Between my posts about our week at WDW, and the upcoming posts about our 12 days on the Oasis of the Seas, I am jumping back up on my soap box and rambling again (and this post REALLY rambles!). Feel free to skip right over this and wait for ship photos in the next blog if you prefer things on the lighter side only. I don't mind.
In the two days between segments of our trip, we drove down to Fort Lauderdale (where our ship departed from) and had planned to spend a day visiting Miami. Our tour of Miami turned into a "see the city by car" day. Between the heat and huge crowds (Labor Day Weekend in Miami means visitors who do not know the city cannot even find parking, at any price, in the city!). We did go to a Target, out to lunch on the drive down, and to a mall and out to dinner that first night. Nothing exciting, but it gave us a chance to buy toiletries for the cruise and a couple of harder to find in Germany items (shoes that fit Rio's big feet, for example--there are many more options in the US).
During this short view back into "typical" American life, the nagging feeling I have had increasingly when reading US chat boards or websites, and on our infrequent visits, was just pushed that much higher. So, when we met another American couple who has been living in Germany almost as long as we have on the cruise, and the wife commented on that same feeling, when I had not brought it up, I figured that at least validates mine enough that I can get away with rambling about it a bit here, right?
Somewhere along the way, our American culture, as a whole, seems to crossed over into living in a state of near constant paranoia in a way that feels terribly unhealthy.
This seems to be spurred on by many factors: the news is rife with stories that seem to (and might well) justify these feelings, and sensationalizing them to the hilt seems to be the reporting style du jour; books like Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear tell us it is a good state of mind to have; the former color coded threat levels that told us to be wary but never why (thank goodness those are gone); ominous warnings from police and schools about putting a child's name on a backpack, etc all seem to converge to keep us on edge most of the time and feeling like even the most simple of acts are likely to put our lives, and our loved ones lives in mortal danger.
It's amazing, when you have been OUT of it for so long, just how intense and overwhelming those messages feel when you go back.
I am starting to think, that at least on some levels, this is a self fulfilling prophecy which is causing us more problems than being blissfully unaware of threats ever could.
Living in fear: fear of being shot for texting at a movie theatre or for walking in the "wrong" neighborhood, or accidentally cutting someone off in traffic, or for just showing up at school or work; fear of losing your livelihood because the big boss needs to make the budget work out to get a bigger bonus and the fastest way to do that is lay off a couple dozen people, or you direct supervisor plain does not like you and you live in a "at will employment" state; fear of your children not being able to support themselves unless they get into top tier universities and graduate with top grades (because that is the line we are sending out there now--nevermind that a country needs MANY workers who are educated in all kinds of ways and skills and handle all kinds of various jobs, and much of that is hands on education not suitable to a university degree); and on and on it goes. . .
As I was saying, living in a near constant state of fear brings about its own set of horrible problems. I am certain that this is one of the reasons depression and anxiety rates are so sharply on the rise in the US. Obesity as well (several studies have shown that people on the same diet and exercise regime gain more when under stress, and it is often fear that keeps children from being allowed outside to play in healthy ways and burn calories, setting up a lifetime of more sedentary behaviors, etc. There are other causes, but I do believe this is one).
I think it goes even deeper though--and this is where that "self fulfilling" part comes in. When you are constantly sent the message to fear your fellow human beings. When other people are a "threat" instead of, well, people compassion gets replaced with hardness, consideration with defensiveness, friendliness with belligerence.
It seems to me that the more we, as a society, focus on all the threats other people pose to us, the more likely we are to "defend" ourselves with rude or threatening actions (that natural tendency in all animals when threatened to look big and try to out size and out shout the threat) or entitled behavior (that feeling that YOU have to look out for just YOURself because everyone else is doing the same) and generally acting more aggressively, which only escalates the entire situation: you defend yourself by acting in aggressive ways, which, in turn, causes the other person to see you as an aggressor and they defend themselves by being more so and it circles back around.
Which, I guess boils down to me feeling that the often heard complaints that we are becoming more entitled, lazy or rude as a society seem to me to be stemming from us becoming more afraid and defensive and not from a deep rooted selfish character flaw.
More troubling to me, I think living with this constant type of feeling and message--this insidious fear of one another erodes our ties to one another and our compassion and can push some people until they snap. I do wonder if some of the most tragic and terrifying incidents in the last couple of decades, incidents which feed these fears and justify so many of our defenses are at least partially results of people (who would struggle anyway) snapping under this pressure?
I'm not sure that I have any answers. No one person is going to change how people act or treat one another or react to one another, and right now there ARE a lot of threats and those people will not suddenly go away--but I do feel like we need to make a concerted effort to not let these fears carry us away or overwhelm us or limit us too severely. Maybe sometimes we need to just give ourselves a break and give ourselves permission to skip over all the terrible news and let our minds obsess over times when people were nice to one another or made an effort to help--because, in spite of what the news outlets show, those times are still much more prevalent than the bad. I still believe that the vast majority of people are good people at heart and that is a very non paranoid feeling to have.
--Hadley
It all roots back to the original lawsuit(s) where blame was placed on a corporation in an accident where there was, really, no one to blame. The judge in that case wanted to award something to the injured party and the only defendant in that case with capital was a major corporation. If my memory serves me, it was a case of a man using a phone booth (this was the early 70s) when the booth was hit by a car. The driver of the car was uninsured, so where is the money going to come from? How about AT&T. The corporation that, ahem, negligently placed a phone booth on a sidewalk next to a street where cars drive and could, under the right circumstances, exit that street and hit the phone booth. Once the judge placed blame on the corporation for failing to see ALL that could, maybe, possibly, under the perfect storm of situations, go wrong... this country as we knew it changed. We are now taught to look for what could go wrong first and foremost before we ever take a step forward with anything. Because if we don't, there is a lawyer out there that will. Once that became the basis for our thought pattern, it isn't too hard to become paranoid or let fear take the lead. Fight or flight is a basic instinct and fear pushes that chemical button in our brain. The media is like a drug and we are the rats that keep pushing that button for more.
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