Credit: Screen Capture from “Resiliance” film trailer.
There is a scene in James Redford’s new film, Resilience, in which a paediatrician cites a parental misdeed so outmoded as to seem bizarre. “Parents used to smoke in the car with kids in the back and the windows rolled up,” she says, incredulous. How long ago those days now seem; how wise today’s parents are to the dangers of those toxins. Yet every week in her clinic in the Bayview-Hunters Point area of San Francisco, children present with symptoms of a new pollutant – one that is just as damaging. But unlike the smoke-filled car, this new pollutant is invisible, curling undetected around children’s lives and causing lasting damage to their lungs, their hearts, their immune systems.
“Stress,” Redford says. “It is a neurotoxin like lead or mercury poisoning.” He mentions the city of Flint in Michigan, where residents were exposed to lead in drinking water. “And that’s literally what’s going on” with children […]
This sounds like a very interesting film. I know I would probably have a few ACE’s in my life. Even at my late stage of life, even more ACE’s begin to show up because of declining health, etc., which could cause premature loss of life expectancy. Certainly one of those ACE’s would be the worry caused by the increase in the cost of living. When we are young we envision the future as being the same, but things change so fast that prices of ordinary things are very different now than when I was young, and that change brings a lot of stress. for just one example of what ordinary older folks have to deal with. I really like having a computer, with it’s many great ways to get news and communicate, but the companies like Microsoft and Verizon are making it almost impossible to afford a computer now days, because they are constantly changing everything and with those changes come price increases, for example.
Dr. Stephen Bezruchka has made a career of making this point in a thousand different ways, If only we could hear him. He taught at UW’s School of Community and Population Health and can carry this discussion down to the chemistry of cortisol (stress, need, dissatisfaction, distractinn, feeling of insufficiency (good for marketing though)) vs oxytocin Ahh, the hormone of communion and community enjendered by having a mother who feels protected.
He points out that we have a choice between creating generous human beings, as the Norse countries exemplify by their 6ix year support of mothers and families with infants, as opposed to making stressed and needy kids by ‘you are on your own’ stressors so evident in Republican and Libertarian philosophies that assume societies exist, but take no responsibility for the quality of their results. I do not say this as a partisan, by the way, Democrats are far from blameless, but on this issue, lie closer to the Nordic exemplars than the previous group that cannot grasp public health.