Sleep is an escape; a refuge from all those prickly parts of reality that serve as reminders of the thorns that hide barely beneath comfortable, smooth surfaces. Yet even sleep cannot smooth the spikes. Sleep softens them just enough to make their points slightly more tolerable. A little less brutal. But still sharp and punishing. Still coated with defensive dust that burns like hot coals when their tips pierce the skin.
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The Global Peace Index (GPI), produced by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP), is a complex measure that takes into account military expenditures, internal security expenditures, private security economic outlays, homicides, suicides, and a long list of additional metrics. The 2020 global impact of violence, evaluated by examining the impact of violence as measured by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll revealed attitudes toward risk and violence across 145 countries. According to IEP, “The experience of violence is highest in sub-Saharan Africa, where there are five countries where more than half of the population have had a recent experience of violence.” But the fear of violence was greatest among Brazilians, where 83 percent were worried about being a victim of violent crime. However, actual experience of violence is said to be greatest in Namibia; there, 63 per cent of the population experienced either serious harm from violence, or knew someone who had such an experience in the two preceding years. The most peaceful county, based on an amalgamation of measures, was Iceland; the countries that joined Iceland in its high ratings of peacefulness were New Zealand, Denmark, Portugal, and Slovenia. The least peaceful country: Afghanistan. The largest regional decline in peacefulness during the year preceding 2020, according to the IEP, was North America. The IEP reports that “The primary driver of this fall in peacefulness was a deterioration on the Safety and Security domain, especially in the United States, where growing civil unrest led to increasing perceptions of criminality and political instability, and more violent demonstrations.” The United States’ worldwide rank of peacefulness in the 2020 report was 122…just beneath Azerbaijan and just ahead of South Africa. Yet Americans are taught to believe that ours is the greatest country in the world. The evidence against such a bold and obviously erroneous claim is enormous. Instead of doing our damnedest to make it so, though, we insist on promulgating a lie so we can feel better about ourselves. How can we feel better about ourselves when we knowingly lie about who and what we are? It’s not just our rank on the Global Peace Index; it’s our insistence that truth does not matter, just as long as we convince ourselves to believe our own lies. We have enormous potential. Instead of living up to it, though, we satisfy ourselves by claiming our minimal adequacy is the greatest gift ever delivered to the rest of the world.
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There’s something about being awake and alone at 4 in the morning that forces me to acknowledge the truth about who we are…what our culture tells us about ourselves. We live in the land of opportunity, we say to ourselves; but most of us fritter away that opportunity by always taking the easy way. It’s as if we feel we do not need to invest in ourselves—financially, intellectually, physically, even morally—because we think we have the innate right to demand we be treated like the royalty we choose to believe we are. In the process of insisting we be treated as if we deserve honor and respect and worship, we behave like useless fools without even the sense to laugh at ourselves.
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