This nation of the United States appears to this writer to have a medical system that leads in the world in reducing the experience of physical pain.  The tragic irony is the United States just might also be a world leader in suffering as well. Maybe we should start here with the natures of the pain and suffering inside our own culture.

What is suffering anyway?  Is suffering more or less or the same as pain?  As one ages one will hear; “Pain is, but suffering is optional.”  What does that mean?  Suffering seems to increase as the body ages and friends die, but suffering is not limited to the aging process.  As for death and dying, one can medically respond to physical pain more directly and effectively than the suffering component of the process. Suffering seems to have a different root system than physical pain. 

As a hospice volunteer I think I encountered the dying processes with varying levels of suffering for the same diagnosis.  Children suffer, but with wildly varying degrees to the same trauma or ‘insult’ to body or person.  As a manager it  became clear to me that changes in organization and culture set off suffering in ways difficult to predict, yet predicting and responding to suffering becomes a successful leader’s most valuable skill.  I think we have learned in this last political round that pain and suffering can be reduced or,  just as effectively, exploited.  Two different motivations (good/not good) using the same tools.  

The infliction of pain and reducing of pain are life’s kindergarten lessons in both cruelty and goodness. The next step up in the maturation for the sense of good is to understand the means and methods for the reduction of suffering in your community. Over the next few posts we will concentrate on suffering and its reduction starting with root causes.  I suggest suffering is largely concentrated on events, happenings, and interpersonal insults that violate a person’s capacity for efficacy (agency), and more precisely ‘soul and body efficacy”.  We have just completed an election and this may become an important topic in the next few months in the United States.  Suffering has already become an expanding epidemic in this modern world. We may have the leadership we have now because one party read the news of suffering in this country and responded more effectively than the other.  If you want to correct the leadership in a democracy without violating your sense of good, look to actually reducing your neighbors suffering and for God’s sake don’t look to punish their views.  People vote their suffering in ways many of us obviously do not understand. They do not necessarily vote to reduce their suffering. The next post will talk more about personal agency or efficacy, as a need next to oxygen for thriving as a human being.