Celebrants at one of Bogotá's innovative Nights for Women
The Unhappy Planet Index link I described
in Sunday's post suggests that, for the most part, Latin Americans are
as happy as North Americans, and happier than Europeans (Scandinavians
excepted), despite owning and consuming 50% less than Europeans and 90%
less than North Americans.
Colombia is a country mired in
political and economic problems, most of them caused by pervasive
corruption that has prevailed since Europeans arrived centuries ago,
and exacerbated by long-standing American interference and support for
violent right-wing extreme regimes. The country's environment is a
wasteland, a chemical soup created by aerial spraying of poisons by
American anti-drug programs and Colombian anti-insurgents that has
rendered much of the country's soil sterile and toxic, and deforested
huge swaths of the country. Only 1% of the country's land is arable,
though 13% is cultivated with coca, much of it the new flourishing
Roundup-resistant variety that the US and Monsanto have inadvertently
encouraged. The country remains in a perpetual state on the edge of
civil war, with huge amounts of US military and CIA aid (the price of
allowing the US free rein to spray the country to oblivion and to
operate its massive and incompetent anti-drug program throughout the
country) used by the hapless government to terrorize its political
opponents, including the country's indigenous peoples. Last week, the
week of President Uribe's second inauguration (he changed the country's
constitution to enable him to run again, and all meaningful opposition
groups are illegal, so his re-election was a dubious exercise in
democracy), 24 people were killed by bombs and land-mines. Nearly 4 million Colombians
have been displaced by recent violence (second only in the world to
Sudan). Over 35,000 have been murdered, by conservative estimates, in
the last decade, by various factions. Each year over 1,000 are
kidnapped and over 1,000 more killed by land-mines. Much of the country
is lawless and run by protection gangs that terrorize and extort money from citizens.
By all traditional measures, then, Colombians should not be happy people. But they are. They seem to have a natural resilience to adversity, a willingness to work with others and try novel approaches, a sense of joie de vivre, and a bottom-up, community-based approach to solving problems.
By
contrast, North Americans, overwhelmingly wealthier, safer, blessed
with natural resources, better educated, supported by vastly more
health infrastructure, are not only no happier than Colombians, but
they are so stressed out that they are disproportionately succumbing to debilitating stress-related illnesses. Rates of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, heart attacks, stroke, lung disease and cancer are all much
higher. But although Gladwell and the study he cites claim stress is
the differentiator, I'm not so sure: should we rule out quality and
diversity of diet, environmental toxins in the air, water and food
(though they're lousy in Colombia, too), and general level of physical
fitness. But if the high rate of North American illness is due to stress, why?
Most North Americans and most Latin Americans are from similar European
ancestry, and, as Gladwell's article points out, the whitebread Brits
seem much less affected by it than North Americans.
As someone
who has just been leveled by a stress-provoked disease, I am of course
very interested in answers to both these questions (is stress the cause, or at least the catalyst?, and if so, why are North Americans so disproportionately stressed? I have some theories and hypotheses, but I want to keep an open mind.
What do you think? |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
