You know what would help?" I asked, not meeting his eyes. "Hmm?" "If you turned off this crap music and put on something that came out after the Berlin Wall went down." Dimitri laughted. "Your worst class is history, yet somehow, you know everything about Eastern Europe." "Hey, gotta have material for my jokes, Comrade." Still smiling, he turned the radio dail. To a country station. "Hey! This isn't what I had in mind," I exclaimed. I could tell he was on the verge of laughing again. "Pick. It's one or the other." I sighed. "Go back to the 1980s stuff." He flipped the dail, and I crossed my arms over my chest as some vaguely European-sounding band sang about how video had killed the radio star. I wished someone would kill this radio.
That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans. A European says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with me?" An American says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?"
The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin'.
To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.' Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.