perfidy

Geitner Simmons links to a story from Germany. Isn't the internet grand?

The story concerns Norwegian researchers who discovered that all the ills of "modern" life, stress, depression, sleeplessness, are shared by the indigenous population of Mindoro Island in the Philippines. 

We were greatly surprised when the data was analyzed and we found that, not only did the jungle dwellers have the same ailments we did, they had them to an even greater degree. Also, we found that the distribution of ailments was exactly like that in modern society," Staff and Hellesnes said.

Fatigue, depression, sleeplessness are all common complaints that are not solved by a hunter-gatherer lifestyle grounded by some basic agriculture.

Like present-day affluent Norwegians, the most common physical complaints were muscle and skeletal pains. But while 82.1 percent of Norwegians answered that they have had such problems in the course of the past 30 days, 100 percent of the Mindoro felt the same.

Stomach ailments pestered 60 percent of Norwegians during the previous month - over 80 percent of the Mindoro had the same complaint.

The lack of control over their existence gave the Mindoro far more to worry about, and even such basic elements like food or childbirth are laden with uncertainty on the fringe of the jungle. A basic difference between the two varying cultures is that the Mindoro do not view their pains as illnesses, but rather as a normal state of affairs.

Huh. People is people.

The researchers also note that "Norwegians also did not consider such afflictions to be illnesses until relatively recently, and place some of the blame on the World Health Organization for defining health as the absence of ailments."

--Pithy moralizing follows--

Too true. A sense of crisis is proportional to your living situation. This is one of the first lessons that any child learns when becoming part of the larger world, and it's too often forgotten by adults. Just take a look at this gigantic blogworld flapdoodle about free lunches for schoolkids.

The original article by John Hawkins at Right Wing News, here, makes a point about free lunches and who should pay for them, in a particularly careless and insenstive manner. Michele at A Small Victory smacks back with a from-the-gut post here, Hawkins smacks back, marveling that " there still are people in America, most of whom seem to be posting at A Small Victory (how they can afford computers, but not food for their kids is beyond me), who believe that everyone else has a responsibility to pay for their kid's food," and a cast of thousands throw in their two cents. Read it and despair, or have a little gut-laugh that we have it so good. Your choice.