This has been a stressful, horrible week for any American with a heart. And for so many people down south, of course.
But everyday American life is fraught with a good measure of stress. Stress in the purest biolgical sense: the constriction of breathing, the release of adrenaline, the near constant fight-or-flight stance.
Of course, one of the main causes of US stress is the nearly total lack of a meaningful social safety net here. We're just one bad accident away from losing everything. A sick child away from never, ever getting out of debt.
I am not married (yet), no kids (yet). But I feel stress every day about my own economic future - even the future of a hypothetical family I might someday have.
I see horrible stress in my married co-worker's faces. These are guys with mortgages, kids, wives. They are a few bad weeks at work away from the brink. From slipping out of white collar status to the abyss below. I feel it in their every interaction.
My question. What is the effect of all this stress? why does the "system" (system = American society, the US economy, the network of social relations in this country) "want" (want = seem to be dead set on causing it) us to be so stressed?
Does it make us better shoppers, more wired for marketing messages, more attuned to social status? Does it make us more biological fearful - and thus easily divided by race and class? (I do realize that fear also keeps us in line politically).
I know life is far more stressful in the third world, and that during man's evolutionary rise stress was everywhere. And even the most coddled European union worker must feel stress now and then (before his or her 6 weeks of vacation.
But this. This blasting, ongoing, constant American stress. In such a wealthy nation no less. It cannot help us lead dignified lives, can it? Can all this stress make us better people, more noble, more accomplished?
I guess I want someone to tell me it's all worth it...