GETTING TO NORMAL
Normalcy, however it’s defined, may be one of the strongest driving forces of human nature. But we too often choose risky or self-defeating ways of trying to achieve this elusive goal.
After decades of never going near a hospital except to visit a recovering friend or family member, I found myself on the receiving end of a surgical knife. It was one of those ‘kick in the groin’ male operations that come to a large number of us guys late in our lives. The pre-op procedures went smooth, the anesthesiologist was super and the procedure was a excess. Except it left me with several painful and very uncomfortable days of hospital recovery and then a period of prolonged discomfort, curtailed physical activity and a regimen physical therapy while mending at home.
All the time I had the good fortune of access to pain killers to help me manage my ordeal. Still, as if he anticipated my question as he cleared me to go home, my physician said his farewell with, “You should be back to normal within three weeks or so. Here’s a prescription for pills to control the pain while you bounce back. Take ’em as prescribed and only when you need ‘em!”
That has been my only experience with using opioid-based pain medication. Not so, for many in America today who are hurting physically, emotionally or economically and whose common lament is that, like me at the time following my surgery, they “just want to get back to normal.” Traditionally when Americans find ourselves off balance in our lives, we work to return to normal. If one of the wheels come off our wagon, we’re programmed to find a way to repair or replace the wheel, and then get back on the road to normalcy. As a society most of us are industrious, clever, creative, and inventive problem solvers, and we pride ourselves in finding a way forward in the face of pain and adversity.
However, in many parts of our country today, getting back to normal is a plea that emergency medical personnel hear all too frequently from opioid overdose victims, that is from those whom they successfully bring back to consciousness. “I didn’t want to get high, I just wanted to get rid of the – physical, mental - pain. I just wanted to feel normal again.”
The pharmaceutical industry has very effectively incorporated ‘getting to normal’ into its advertising messages. Whether it’s your constricted bowels or your congested sinuses, the messaging is clear: “We have a remedy for that, a drug to make you regular or normal again!” It’s a small step from this messaging to fostering the use – and misuse - of opioids to reduce the physical and psychological hurt that so many Americans feel in today’s troubling and turbulent times. However, such messaging has lulled too many of us into complacency and, some experts argue, has enabled bad habits and self-destructive behavior that ends up in drug overdose.
Patient: “Doctor, I’m hurting, and I just want to feel OK again.”
Doctor: “I’ve got a pill for that.”
In today’s world far too many of us no longer feel capable of participating in the “Great American Success Story” due often to job loss, low pay and demanding working conditions, challenges in finding a safe place to live. The list is long. As a result, we turn to drugs to overcome the sense of depression that struggles to live a normal life bring on.
Most of the last half of the 20th century, normal was particularly easy to define, and for most Americans relatively easy to achieve: a steady job, a small but affordable house with a car in the driveway and a dad, mom, kids, and dog or cat inside. That image of a normal life appears increasingly unattainable today, given the pace at which American society and the economy are changing in response to the accelerating technological advancement and global economic growth and competition.
‘Normal’ today is a moving target. That’s partly because, missing from the normal equation is a certain stability and ease of upward mobility that many Americans enjoyed in the past and had become conditioned to expect. Knowledge has evolved so rapidly, for example, that kids’ high school math and biology textbooks today are more complex than their parents’ college texts. Parents find themselves totally unequipped to assist their children with their homework.
In the workplace, fewer employees can expect to retire from the company which first hired them. Firms’ loyalties have shifted from their employees to their stockholders. The urgency of reporting short-term earnings gains in the next quarterly report overshadows any long-term efforts to cultivate a committed and adequately compensated workforce.
The all-too-frequent result is the trimming back of the number of their employees and automating their functions. John or Jane Doe at one time could count on Widgets, Inc. to provide them steady jobs, even advancement toward a full 25- to 30-year career with the firm. Now, they must be John or Jane Doe, Inc. selling their labor, management or technical expertise and services, as if they themselves were micro-enterprises. But they have diminishing market bargaining power with larger firms unwilling to commit to contracting them for more than a few years and limiting the retirement benefits that come with employment.
What is emerging is a new normal; the one-employer career and home-with-picket-fence lifestyles are becoming more the exception than the rule. This “new normal” is made all the more difficult to attain because of what psychologists and economists call social and market “rigidities.”
Our lives are more closely tethered to our communities than we recognize. We don’t always notice that community affinity until we discover that to compete in increasingly competitive labor markets we need to relocate to where corporate investment and job growth are taking place. This requires leaving behind the civic organizations and social networks in which we have participated, and which have helped define and often support us.
We feel guilty abandoning friends and neighbors with whom we have come to be so closely associated. This “social capital,” as economists describe it, begins to dissipate as community and family support networks disintegrate when we drift away to new jobs in new locations. When we pull up stakes, we find ourselves not only in unfamiliar jobs and workplaces, but also without that familiar community support. Putting down new roots means the stressful task of finding a new normal. Staying put, we risk joblessness and financial hardship. Neither of these two options feels good.
Under such conditions, ‘normal’ becomes elusive, often unattainable, and only a distant enticing memory about how good things were in the stable and comfortable past as compared to the evolving and confusing world of now. This uneasiness about what is ‘normal’ today can be traced to three causes:
· Technologically driven change – automation, communications, information management – introduces unfamiliar workplace conditions and requirements;
· Greater cultural diversity demands more understanding and acceptance of those who are different from us; and
· Bigness and consolidation of bureaucratic government agencies and private corporations often result in unresponsive and even patronizing approaches to our needs for temporary social safety net support as workers and citizens.
Some individuals seek to be ‘normal’ again by taking refuge in the past. They struggle to protect the predictable vestiges of traditional community and family structures that once made them feel comfortable, secure, accepted members. But they are most likely doomed to failure. Why? There’s a couple of reasons:
· There now is only one normal today and that normal is change;
· We are still grappling with how to equip ourselves, and our children to manage change, to adjust, to mitigate its impact and to benefit from it.
There’s no remedy, no magic pill to help us adjust to the new normal of change. Those ill equipped to adjust risk dropping out of society and turning to artificial supports in an attempt to return to normal. Moreover, behind a goodly share of those affected by our current opioid epidemic is a sense of betrayal, marginalization and loss of self-worth. That often leads to mounting depression and the desperate hope that maybe, just maybe there’s a drug to overcome it or at least drive from it their consciousness. Traditional breadwinners and heads of households find themselves incapable of filling their expected roles of supporting their families and seek a chemical ‘quick fix’ to restore them to their normal selves.
Alarmingly, many caught up in today’s opioid epidemic, have lost not just one wheel, but more likely two or three, off their wagon which makes getting back on the road appear like an insurmountable task. Loss of steady work leads to loss of self-esteem, which leads to consumption of drugs and alcohol, which reduced job dependability. Turning to drugs disqualifies workers from many types of jobs. Drowning in self-pity often leads to self-destructive lifestyles of over-eating, obesity, and increased likelihood of chronic illness.
Easy credit may solve short-run consumption needs but eventually can create unmanageable financial burdens from which it is difficult to escape. Combined, these overwhelming outcomes of deteriorating self-esteem, health and finances lead to mental and physical breakdowns that put a return to any sense of normal living totally out of reach.
The drug companies, big pharma in particular, may be rightly accused of being ‘enablers’ of today’s opioid epidemic by fostering a chemical approach to getting back to normal. But they are not the cause. The blame for failing to prepare ourselves for achieving today’s new normal falls on the shoulders of each of us because we are failing to recognize and address the asymmetry that exists in trying to get to normal in our changing world. The inducements that lead to abnormality - to falling short of the new normal - are stronger today than the incentives for striving to achieve it.
Owning a home appears out of reach for many young adult couples because wage growth has lagged housing prices. Mounting college debt has left many young workers with no net equity to finance a home purchase. It is easy to understand why a sense of frustration, defeat and depression can set in. The ease of access to consumer credit card debt may help them compensate for home ownership, but if poorly managed, it can lead to over-indebtedness, the looming threat of impoverishment and overwhelming depression. The new normal is manifested by a future that is changing so much and so quickly that it seems always to be frustratingly just beyond reach.
Needed are sufficiently strong incentives to save and invest for the future despite the fact that every dollar seems critical to meeting the immediate challenges of today’s changing world.
So, how can we foster these incentives and equip ourselves and our children to achieve and manage the new normal of change? Scores of remedies have been put forward and debated. Certainly, more will emerge from our currently politicized culture now that more of us are becoming aware of the challenges of defining and getting to normal. This writer will only add to the dialogue by proposing to consider three broad steps that we can take to navigate a future of accelerating change. Perhaps a good place to start is resurrecting some values and practices that have served us well in other times of difficult transition. Among them are:
Restore a sense of value to things that have no price.
We are a market economy and as such we tend to equate the value of things with their price. We are very price conscious, perhaps overly so and to our detriment. Most of us could come fairly close to estimating the price of an SUV, a smartphone or a cable TV subscription.
But there are things of value in our lives that don’t have an easily calculable or estimated price. What’s the cost of clean air, safe streets, keeping libraries open more hours, or simply spending ‘quality time” playing board games around the kitchen table with family? Because most of us realistically can’t put a price on them, these things of value tend to get squeezed out of our consciousness and become overlooked and abandoned.
Let’s look at restoring things of value to more important places in our lives and maybe avoid spending on those items that don’t.
The benefits can be huge:
Less money spent on material things means greater financial solvency to afford more important needs like better housing and healthier lives;
More quality time with family or community means stronger social interactions and spiritual connections to support us when we need them, which in turn create less dependency on public services, services that can’t and shouldn’t take the place of family or community support.
Let’s invest more time in things of value in our lives.
Strengthen and foster the basic institutions of family and community.
Let’s stop seeking government supports to replace the roles of family and community in our lives. Public services are important in true ‘safety net’ situations, such as recovering from natural disasters or disruptive dislocations such as local factory closures. But it is in our nuclear families and local communities where the best nurturing and support reside.
Kids in particular will benefit. Of the two-thirds of the day that kids aren’t sleeping they pass one-third of that time with family and one-third with community – friends, adult role models, part-time jobs for local businesses, etc. Federal and state government can help restore and strengthen the basic institutions of family and community with pro-family and pro-community tax and spending policies including the provision of strong reliable safety nets to help those displaced by economic adjustments and natural disasters. Government can help restore the conditions for getting to normalcy without declaring what it would be or what it should look like. That’s the role of free market democracies.
Budget more public funding for universal education and public service.
Enough has already been written about the critical need to invest more in our schools and to pay living wages to our teachers. Less has been said about increasing opportunities for public service or paid apprenticeship programs for youth as they transition from school to work. Americans’ need for public services is huge, whether it be in the military defending our country, in conservation corps tasked with protecting and stewarding our environment and natural resources, in participating in technical teams expanding digital infrastructure and services to every corner of the country, or in providing health or companion services to the very young and very old.
And with those services we reap the dividends of building appreciation for community and civic duty, of self-reliance and reduced dependency of big government to meet our needs. Youth also learn the value of teamwork while gaining skills that will help them address the challenges of the new normal of ongoing change they can expect to encounter in the course of their lives.
To keep the wheels from falling off the wagon for this new generation of Americans, let’s build a can-do culture of skilled, capable and confident young citizens who are equipped to respond rationally and responsibly to the incentives embedded in the new normal of change.
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