American Society Under Pressure

I have a wellness consultant who tries not to involve herself in the most troublesome aspects of American life these days. Her reasoning, and I understand it, is that in order to help her clients most effectively, she needs to protect herself from despair, anger, terror, and all the other deeply negative emotions that permeate our society.  She wants to follow this stuff only to the level that she has a fairly decent understanding of what her patients are experiencing, but not to the level that she experiences it herself.

Everywhere we look we see that the good old days of plugging along through life, working, parenting, vacationing, throwing parties, and so forth are gone, and it’s hard to imagine things will ever be the same. We find ourselves under pressure to preserve our wealth, stay healthy, remove Trumpism as a popular national phenomenon, and deal with environmental collapse, all before it’s too late.

To lighten the mood, here’s David Bowie and company performing his masterpiece, “Under Pressure.”