Stress And Hunger

The Inquirer (November 14) wrote about what it was like for 670,000 workers furloughed by the government and the 730,000 federal workers who were affected by the shutdown. Many of them were required to work without pay. Trump piled on with threats to not pay them if they didn’t report to work which added to their plight.

The Bank of America Institute indicated that 24% of all workers live paycheck to paycheck. Investodia puts the figure at 67%. Federal workers were forced to go into retirement funds just to make it through the shutdown. They skipped meals, deferred paying bills, cut down on groceries, and begged their landlords for an extension on their rent. All these things produced a high level of stress. It was stressed in the article that people were caught between stress and hunger as the greatest source of trauma. The people felt betrayed.

I have written extensively about the two things that people need to function well. They are their self-esteem must be good, and they should feel that they sense that they belong to people around them. They must feel connected. You can be popular and still not feel that you belong. This is Philia in the Greek that when these two things are present according to the Greek, it is like being in the grocery store and finding that item that is buy one get one free.

Certainly, the sense of belonging to their colleagues in government was missing as Trump and others kept making statements that made them feel isolated and not belonging to an organization that valued their presence and work. They felt expendable. This created stress and hunger.

But there was something else that was present that was creating stress and a sense of alienation. Some of them looked for another job. This something created an untenable nightmare for the workers for they were caught in a double bind created by the shutdown. They constantly had the bind of not knowing when the shutdown would end, whether they should pay certain bills, and how to purchase things in the grocery store.

Put yourself in the shutdown worker’s shoes. Use as much empathy as you can. What does a double bind look like: when you have to choose between your medication and food; when you have to think about how much you can eat to have enough for your children; you have to pay rent or risk having a place for you and your family to live, etc.

Two systems that we studied in class relate to the issue of the double bind that can literally make people crazy and existentialism.

Gregory Bateson discovered the terrible consequences of people caught in a double bind. He identified this stressor when he put forth his theory that when you must decide between two things where both choices are problematic such as choosing food for you and food for your children. He also said that double binds are cause when there was no way for people to escape and for a pattern of double bind issues became a pattern over time.

The example that I often used in class was the book and movie, Sophia’s Choice by William Styron, about the Holocaust. Sophia stands with her son on one side of her and her daughter on the other. When she was required to get on the train, she knew that train A went to a death camp for people on that train while train B was going to a less severe camp which would have more of a chance of people’s survival. When she was walking toward the trains, she was stopped by a member of the Gestapo who told her she must get on train B, and she could only take one child. It was not a choice to put both children on train B and for her stay behind. She had just a moment to decide. She chose the boy. Later in the novel we learn that she made that choice because she thought he was stronger and more likely to survive in the camp going to camp B. The decision haunts her for the rest of her life. She ended up being crazy.

The second thing that the federal workers faced were considerations of existentialism which goes hand in hand with the above example. Jean Paul Sartre, who founded the system, said “hell and heaven are the others” meaning most of our pain is emotional more so than physical. We create a living hell for others, and on our best days we create a heaven for others. When we think of the federal workers, it is a situation that is hellish for them because hell for the existentialist is when there is nothing you can do to change something in your life that is creating hell because of others’ decisions. The inability to institute change is key to soul/psyche to make bad something that is better.

We can apply what happened to the federal workers to our own lives when we must make terrible choices with a lot at stake. Ethics as a discipline itself is defined by the phrase “the choices we make.” Choice is the key word. It is the bottom line.

We can fix this political problem very simply. Politicians do not get paid unless they are working on a solution. The politicians’ healthcare is the best in the country. Why shouldn’t all Americans have the same healthcare as the politicians. In fact, it should be lower in quality than what we have. The last time I looked, they were working for us! In Ethics we call that consequentialism where they see the consequences of what they do or don’t do. I would bet everything that I have that we wouldn’t see another shutdown!