It’s More Than Just the Headlines
Gallup published a poll last month titled “Satisfaction With Own Life Five Times Higher Than With U.S.” Here’s an excerpt:
“Americans' satisfaction with the direction of the country has fallen to 17%, the lowest in a year. At the same time, Americans' satisfaction with their own lives has ticked up to 85%, just five points shy of the 2020 record-high point.”
Yet CNN, citing the exact same poll, reported something different:
“American happiness hits record lows”
“One word can describe how Americans are feeling about the way things are going: bad. That’s the finding of a new Gallup Poll out Wednesday that measures the state of the nation, and it’s what a lot of other data tells us as well.”
We now live in a country where pushing us apart and pushing us down have become embedded in our media and our politics. Happily, it seems to date that this negativity has had a limited effect on how satisfied most of us are with our own lives. That is great.
Can it last? Better not to find out. We need to insist on more pragmatic, consensus-oriented politics and politicians, and media that is less Debbie Downer.
A pretty good argument can be made that both our politicians and the media are trying to manipulate us more than serve us. More Americans are getting fed up with this, but nothing will change until more of us communicate with our elected politicians and insist they govern effectively—which in such a politically divided country means working with people in the other party, issue by issue.
This website has a great tool that can be used to look up your state and federal representatives. Please do so. Ask your representatives what they have done to work with members of the other party to enact legislation. Tell them you expect them to get things done, not spend most of their time demonizing the craziest in the other party in furtherance of their own re-election.
To close out with some positive news, here is something from Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times last week that, if our media was more uplifting and concentrated on more things that are really important, more of us would know about:
“One gauge of our progress in saving children’s lives: according to one analysis of data, as recently as the 1920s, the child mortality rate in the United States was higher than it is in Somalia today — and since then it has plunged in America by more than 95 percent. In 1960, child mortality was higher in Mexico, Brazil, China and Turkey than it is in Somalia today.
We know how to save kids’ lives. At UNICEF in the 1980s and 1990s, an American executive director named James Grant — for my money, the most important U.N. official in history — oversaw an effort that slashed death rates in the developing world and saved perhaps 25 million lives. If we built statues of heroes based on their impact on the world, busts of Grant would adorn every town square.”
Pretty amazing. And if we lived in a culture that tried to lift us up and bring us together, a lot more people would know who James Grant was and take heart in how much more impact individuals like Mr. Grant can quietly have than most politicians and celebrities do.