Cheerful News: Happiness Is Contagious

Dec. 7, 2008(CBS) Weekly commentary by CBS Evening News chief Washington correspondent and Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer.My great teacher Eric Sevareid once said it was important to maintain the courage of one's doubts as well as the courage of one's convictions.

That has never been hard for me; the older I get, the less sure I am about everything.

So I was glad to find out that something I always thought was true, turned out to be just that - and now we even have the scientific evidence to prove it.

I've always been attracted to happy people for the selfish reason they put me in a better humor. Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I just don't enjoy cynics and doomsayers, so I stay clear of them.

Well, a respected British medical journal called BMJ has published a 20-year study of 4,700 people which shows that happiness is not only good for you, it is actually contagious.

It spreads like the flu!

The researchers told the Washington Post that happiness is far more potent than just making another person laugh. The study shows that when one person in a group is happy, it increases the possibility - sometimes by as much as 34 percent - that others in the group will also be happy, everyone from a spouse to a next-door neighbor, and the impact can be long-lasting.

With the state of the news these days, we're finding this out not a moment too soon, so I'm happy to know it - and pardon me for being smug, but another thing that always makes me happy is knowing I was right.

IRAQ

It has been reported that UK troops will leave Iraq next spring. Andrew North looks back to the last time British troops occupied Iraq in the years after World War I and finds remarkable parallels.

Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. ...voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. Hermann Goring 1934

Gazing with weariness, with compassion, with dignity, and the alien world. Ralph Wood

In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department.James Madison

Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, and quietly building new structures.
--John F. Kennedy

To Kill an American:

You may have missed this in the rush of news, but there was actually a report that someone in Pakistan had published in a newspaper, an offer of a reward to anyone who killed an American,.....any American.

So an Australian dentist wrote an editorial the following day to let everyone know what an American is . So they would know when they found one.

'An American is....English, or French, or Italian, Irish, German, Spanish, Polish, Russian or Greek......An American may also be Canadian, Mexican, African, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Australian, Iranian, Asian, or Arab, or Pakistani or Afghan'.

An American may also be a Comanche, Cherokee, Osage, Blackfoot, Navaho, Apache, Seminole or one of the many other tribes known as native Americans.

An American is Christian, or he could be Jewish, or Buddhist, or Muslim. In fact, there are more Muslims in America than in Afghanistan.The only difference is that in America they are free to worship as each of them chooses.

An American is also free to believe in no religion. For that he will answer only to God, not to the government, or to armed thugs claiming to speak for the government and for God.

An American lives in the most prosperous land in the history of the world. The root of that prosperity can be found in the Declaration of Independence , which recognizes the God given right of each person to the pursuit of happiness.

An American is generous. Americans have helped out just about every other nation in the world in their time of need, never asking a thing in return. America has given more than any other nation.

Americans welcome the best of everything...the best products, the best books, the best music, the best food, the best services.

But they also welcome the least.


The national symbol of America , The Statue of Liberty , welcomes your tired and your poor, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores, the homeless, tempest tossed.

These in fact are the people who built America.


Some of them were working in the Twin Towers the morning of September 11 , 2001 earning a better life for their families. It's been told that the World Trade Center victims were from at least 30 different countries, cultures, and first languages, including those that aided and abetted the terrorists.

So you can try to kill an American if you must. Hitler did. So did General Tojo, and Stalin, and Mao Tse-Tung, and other blood-thirsty tyrants in the world. But, in doing so you would just be killing one of your own.

Because Americans are not a particular people from a particular place. They are the embodiment of the human spirit of freedom.


Everyone who holds to that spirit, anywhere, ......... is an American.

Forwarded by a Dutch-Indonesian-American.

Frans Officer.