Today I would like to write about stress. Not just any old stress but the whole idea of stress and of how stressed out we are all getting by the idea of stress. This isn't to say that we don't have just cause for feeling anxious. We have climate change on tap, a worsening instability in the global economy, a refugee crisis that keeps growing even after we never thought it could get worse, and a dangerous imbecile who will soon be moving into the Oval Office.
After reading this over I almost feel like going straight to bed and staying there till it's all over....
Outside of climate change and the dangerous imbecile who will soon be moving into the Oval Office I find myself wondering if maybe we are protesting too much. Hasn't life always been hard? It seems we didn't always have the easy convenience of email, Google, Facebook or Twitter. We phoned each other. From our homes. When we were outside walking a lot of us had our heads buried in newspapers or books while walking instead of smart phones. And a lot of us still stepped in dog shit. There were wars, two particularly big ugly ones in the twentieth century, the two biggest most lethal and destructive conflicts ever known to human history. Child abuse was not only commonplace, it was rampant. Parents beat their children with impunity. There was no protection for queers, no human rights and slavery was not yet a distant memory. There were no public amenities for people with disabilities and people with mental illness were cruelly stigmatized and excluded. And almost everyone was a dirty racist.
Nowadays, if you want information about anything you don't have to reach for the dated encyclopedia on your bookshelf. One click to Google and there it is, for your eyes to see. All the knowable knowledge of the known universe is at your fingertips. If you're late for an appointment you don't have to madly search for a payphone (remember those?). You just take out your phone (first pull over and stop your car if you're driving) and call your party and invent lies to explain why you are late to your heart's content, then you can update your Facebook status, and after that check a dating site, maybe look for some relevant information.
Nowadays, if you're a gay man you can walk hand in hand with your boyfriend in public and hardly anyone will notice, and that guy could even be your husband. You might even have kids. If you're in a wheelchair you can still get on an ordinary transit bus that will take you to wherever you need to go. If you are living with a mental illness you can still enjoy ordinary life, have a job, friends and a family. If you're a kid you will have a reasonably good expectation of growing up without being harmed or hit by your caregivers. You will be sharing sidewalk space, public transit, restaurants, coffee shops, stores, schools and the workplace of various colours, creeds and origins and you might even fall in love and marry someone of a different race and no one is going to bat an eye.
It isn't like that all over the world and we want it to be. We want to import our lovely liberalism to every far corner of the earth, ISIS and North Korea be damned. We don't care if our way of life isn't universally welcome. Look what it's done for us, how unhappily happy we are, how overstimulated and bored we are, and how we have to work our lives to the bone in order to pay for all our high-tech toys, pricey gadgets and sweatshop sourced fashions.
I am not saying we don't live in scary times. We have always lived in scary times, no epoch any more or less scary than its predecessor or successor. What has changed is that we are now more afraid than ever. Over-informed, overeducated and overstimulated and we are not yet ready to stop dancing, not even when our shoes wear out and our feet begin to bleed we will continue to dance to the frenzied beat of the drum that resonates and frightens us unto the ends of the earth and the deepest recess of our poor undeveloped souls.
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