For I am not alone

There is a search feature in blogger that lets you look for phrases occuring on anyone's blog anywhere. Unsurprisingly, I used it to look for myself, by typing in the phrase "Why is everyone so unhappy" into the search bar. I was fourth, which was a bit disappointing, seeing as that is the title of my blog. Turns out it searches the text, not the title, so, maybe fourth is decent enough. A Champions' League spot. And I think Number 1 deserves its spot.

Number 1 is an entry from USpolitics.tribe.net , with the intriguing, if not outright hilarious, title "Park Rangers not allowed to state age of Grand Canyon". I think this is funny because Park Rangers make me think of Yogi Bear, and the headline is reminiscent in tone of something the Daily Mail might say ("Now YOU must learn Urdu!", "PC Brigade forces Diwali on our kids", "You can't even call them midgets any more!"), though different in content.

The story itself is one of those you-couldn't-make-it-up-only-in-America ones. The fact that the Grand Canyon has been around for a few million years is problematic to some who believe the earth to only be 12,000 years or so old, people who apparently have enough purchase within the Bush administration to pressure the National Park Service into denying the Canyon's age. And provenance. Apparently it was formed during Noah's flood, not, for instance, by uplift from the Colorado Plateaus, which steepened the gradient of the Colorado River and its tributaries, increasing their speed and ability to erode, further exacerbated by weather conditions during the Ice Age, increasing the amount of water in the drainage system. Two different views. That's all.

So, Why Are People So Unhappy? In this instance, the phrase crops up during the increasingly heated debate below, where an unsuspecting Christian gets a huge heap of opprobrium dumped on him or her in the name of his/ her fellow believers. This poster wonders why "everyone is so unhappy and only happy when bashing someone who is". In this instance, everyone is unhappy because a many-million year long geological process has been rebranded as an act of God by some underling in the pay of the White House. And it is impossible not to notice that there are a lot of unhappy people online....