Reprints Online

A recently published study on health differences between the English and Americans found that people living in the U.S. are profoundly more unhealthy than their counterparts from over the pond. The study did not reach any conclusions but experts were shocked at the extent of the disparity.

You can find hints at the fundamental reasons underlying this problem everywhere you look. All you have to do is look out your front door. You can see it in the over-fertilized, over-watered and well manicured lawns; in fact it's a metaphor for the root of the problem. You can observe it by the things that hang on your wall, the car that's parked in your driveway and the designer jeans that hang in our closets. It's not hard to find at all. You'll see it on the $10,000 car with the $4,000 rims and in the state-of-the-art electronic devices that seem to occupy every nook and cranny of every house in America. You can look at it in the hands of our children as they sit in the back of the family gas-guzzler with the built-in DVD player that bellows the latest Disney movie, speeding away on the 10 lane highway only making pit stops for gas and McDonald's as it heads to our vacation homes.

The problem is that the antidote for it isn't reflected back in the state of our marriages or our families. You won't even come close to finding it in our schools and it's conspicuously absent in our libraries. The box that sits atop our mantle that seems to be continually droning on is nearly devoid of it. We seem to have reached the point where it's absent from not only our everyday conversations but from our hopes and our dreams.

The fact is that as a people we are unhealthy. We are physically, mentally and spiritually sick because we worship a god that is devoid of all substance - but we still keep praying at the altar. Our souls long for meaning and purpose and we feed it with the spoils provide us by our man-made god. We can't seem to grasp that no matter how hard we pray the void grows deeper and the chasm in our souls grows wider.

We come by "it" and we use "it," abuse "it" and discard "it" and that's just how we treat the people in our lives. Have you ever noticed how hard we can be on our possessions? Everything in our collective eyes is expendable - we just toss "it" out, whatever "it" may be with the belief that we can just get a new one. But our religions and our science conclude something contrary to the way we believe and the way we live our lives. Our actions do have consequences and we will continue to suffer as a people and as individuals when we don't feed our need for substance found in true relationships.

People are not expendable, they're not inherently evil and everyone, no matter who they are, hurts because they long for something more than just the attainment of things. We can heal our collective infirmity with a little courage but we must be willing to live, to love, to sacrifice and to give. We must forego our immediate need for the entertainment of the hour and work towards making our homes and communities something more than just springboards for our commercially crafted egos. Together we can remove the log from our eyes. Only then will we approach what it means to have good health.


About the Author

Stop by The Indy Voice to see hypocrisy exposed regularly but be warned, what you'll find is nothing like those corporate biased, for-profit news and commentary sites.

Go places you've never been before by clicking here, The Indy Voice