupid, sick, sociopathic, and sketchy it is and you are. I’m always not here with you. Go on, my wobbly-kneed conservative charges. There–you’re doing it! It’s scary at first, but then exhilarating, even addictive, the rush you get from testing the waters of Alt-loony behavior. And now, now that you’ve tasted power and privilege, I’ve got you hooked. You’ll do anything I say, you want you, my little Dr. Faustus-es? What you’re going to do now is elect into both local and national offices people unfit for them, undeserving of then, and unconcerned with doing a good job in them. We’ll elect them for reasons unrelated to being good choices for the positions, earning our faith in them, or dedicated to serving in them. No, we have bigger, more psychotic fish to fry. Namely, we want revenge, revenge for an African-American man telling us what to do for eight years; our non-Jewish, white, male, hetero and rapidly declining cultural agency; and the Mexicans and Muslims moving in next door.
And: Join SYRW as we climb Mt. Votersuppression.
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