TEN ESSENTIAL KEYS TO THE HAPPY WARRIOR
(from "What the (BLEEP) Just Happened" by Monica Crowley: Part V, "America, Unleashed" - pp. 317 – 319)

Enter the Happy Warrior.

The Happy Warrior believes in two essential truths: first, that America can be saved, and second, that it is worth saving. We need a nation of Happy Warriors – focused on those two truths and the rough reality that the threats to our survival are all around us—to perform the rescue operation

What is a Happy Warrior and how do we become a nation of them? There are ten essential keys to the Happy Warrior, all of which require hard work, dedication, and attitudinal changes. But if we understand and undertake them, the journey to renew America will be spectacularly rewarding.

First, we must recognize that the Happy Warrior is above all a warrior. We must realize that we are in a war. We’re in an ideological war, an economic war, a political war, a cultural war, and a war abroad for our superpower primacy. When Reagan became president, he knew we were in brutal economic and international wars for America. When Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, she knew Great Britain was deep in those wars as well. Once we recognize that we’re in the war, then we must be prepared to fight it. That means understanding that the other side is going to hit back ruthlessly and relentlessly, and that we’ve got to persevere despite the attacks and hit back too, as difficult as that may be. So the first step for the Happy Warrior is to realize that we face a very real danger and that there’s no getting out of the war without fighting it.

Second, we must win these wars before they escalate into bigger cataclysms. we’ve got to be smart and self aware enough to learn from our history, avoid repeating it, and letting things deteriorate until a devastating war is upon us, as with the Civil War, World War II, and September 11, 2001. We must adopt a warrior attitude now, before it’s truly too late, and be prepared to be strong, confident, and unwavering as we fight it.

Third, we must recognize that any war requires pain and sacrifice. The Happy Warrior’s choice—and only choice—is to face those uncomfortable things now or face much greater pain later.

Fourth, in most cases, we are at war with ourselves—the tendency to go wobbly, seek the easy way out, relinquish responsibility to the nanny state, fall into the waiting arms of the kooks promising the path of least resistance. We must fight these impulses in ourselves in order to form the national strength to fight these wars.

Fifth, the Happy Warrior fights to hold the other side responsible for its actions. The kooks fight to transfer responsibility and power away from the individual to the state. They argue that we are the ones who have to change and adapt to their freedom-crushing template. We reject that perversion of the American ideal.

Sixth, the Happy Warrior is fully comfortable that the underpinning of freedom is, in fact, individual responsibility. The kooks try to sell, hypnotize, and addict us to the idea that they will assume responsibility for us without requiring us to relinquish our freedoms. We know that we’ve got to turn back that Big Lie and take responsibility for fighting for American interests, at home and abroad. The Happy Warrior is responsible for himself and believes that everybody else is responsible for themselves. If we all fought determinedly for that belief, the state would naturally shrink as we the people won more of our power back.

Seventh, the Happy Warrior believes in the inherent goodness of man. We believe that the state should get out of the way not just so we can prosper, but so we can share that prosperity unencumbered by the state. The Left’s philosophy of “social justice” requires the state to compel “charity” in order to “spread the wealth around.” And yet, without government compulsion, the American people are the most charitable on earth. Most other countries give about 1 percent or less of their national wealth to charity. The United States doubles that. While we recognize that there is a proper role for government to discharge its constitutional duties and provide a reasonable social safety net, we also recognize that the kooks have so expanded government in the false name of “compassion” that we now have a nearly unrecognizable America.

Eighth, the Happy Warrior doesn’t believe that America is zero-sum, that success in one place must be punished to elevate the less successful somewhere else. The depraved premise of the kooks is that the rich got their wealth by “taking” from the poor. In fact, approximately 80 percent of all millionaires are the first generation in their family to be rich. They didn’t inherit their wealth, a la Paris Hilton. They earned it through hard work and sacrifice. Unlike the professional victimhood hustlers of the Left, the Happy Warrior believes that economic expansion creates real growth. We don’t believe in expanding the money supply in order to create the illusion of growth in order to redistribute all over the place. We believe in restraining government so individuals can do their thing and prosper.

Ninth, an effective Happy Warrior is a disciplined one. As long as our directives are consistent with the founding principles of constitutionally limited government, fiscal responsibility, and properly regulated free markets, we must on the fight for them until America has been restored.

And finally, the Happy Warrior is, in fact, happy. We take on our mission joyfully, certain that traditional American values are worthy of a passionate defense and that American power is not something to be ashamed of but celebrated. The attitudinal shift away from Howard Beale outrage to Reagan/Thatcher exuberance will animate the fight with our national optimism. The best way to temper the inevitable pain of the battle is to carry it out with good cheer, confident in our mission, its integrity, and success.

What made previous Happy Warriors such as Reagan and Thatcher particularly strong leaders was their vision of individual freedom and national power, their charismatic articulation of it, and their ability to persuade people that their policy path was the right way to go. Today, we need people who are proud to make an unequivocal, unapologetic, and full-throated case for America. We need people willing to make a moral case for the free market and American superpower. We need people willing to reject outright the kooks’ contention that redistributionism is a moral system of “economic justice” and argue for how and why capitalism empowers the individual and creates a steady expansion of prosperity and opportunity. We need people willing to make the moral case for a for a strong U.S. presence in the world, keeping the bad guys at bay, and advancing the cases of freedom and peace. We need people willing to tell the truth about the kooks’ lies that redistributionism at home and wobbliness abroad ensure greater “justice” and “equality.” And absent leaders who will make these arguments, we must take it upon ourselves to make the moral case for America. We have our work cut out for us, because the class warrior and defeatist punks aren’t going to step aside.