Pain and Fear

Recently, I wrote about how Americans are more or less screwed. This is true whether you are Black, White, or Latino (but yes, as usual, it is better to be White in America).

Well, there is more horrific news on the horizon. You see, it is now extremely painful to be an American. I don’t just mean the pain of knowing that half the country is perfectly happy to vote for a triple-indicted racist who is threatening to destroy democracy. That’s a given.

What you may not know is that Americans are “developing new cases of chronic pain at higher rates than new diagnoses of diabetes, depression, or high blood pressure.”

Chronic pain—defined as pain on most or every day— is not “just a result of car accidents and workplace injuries but is also linked to troubled childhoods, loneliness, job insecurity and a hundred other pressures on working families.”

Yes, here in the greatest country in the world, our residents suffer from massive levels of economic insecurity, income inequality, racial discrimination, loneliness, and general unhappiness.  Chronic pain is “tightly woven into the bundle of diseases of despair, and causation probably runs in several directions.”

Pain is more common among the lower classes, and some studies show that the less education you have, the more likely you are to endure constant agony. Basically, people with master’s degrees rarely suffer chronic pain, but high school dropouts are probably twisted in anguish on a daily basis.

If you’re lucky enough to escape the torment of chronic pain, you likely still suffer from the deep-seated fear of simply living in the USA. Perhaps it is because the “incessant rat-a-tat of bloody headlines makes people feel—viscerally—that the risks they do encounter are unbearably dangerous.” Perhaps it is because the business models of so many media outlets depend on scaring Americans senseless. Or maybe it is the fact that the tactics we embrace to make ourselves feel secure — such as living in gated communities — are actually more likely to turn us into paranoid wrecks.

And that’s when our tactics don’t backfire, quite literally, and actively endanger us.

For example, we all know that gunowners are more likely to use their weapons on themselves or a loved one than any imaginary intruder.

But maybe you didn’t know that although suicide rates are falling around the world, “one high-income country is a particular exception to the downward trend: the U.S.”

Yes, between 2000 and 2018, the U.S. suicide rate jumped 35 percent. Now, you might yell, “The answer is guns! And you’d be mostly right.”

But you will never convince Second Amendment absolutists that an AR-15 is anything other than a source of comfort and a member of the family.

This fever pitch of fear is what “we have come to accept in our culture of violence, [and] this is the country we have become.”

Pain and fear bind all Americans together.