And that is difficult to find or define. Better can be taken out of context, but it is not just a generalized term, it is also subject to individual interpretations. What I think is better is completely different from what you think is better.
And then for me to say that society needs to make it “better” is just another monsterous context problem that you as the reader cannot make heads or tails.
So lets switch gears and not define better, but try and find out why we cannot make our society or government better. And there is actually some context for this thought.
It is hard to make something better if you have no control to make your own life better. And for our own society or government to be better we need the personal ability to make our lives better, but yet again if our society or government were better then it would be easier to make our lives better and the circular philosophy begins. So lets take a quote completely out of context to see what we can do.
One of the many complaints I have had over the years is the decline of the middle class in our society. And there are many reasons for this, but I recently came across a different perspective than I normally read.
I have been reading a book called The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate, MD with Daniel Mate.(not finished yet) This book deals mainly with how trauma affects our lives and more specifically our health. The bottom of the cover has this blurb: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture. And this is important because it is this (or a) toxic culture that prevent us from being better. And if you throw in that people have experienced trauma that affects their lives, and the book goes into great detail about this aspect, you get an idea of why better is more difficult than we would like it to be.
So it brings me Chapter 19″From Society to Cell: Uncertainty, Conflict, and Loss of Control.
“We know that chronic stress, whatever its source, puts the nervous system on edge, distorts the hormonal apparatus, impairs immunity……..” and goes on to start to tie in the stress affecting us individually affects us as a society. And that leads to page 214 (there are footnotes in his book that you are not included in this text).
“Many people exist at the mercy of forces completely beyond their power to affect let along control. Who knows when the next cyclic recession will strike or when yet another megabusiness will downsize, merge or relocate so that livelihoods are jeopardized with barely a day’s notice. Even prior to COVID-19′s economic ravages, one had become almost inured to news that yet another corporation was declaring masses of employees redundant “High Street Crisis Deepens as 3,150 Staff Lose Jobs in One Week” was a headline in the Guardian in January 2020 a few weeks before the pandemic arrived in Britain” (and currently we can add the AI headlines to adding to our job stresses, my note). “Only months earlier, the New York Times had reported on the deepening insecurity of American families: “The cost of housing, health care and education are consuming ever larger shares of household budgets and have risen faster than incomes. Today’s middle class families are working longer, managing new kinds of stress and shouldering greater financial risks than previous generations did. (13) As the famed anthropologist, researcher and author Wade Davis remarked recently in a broadly circulated Rolling Stone piece, “Though living in a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall(14). A better blueprint for allostatic overload could not be imagined.”
So what do this mean to achieving better, interestingly this goes back to my attempt at humor with the circular statement above. In my opinion the three most important aspects of having a successful middle class are the three items mentioned in the New York Times piece from the book. Having good housing, health care and education are the foundations for families to feel secure and then be able to grow. You have heard it many times the backbone of a democracy is a strong middle class and to have a strong middle class you need housing and health care security, then education to grow as a person and be able to contribute even more. If the middle class is struggling with all three then the middle class struggles to be better hence they cannot contribute to the larger better of society. So to make the middle class better hence our country better or our government better, we need to make ourselves better, but here comes the circle, we need the government to be better so we have access or have the ability to access better housing, healthcare and education.
This blurb from the book is out of context from the whole of the book, yet it helps me to explain some of the challenges we face when I say we need to make things better.
Like I mentioned I have not read the whole book and there are some aspects of it from talking to others who have finished it that I would not condone, but overall if we are experiencing events that create a sense of trauma in us, (better explained in the book) then how can we go forth as a well rounded human being to overcome what ails us to become better. The book references this as a concern for our overall health, but in the chapter 19 it touches on more of what I pratter on about which is the health of our society or any society for that matter.
How can I ask you as a fellow citizen to help us make this country better, when we are all affected by traumatic events in our lives that negatively effect how we perceive what is better. A hungry person sees a meal as better, a rich person sees more wealth as better, but for the vast majority of us, what should be our basics in having a strong society have been lost over the years or why I say the middle class is declining. Unfortunately I am not so well read that I have references handy to back me up, however I do feel confident that this topic has voluminous works that would validate some of my points.
I do like this book because it is an interesting read, but also because it hit on something I feel is lost today from a completely different viewpoint. Sure one paragraph on page 214 is not the whole answer, but it alludes to exactly what all of the middle class is feeling right now which is this feeling that something has been taken away from us that we are having a hard time identifying. And if we cannot identify or put our finger on it, we cannot define what would be better.
Which leads me to say, we need new leadership (new parties) to stop the circular philosophical problem above and help us identify what is needed for better housing, healthcare and education and subsequently help us get there.
Cheers
No comments:
Post a Comment