Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!

A well-known TV commercial once had an old woman who fell in her room and manages to call someone with the phrase "Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!", or something like that.

In a larger sense, the question of resilience, or the ability to "get up" again after taking a disappointment or defeat is a core competency. Life is full of impacts and things breaking, and to hang in there, we have to rebuild at least as fast as things break. Individuals, companies, cultures, or nations that can't get back up again face a bleak and truncated future.

But, we live in a multi-level world, where trillions of cells come together in our bodies, and our bodies are small parts of much larger cultures and nations. And, these levels are not separate worlds, even though they seem it some times -- they interact a lot. It is hard in a thriving culture to stay down; it is hard in a depressed culture to get back up. We are social beings.

So, when many individuals fall down and don't get back up, we have to look past individual causes and look at social causes that are contributing to or even dominating events.

One cultural and individual factor is ego or self-esteem. My friends at MIT described the opening talk as freshmen, when they were informed that a third of them would not make it through 4 years - not because they weren't bright, because you had to be to be in that room. It was because they couldn't adapt to no longer being number one.

Students who had been big fish in small ponds their whole lives, number one, suddenly found themselves surrounded by other people who were also number one's, and some of those were clearly smarter. So their egos and self-esteem collapsed, and they stopped trying, and failed courses they could easily have passed, because they couldn't be number one.

They fell down and didn't get up.

This happens to entire cultures. The Pima Indians, around Phoenix Arizona in the US were number one for hundreds of years. They had extensive and elaborate methods of farming and irrigation and were widely respected. They were the friendliest Native American tribe, by many accounts, peace loving. Then the white man's culture came, and along with it radio and the outside world. There were many factors involved, but, basically, the Pima nation collapsed. They went from the lowest rate of violence and suicide to the highest, with huge problems with drinking, drugs, obesity, diabetes, homicide and suicide.

They fell and couldn't get up.

It was very hard on Japan to lose World War II, and their economy was devastated. They really had nothing left. They rebuilt their nation from that into a world leader, with the world's most admired company, Toyota. Yesterday the first photos came back from the Japanese satellite they just launched to the moon. They got up.

China similarly was devastated, over a longer period, and couldn't cope with the fact that the foreigner's weapons and armies were better than theirs. Finally, through a brutal process, they got back up and said "We can do this." And they did.

Right now, the USA seems to me to be near the same kind of watershed point. Other nations are running circles around our best industries. Other nations have healthier populations. The Netherlands passed us as having the tallest males. Top health care in India, Singapore, Thailand, Dubai, etc. is at least as good as the best care in the USA, and ten times cheaper.

We're kind of at the same point as the MIT freshmen. Welcome to the wider world. Now the question is, do we go the way of the Pima, or go the way of Japan?

On a smaller scale, the Michigan state scene is looking bleak in places, now 50th in terms of 50 states for employment. The "Big three" auto companies no longer rule the world. It's not clear which way that will go now.

In that vein, I read about the latest study of blacks in the US by the Pew Trust, in today's Washington Post. Something like a third of black children of middle class families have fallen back into poverty over the last 20 years. There is no doubt they fight an uphill battle that is often unfair, but many of them may have simply given up the fight. This was the subject of "blogging heads" in the New York Times today. Yes, jobs have left, but people aren't moving on and seeking other jobs -- they're just giving up.

This is bad news. Public Health doesn't subscribe to the "bad people" theory of events, and looks instead for structural or system reasons why large numbers of people start or stop doing something, or all get sick, or all get obese, or all get depressed.

Whatever is going on with blacks is very likely to be continued by middle class whites soon, and we need to figure out what to do, before we all become Pimas.

While people experience depression at an individual level, there is also depression and inability to cope at cultural and social levels. The "cheese has moved."

We need to investigate how the cultures that "get up again" do that. Or like the MIT freshmen, we'll simply drop out entirely.

The "War on Terror" masks one basic fact. The US was attacked and lost a few buildings and 3000 lives. In any war, a single bomber produces that much damage. London took that much damage in a day and didn't blink during World War II.

Yet, the US has gone into some sort of anaphylactic shock, where a relatively tiny bee sting has caused a trillion dollars in collapse, thousands of times beyond the wildest dreams of those who attacked the World Trade Center on 9/11. It's like we fell and pulled down the neighboring buildings on top off us, instead of getting back up.

I am concerned that a larger scale depression and frustration and sense of denial is at work here, and think we need to examine how we are coping with no longer being number one in the universe. Closing factors hit, but don't explain why blacks aren't getting back up. Terrorist attacks don't explain why the US isn't getting back up.

Something else is going on here. If we want to get Michigan, and the US back on their feet, we need to figure out what that is and address the root-causes of not getting back up, not the excuses for falling.