Here's my January column for the @HollandSentinel…
According to a recent news story, a man in his 60s was grocery shopping in Minnesota, searching for a specific type of cheese. When he couldn’t find it in the dairy aisle, he found an employee to help him search. He even demanded that she go “in the back” to find it. When neither of them could locate the cheese, the man “lost it,” in the words of the story, and threw a temper tantrum right there in the store.
The employee, who was apparently shaken by the incident, told a reporter later, “You’re looking at someone and thinking, ‘I don’t think this is about the cheese.’”
The man in the dairy aisle is not the only angry person in our country today. Examples of rage toward grocery store employees, flight attendants, school board members, public health officials, and others can be found in the news just about every day. I cite this example because the person who spoke about her experience with a reporter was on to something.
This is not about the cheese—or the vaccinations, or the mask wearing, or any of the other reasons people give for “losing it” and acting in ways no one would have imagined possible only a few years ago.
This is about something more, something darker and more worrisome.
A recent survey of 1,320 mental health professionals provides at least one insight: Our country is facing a mental health crisis—a second pandemic, if you will—something much harder to identify and more difficult to treat.
Forget Covid (if you can); the more frightening, long-term challenge to our country’s well-being is the number of people right now who are feeling anxious, depressed, burned out, overwhelmed, lonely, empty, and uncertain. The survey revealed that frontline mental health providers are themselves overwhelmed with people seeking care, often managing full client loads and waiting lists.
Reading the study, I thought it was interesting that mental health professionals were able to find some good news among the bad. The stigma surrounding therapy, for example, seems to have diminished considerably, as more people are willing to seek help, many for the first time. I suppose there’s something to be said for that (I’ll go on record as being a strong advocate for psychotherapy), but the situation seems dire and must seem even more dire if you’re the one on the waiting list.
We all know by now the reasons we got here—the pandemic, certainly, and then the restrictions on travel and movement, the loneliness that comes from staying home, the threat of inflation and the shortage of goods, not to the mention the ever-deepening political polarization in the country. I should include as well the existential threats from racial justice unrest and the feeling that our democracy is slipping away. I feel stressed out from typing those sentences.
What’s of greater interest to me, though, is how we got here and how we cope. The fault lines were clearly present before anyone ever heard of Covid-19. The rage that we read about on airplanes, at school board meetings, and even in churches, didn’t surface one day without warning. What seems to have happened is that the pandemic exposed us. One good jolt, and we suddenly woke up to the world as it is—fragile and vulnerable. Looking back, it seems clear that, as a culture, we haven’t been in a good place for a long time.
In a recent column I proposed that we seek out more truth, beauty, and mystery, whatever it is that has allowed human beings over the centuries to transcend themselves and their most pressing concerns. After reading my column, one reader challenged me to be more explicit. We need God, she wrote. And I won’t disagree.
But even believers need to learn some coping skills right now. And so, I’ll recommend a few:
1. Turn off the news. Reading one newspaper a day or watching one news summary should be enough for any well-informed citizen.
2. Get off social media, or at least limit yourself.
3. Read a book. (My latest one will be available in March.)
4. Write a book. (If I can do it, you can too.)
5. Take a walk.
6. And reach out to family members and friends. If they’re struggling, they’ll be glad to hear from you. If they start talking about the sorry state of the country and Congress and how the last election was stolen, tell them how glad you are to hear their voices and promise to call again soon.
Photo: The view from my attic study window in Minneapolis...with outdoor temps well below zero Fahrenheit.
Doug, I always enjoy your columns, and today's was most interesting. I rarely listen to the news. The last time I did I walked out of the room after 17 minutes out of 30 of 100% Covid-19. Recently went to CDC.gov and clicked around to see if any meaningful statistics could be found. For what it is worth I computed a Covid-19 fatality rate of 1.52%; in other words a survivability rate of 98.48%. The contractual rate was between 14 to 15%. I went to VAERS' website and found five pages of vaccines. Only two had adverse reactions reported above 1.5%. Care to guess which two and both were slightly above 23%!!! One of my reasons for being annoyed these days is all the jumping through our you-know-whats we, as in the world, so to speak, are doing for miniscule reasons. Keep your columns coming. Happy New Year! Steve Stimpson
(Second try)
Hi Doug,
In defense for "losing it in the dairy aisle".....A Minnesota Norwegian without his gjetost is definitely a cause for fisticuffs!