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A National Well Being Measure undertaken by Healthways and Gallup found that most Americans are struggling .  When asked to rate their lives on a ladder scale, 47% of the 100,000 respondents polled since January 2008 said they were struggling and a further 4% said they were suffering . Contributing factors included negative workplace environments, and difficulty making positive decisions about modifiable health behaviours like diet, exercise and stress.
“In general, we find that misfortunes tend to reinforce each other,” said Daniel Kahneman, Ph. D., Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School Senior Scholar, Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Nobel Laureate, Economics 2002. “In addition to physical pain, illness also increases feelings of stress, sadness and worries about money, and lowers energy. These consequences of illness are buffered or mitigated to some extent by the availability of health insurance, by higher income, by being married and by social contact with others. We are discovering that different aspects of life determine people's judgments and their emotions, and we expect this survey to provide a much richer picture of the feelings of the American citizenry than has ever been available.”
I suspect money problems and the economy play a much bigger part in the degree to which people are struggling but these surveys are not produced by ragged trousered philanthropists, Healthways has a vested interest in talking up the health rather than economic aspect of the national malaise as its a provider of Health and Care Support solutions to , quote ' help millions of people maintain or improve their health 'unquote, so describing workplaces and potential paying customers as unhealthy makes a lot more sense than blaming the economy and the lack of spiritual vision Americans have about where they and Americaare going.
George Bush certainly has a myopic material vision of where America should be going as he rounded on Congress today accusing his detractors of adding to the nations pain through blocking capacity for producing and refining more oil , including blocking opening up an Alaskan Wildlife Reserve for oil drilling. In California today a Judge hearing a case brought by three environmental groups ruled that the the Bush administration has 16 days to decide whether polar bears are now an endangered species because of climate change
The US court found in favour of the three environmental groups that sued to protect polar bears threatened by melting sea ice, rejecting a plea by the government to postpone its decision until June 30.
An agency of the US interior department was supposed to have ruled by January 9 on whether to designate the polar bear an endangered species. But the agency failed to act, angering green activists who attributed the delay to the Bush administration's sale of oil and gas drilling leases near polar bear habitats in Alaska.
The California judge Claudia Wilken, ruled that the administration presented "no specific facts that would justify the existing delay, much less further delay".
Rising global temperatures have endangered the bears by preventing them from hunting beneath the arctic sea ice. Without sufficient ice for refuge, some of the bears have drowned while others have grown too weak to reproduce.
"These magnificent creatures are in peril, and this administration has no right to walk away from protecting them," Barbara Boxer, Democratic chairwoman of the Senate environment committee, said in a statement on the court decision.
The administration can still decline to list the polar bear as endangered by the May 16 deadline.
It seems to me that we should all be seriously looking to the plight of the polar bear as a means of arriving at a new spiritual awareness of and vision for living on this planet to avoid drowning in a sea of human despair.  dark ages by autotelic
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