Something's Off
What a difference a little three-letter word can make. Well means healthy. Well off means wealthy. Compared to most others, the U.S. is a high-income country, among the wealthiest nations in the world, but far from the healthiest. Americans live shorter lives and suffer more illnesses and injuries than people in other high-income countries, despite spending considerably more on health care.
As goes one of those songs meant for singing around this time, I’ve no wish to come between the season and your enjoyment, so I bid you pleasure and bid you cheer. Still, this is the time of year for taking inventory. If done honestly, it’s impossible not to see that something is off here. America is unwell. Our obsession with being well off has a lot to do with it.
The obsession makes us fond of locks and gates and guns and video surveillance. It fills us with grievances, which in turn fertilize intolerance of difference and indifference to suffering. From this grows a self-absorbed, cold-hearted mean streak. Numb to cruelty one moment, accepting of barbarity the next.
Yearning to be well off above all else—even at the high cost of unwellness—diverts one’s gaze from social and economic injustice, how wealth and power feed off each other. Concentration of wealth produces concentration of power, greater concentration of power leads to further concentration of wealth, a corruption cycle that has put our country in a death spiral.
Another year coming to a close, a new one about to dawn, billionaires well on their way to becoming trillionaires. Goodbye neighborhood, hello island sanctuary. Old acquaintance, forgotten. Cup of kindness, poured out on the ground. Something is off here. America is unwell.
Surely I can’t be alone in noticing that people who have the least in this world, materially speaking, are often the most giving. I once lived for two years in one of those places our nation’s mean-streak-in-chief calls a shithole. At the time, people there were living on less than a dollar a day but never hesitated to welcome a stranger, share a meal, offer shelter, give what little they had. They are poor in ways we are rich, rich in ways we are poor.
They are not well off, but they are well. There’s a big difference between the two conditions. To a much greater extent than most Americans realize, our society’s fate in the new year and beyond will depend on recognizing that difference, taking it to heart, striking a better balance.
As that other song always sung this time of year asks, should old acquaintance be forgot? Good God, no. Better to remember every fellow passenger, cultivate associations with all our might. While we’re at it, take a cup of kindness, that true source of wellness, offer it generously, share the health.
