Mary Katherine Ham Returns to Fox News, To Talk About The Passing of Her Husband and to Thank Her Friends and Supporters

It's wonderful to see her again.

Mary Katharine has always stated she felt it was her moral obligation to be a happy, positive person, a moral seintiment I first heard from Dennis Praeger.

For much of my life, I, like most people, regarded the pursuit of happiness as largely a selfish pursuit. One of the great revelations of middle age has been that happiness, far from being only a selfish pursuit, is a moral demand.

When we think of character traits we rightly think of honesty, integrity, moral courage, and acts of altruism. Few people include happiness in any list of character traits or moral achievements.

But happiness is both.

Happiness -- or at least acting happy, or at the very least not inflicting one's unhappiness on others -- is no less important in making the world better than any other human trait.

With some exceptions, happy people make the world better and unhappy people make it worse....

The flip side of the damage unhappy people do when they subject others to their unhappiness is the good that people do when they are, or at least act, happy. Just think of how much more you want to help people when you are in particularly happy mood and you realize how much more good the happy are likely to do....

Cults, hysteria and mass movements all appeal to the unhappy far more than to the happy. It is one more example of the genius of America’s Founders to include "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence. No other major civilization so enshrined happiness as a core value.

[T]he pursuit of happiness is noble. It benefits everyone around the individual pursuing it, and it benefits humanity. And that is why happiness is a moral obligation.

Mary Katherine states that while this is an "impossibly, irreparably sad" event, she will is not an impossibly irreparably sad person, and will not let her children be.

Speaking of her husband, she says , "He would want us to live bravely." But I imagine there are other He's that would endorse that proposition.

posted by Ace at 05:33 PM

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