The actions of your country’s political leaders may have direct, immediate, practical impacts on your personal life.
A change in tax law is one example. It might result in you have more or less money at your disposal.
Shifts in immigration policy constitute another. If you’re an immigrant or have friends and family who are immigrants, those shifts may touch you deeply.
Here’s a third possibility: Laws designed to protect the environment from its many different damagers might limit or expand your enjoyment of nature in your area.
As the devastating effects of the climate crisis rampage, your personal health may be affected.
The World Health organization says: Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250 000 additional deaths per year, from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress.
The direct damage costs to health is estimated to be between $2 to 4 billion per year by 2030.
More: https://tinyurl.com/mr2ayeeh
Fourth: If the government expands or contracts its involvement in how your medical bills are paid, it might either save the lives and ease the suffering of you and your loved ones, or else result in your death or debilitation.
According to the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, less wealthy Americans without health insurance are more likely to die than wealthier Americans who have it.
Other benefits of health insurance: “improved self-rated health, financial protection, and reduced likelihood of depression. Insurance is the gateway to medical care, whose aim is not just to save lives but also to relieve suffering.”
More: https://tinyurl.com/HealthInsuranceBenefits
Some actions by your elected and appointed officials may have little direct, immediate, practical impact on your personal life, while at the same time having huge consequences for people you don’t know.
For example, when the American government sells huge amounts of weaponry at bargain rates to the authoritarian nation of Saudi Arabia, that weaponry might be used to annihilate civilians in Yemen.
An astute mythologist or depth psychologist might identify another mechanism by which prominent, notorious, and highly visible politicians wield influence in our private lives. They become major players in our imaginations, embodying the roles of archetypal figures like kings and queens, rebels and fools, gray eminences and sycophants.
We may incorporate them into our nightly dreams as if they were people we knew personally. They may possess an oversized power to inspire or demoralize us, gladden or enrage us. Their numinous images may get entangled with our feelings about our parents or other authority figures we have dealt with.
So when we Americans elect a new president, for example, we choose a character who will be a major force, for better or worse, in our subconscious minds for the next four years. Same is true, on a less intense but still powerful level, for governors and Senators and influe ntial Congresspeople.
In a sense, we are deciding upon fairy tale heroes an villains who will preside over the dramas that are always simmering in our deep psyches.
Our word “idiot” comes from the Greek name for the man who took no share in public matters.
—Classicist scholar and author Edith Hamilton
(Courtesy of Rob Brezsny)