A Triptych
Mt. Mansfield. photo by Jared C. Benedict
Today’s opus will be presented as three un-related chapters, each with its own title, as follows:
1—Vermont the Healthy?
Among Vermont’s other distinctions, it seems to be Number One in health-consciousness.
In the latest Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, Vermont scored 69.1 on the “healthy behavior index score,” higher than it did last year and 1.3 clicks ahead of second-place Hawaii.
This does not prove that Vermonters are healthier than anyone else. In fact it doesn’t prove anything; it’s survey research, which provides indications, not incontrovertible fact.
The indications are that Vermonters take care of themselves better than other Americans. They are less likely to smoke, more likely to exercise, most likely to eat lots of fruits and vegetables.
That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that being best in America does not necessarily men being very good. Overall, the survey found that the “nation as a whole (is) dropping substantively on the Healthy Behavior Sub-Index, from 63.7 in 2008 to 62.6 in the first half of 2009.” In fact, “Mississippi, whose score ranks among the bottom 10, is the only state to record a statistically significant increase in its healthy behavior score.”
So there’s little justification here for Vermonters getting a swelled head about their (relatively) good habits. To begin with, there doesn’t seem to be all that much specifically “Vermontish” in these results. Almost all the states in the Northeast scored reasonably well, as did the Rocky Mountain states and the West Coast (except Washington State and Nevada.). To some extent, then, being health-conscious is a regional habit.
And probably an educational habit. More than 35 percent of adult Vermonters graduated from college, more than in all but five other states. College graduates tend to be more health conscious, not to mention more affluent. Not only do they know that they ought to go to the gym, they can afford the membership.
On the other hand, Vermont is the most rural of the states in the top ten, and there is ample evidence (such as this 2005 study in Pennsylvania) that rural residents don’t have the healthiest habits. They are more likely to smoke, less likely to exercise, and they gobble up lots of fried foods.
Meaning that perhaps it is the residents of Chittenden County and a few others outposts who take good care of themselves. But the survey didn’t get down to the county or town level.
The Gallup survey says it provides “a daily measure of people’s well-being…based on the World Health Organization (WHO) definition of health as not only the absence of infirmity and disease but also a state of physical, mental and social well-being.”
Whereupon we segue, as the TV folks would say, into……
CHAPTER TWO: VERMONT THE GOOD?
One way lots of Vermonters stay healthy is by doing stuff outdoors. That’s not in the Gallup survey, but we know from many sources that people in this state are more likely than most other Americans to hike and camp out, to paddle a kayak or canoe, to work in their gardens or in the woods.
Now comes evidence that all this activity not only helps make a person healthier. It can him or her a better person – kinder, more generous, less selfish. Contact with nature, says a new study “brings individuals closer to others, whereas human-made environments orient goals toward more selfish or self-interested ends.”
A bit of skepticism is in order here. Psychology lacks the precision of physics. Studies such as this one – conducted by psychologists Netta Weinstein, Andrew K. Przybylski, and Richard M. Ryan – sometimes conclude with the conclusions the studiers wanted to find before they started.
But these folks have credentials – Weinstein is a clinical psychologist at the University of Rochester – and their findings sufficiently intrigued the editors at the interesting, lively, new Miller-McCune Magazine that they wrote about them in an article called “Immersion in Nature Makes us Nicer.”
Why would it? Writer Tom Jacobs reports that “Weinstein and her colleagues suggest the answer lies in an enhanced sense of personal autonomy. ‘Nature affords individuals the chance to follow their interests and reduces pressures, fears, introjects and social expectations,’ they write.
Introjects? A term the meaning of which seems to be in dispute but is related to making too big a deal of oneself.
If both un-confirmable and un-refutable, the notion does seem to make some sense. Not there aren’t some very nice couch potatoes and a few avid white-water paddlers who are real stinkos, but connecting with the natural world (and this includes spending time with your house plants)would seem to reduce stress, encourage a contemplative outlook, and keep one on an even keel (except, literally, in that kayak in white-water).
And speaking of even keels, we segue to….
CHAPTER THREE: ET TU JACOBE?
Did everybody note that even Gov. Jim Douglas would not come right out and say what he (almost surely) knows is true: that this business about “death panels” in the proposed health care legislation is some combination of dishonesty and insanity?
Asked about it at his press conference last week, the Governor, as reported by Terri Hallenbeck of the Burlington Free Press in the paper’s Vermont Buzz blog, would only note that the argument was “an example of the kind of rhetoric that’s distracting us from fundamental reform.”
“But he did not come out and denounce the death-panel debate nor would he say he felt confident the proposed legislation didn’t include death panels,” Hallenbeck wrote. “He said that like most members of Congress he had not read every word of the legislation.”
No condemnation here of Douglas, who was doing what he had to do. Oh, it would have been admirable for him to have said (in somewhat more diplomatic language), “this stuff is crazy.”
But that would have been dangerous, and what is interesting is why it would have been dangerous.
In the latest polling on the subjects (NBC News/Wall Street Journal), 45 percent of the respondents said they thought the health care proposals before Congress “Will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly.”
Those proposals will allow no such thing.
Checking the polls’ “internals, “ it’s reasonable to conclude that the percentage in Vermont is smaller, probably closer to a third, roughly the percentage of Vermonters who voted for John McCain last year.
In other words, that third is Douglas’s base. A politician can not afford to tell his base that they are (not to put too fine a point on it and using the term in its colloquial rather than its clinical context) out of their minds.
Or, more gently, that they have allowed themselves to believe outright lies.
But maybe “allowed is less accurate than “affirmatively chosen” to believe outright lies, which leads to the question of why so many people would so choose.
A complicated question, perhaps pursued another time. Meanwhile ponder what it means that a sane and responsible governor fears to suggest that some of his constituents are acting in a manner neither sane nor responsible.
Tags: health, health Care, Jim Douglas
August 26th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
“Meanwhile ponder what it means that a sane and responsible governor fears to suggest that some of his constituents are acing in a manner neither sane nor responsible.”
We know what it means. Jim Douglas (who purports to care about health care and the importance of an honest debate) is not a leader in any meaningful sense of the word. Nor is he “responsible”. If he were either, he would not be afraid of saying what we all know is true. Instead, he would rather avoid offending his base (however misguided) because BEING governor is more important to him than solving problems. And while this may be an especially eggregious example of his pandering, it is just one of many. In fact, it is not much different from his repeated assertions that “VT is the highest taxed state in the country”. In that case, he is an enabler of those who would mislead the people.
So thanks for the reminder but I’m all too familiar with the Governor’s unwillingness / inability to lead this state. Instead, we should ponder why so many of our neighbors have been taken in by him for so long.
As we consider the legacy of Ted Kennedy, we might also think about what Jim Douglas. Exactly how will this career politician be remembered? For me, it’s a long (and sad) list of lost opportunities.