HEALTHY AT 100 (37 page)

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• If you want to change the way you feel about someone, change the way you treat him (or her).
  

• Remember that love is necessary for great relationships, but it is not sufficient. Great relationships don’t just happen because you’re in love. They take work, and lots of it.
  

• Beware of the temptation to take others, especially your spouse or intimate partner, for granted. Rather than using your relationship for convenience, use it to become a more loving person.
  

• Step back every now and then and take an objective look at your own behavior. If someone important to you is being defensive, ask whether you are doing anything to make them so.
  

• Listen before you react to anger. Look for solutions that benefit everyone.
  

• Nurture the friendships with which you feel at ease. Move on from those that take enormous energy and stress to maintain.
  

• Respect people for who they are, not for the roles they play.
  

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• Read a story to an elder who can no longer see fine print. Record your reading on tape so they can play it back and listen whenever they wish. Help an older neighbor with home tasks, such as washing windows, shoveling snow, or painting. If there is a pet in the house, offer to take the dog for a walk, clean the cat’s litter box, or shop for pet food and supplies.
  

• Be the coach or friend or teacher who notices a child’s efforts and says “Good job.” Be the older friend who sees that a child is capable of more than his behavior indicates, and lifts him toward his higher potential by helping him to show good manners, kindness to others, and responsible behavior. Be the family member who is honest with a child and in so doing reminds him or her how to be truthful. Be the teacher who validates the inner life of children by asking for their ideas and opinions about topics that are important to them. Be the eccentric relative who shows a child that it is okay to be just who he or she is.
  

• If you don’t have a young person in your life, go to your nearby day-care center and offer to read a book or help out there. Volunteer to rock babies at your local hospital. Take kids from your neighborhood on a nature hike. Walk a child to or from school. Express your caring for children who are not your own. Take neighboring kids to the library when you take your own child. Provide them with healthful snacks and an accepting ear, remembering how much it matters to be listened to.
  

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• Gather with others to gain support in taking steps toward more loving relationships. Meet regularly, and decide together at each meeting on the step or steps that you will each take before the next meeting. Share both the difficulties you encounter and the successes you experience.
  

• Learn from people who are different from you. Greet them with true curiosity, knowing that you can stay true to yourself no matter what the differences. Do not let differences of opinion become causes of estrangement.
  

• Tell others what you appreciate about them. Make sure each of your friends knows that there is something special about them that you cherish. Write them cards or letters so they have something to help them remember that you value them.
  

• Bake extra and share. Bring good food to people who are in transition, stress, or crisis. A few times a month, double what you are making for dinner and take the extra to someone who is having an especially busy or difficult time. It doesn’t have to be a complete meal—just something that lessens her load and reminds her that she is in your heart.
  

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

—Jiddu Krishnamurti

T
oday, the term “culture” is widely understood to refer to the systematic body of learned behavior which is transmitted to children from parents, schools, and communities. But not that long ago, this concept was part of the vocabulary of only a small and technical group of professional anthropologists. It had not yet been widely recognized that from the moment of our births, the customs into which we are born exert an enormous influence on our experience and behavior.

This changed with the work of one of the world’s most renowned anthropologists, the bestselling author Ruth Benedict. According to her student, friend, and colleague, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict’s work is the main reason that the words “in our culture” have come to be widely used and understood. It is largely thanks to her that we have come to understand how profoundly we are shaped by the cultures in which we live.

In his book
A Language Older Than Words
, Derrick Jensen describes how Ruth Benedict sought to understand why some cultures are fundamentally peaceful and healthy while others are not, why
women, children, and the aged are treated well in some cultures while in others they are not, and why some cultures are cooperative while others are competitive.
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Based on her study of more than seven hundred societies, Benedict perceived a single pattern that seemed to explain all these variations.

At one end of the continuum, she found what she called “syner-gistic” societies. In these cultures, behaviors that benefit the whole group are rewarded, while behaviors that harm the group as a whole are forbidden. Generosity and compassion are esteemed, while hoarding is considered shameful, and so wealth is continuously circulated through the community and not allowed to accumulate in any one person’s hands. In these societies, she wrote, “if a man has meat or garden produce or horses or cattle, these give him no standing except as they pass through his hands to the tribe at large.”
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Such cultures, she said, tend to be harmonious, peaceful, healthy, and respectful of women, children, and the elderly. Individual members tend to be happy, secure, and trusting.

In these communities, children are taught to share from early in childhood. Jack Kornfield tells of a Native American ceremony in which young children are showered with food, drink, and clothing. Then members of the tribe cry out, “I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, I’m cold.” From their abundance, the children are then led to distribute their bounty to others in need. Through such games, children are taught to hold the needs of the other members of their tribe to be as important as their own.

At the far opposite end of the continuum, however, Ruth Benedict found what she called “surly and nasty” cultures. In these cultures, behaviors that benefit individuals at the expense of the whole are rewarded, and those who amass wealth are esteemed. People in such societies, she found, tend to be “paranoid, mean-spirited, warlike, and abusive toward women, children and the elderly.” Individual members of such societies tend to view each other as competitors or threats, to think exclusively about their own interests, and to be self-aggrandizing, insecure, suspicious, and hostile. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of the very few.

I once believed that the wealthier a society, the better would be the health of its citizens. And it’s certainly true that worldwide today, those nations whose annual per capita income is below about $5,000 to $10,000 often suffer from poor sanitation and malnutrition and have the poorest health. But studies have consistently found that above that threshold, the health of nations is no longer a matter of absolute income, but is actually more a matter of the gap between the rich and the poor. Above that point,
the larger the gap between rich and poor, the less health will prevail.
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Societies in which the pie gets divided in such a way that everyone gets a decent share are healthier because as well as having their basic needs met, people tend to participate in their community, trust others, and cooperate for mutual benefit. They form friendships. They care for one another. Their relationships are marked by support, trust, and sociability.

Of all nations today, Japan has the greatest life expectancy of any nation on earth (and Okinawa has for many years had the greatest life expectancy in all of Japan). How, you may wonder, does Japan manage this stellar health (which is all the more remarkable given the very high level of smoking in Japan)? A key factor may be that Japan today is economically the most equitable of all the world’s affluent nations.

It hasn’t always been this way. Prior to World War II, wealth distribution in Japan was harshly unequal, and life expectancy rates were hardly better than those of impoverished third-world countries. After the war, though, things began to change when General Douglas MacArthur was given the task of overseeing the nation’s reconstruction. MacArthur had his faults, but he has been called “the greatest population health doctor who ever lived” by Stephen Bezruchka, M.D., who has written extensively on the medical consequences of wealth inequality.
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MacArthur required three fundamental things of the Japanese. First was demilitarization—Japan was forbidden to have an army. Second was democratization—his staff created the constitution that is in use in Japan to this day, providing for a representative democracy,
free universal education, the right of labor unions to organize and engage in collective bargaining, the right of women to vote, and the right of everyone to a decent life. And the third was decentralization—MacArthur broke up the family dynasties that ran the huge corporations that had controlled the country. He mandated a maximum wage for business and corporate leaders. He also carried out the most successful land reform program in history. Land was purchased from landlords who had amassed huge holdings, then sold to the tenants at the same price. The tenants were given thirty-year interest-free loans to make the purchase. Essentially, he leveled the playing field. His reforms were followed by the most rapid rise in health and longevity ever documented in any major country in world history.

From a highly stratified prewar society, postwar Japan became a nation that cherished egalitarianism. When the economy ran into trouble in the early 1990s, Japanese bosses and managers took cuts in pay rather than lay off workers. As recently as 2000, the prime minister of Japan made only four times what an average worker made, and bosses made only ten times what entry-level workers made.

When Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi took office in 2001, however, he initiated Reagan-like policies of spending cuts, privatization, deregulation, and tax breaks for the wealthy. As a result the gap between rich and poor, long held in check, began to grow. But still, very few Japanese wanted to see a society divided into winners and losers. The nation’s major daily newspapers ran articles with titles like “Divided Japan” and “Light and Darkness,” decrying policies that favored the rich at the expense of the average Japanese. Even Prime Minister Koizumi said that “Winners and losers shouldn’t be trapped in those categories. If someone loses once, he should be given a second chance.”

In the United States, however, things have taken a different course since World War II. At the end of the war, there were very few homeless people on U.S. streets. Even as late as 1970, homelessness in America was still rare. But since that time economic inequality in this country has grown immensely.
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In 1998, one American (Bill Gates)
achieved the dubious distinction of amassing more wealth than the combined net worth of the poorest 45 percent of U.S. households.
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Today, many corporate executives earn more money in a couple of hours than the average factory worker makes in a year.
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The wealthiest 1 percent of America’s population owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.
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And meanwhile, the minimum wage in the United States, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by 37 percent since 1968, and become the lowest of any industrialized nation.

This gap has had devastating health consequences. Forty-five million Americans do not have even the most basic health insurance, and many millions more are seriously underinsured. Many Americans face the risk of financial ruin and even premature death because they can’t pay their medical bills. And of course, it’s the poor who are hit the hardest. Today, an African American man in Harlem has a lower life expectancy than a man in Bangladesh, one of the world’s most monetarily poor countries.
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With less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States now accounts for nearly 50 percent of the world’s spending on healthcare. Yet the United States ranks only 26th in life expectancy, and 28th in infant mortality.
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It may be happenstance, but not a single one of the 25 countries that have longer life expectancies than the United States, nor a single one of the 27 countries that have better infant mortality rates, has as wide a wealth gap between its richest and poorest citizens.