Kvetching has replaced baseball as our national pastime. Granted, we are not without things to worry about. Since 2008, the United States and much of the world has been in the Great Recession. This past month, the U.S. economy shrank for the first time in several years.  We are on the brink of terrorists getting weapons of mass destruction and potentially rendering American cities uninhabitable. No doubt many individual citizens and families experience genuine, serious financial, health, and other problems. Nothing I am about to say is meant to dismiss the real concerns people have. Still, we need to get some perspective and stop what has reached a new level of national whining.

I was reminded of how out of control our kvetching has become when I recently heard a news bulletin reporting how schools are now instituting reforms to address the growing “anxiety” of their students, including promoting yoga and relaxation exercises in the hallways, encouraging kids to bring teddy bears to class, and mandating homework-free days and weekends.  One of the most popular movies parent-teacher organizations are showing in St. Louis and elsewhere is “Race to Nowhere,” which argues that our kids are stressed by all the demands made on them today in the form of too much reading, excessive testing, and overemphasis on grades and competition.  

As an educator, I find this bizarre.  If we hope to compete with China and other countries in an era of globalization, we need to increase academic rigor and challenge in K-12, not reduce it. After all, a Kaiser Foundation study found that American children today spend an average of eight hours a day watching TV or texting or tweeting or surfing the Internet. Jay Mathews of the Washington Post reports that the daily homework done by elementary-schoolers “takes less time than watching an episode of ‘Hannah Montana Forever.” A 2011 study by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute found that only 30 percent of incoming college freshmen “report that they studied six or more hours a week as high school seniors.”  In their 2010 book “Academically Adrift,” Richard Arum and Josipa Roska noted an overall 50 percent decline in the number of hours university students spend studying from previous decades. So forgive me if I cannot get too stressed over all the stress that our kids are feeling.

Adults could stand to chill out as well. When I think of “stress,” I think of what my parents’ generation experienced, when in successive decades they spent the flower of their youth trying to cope with World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II.  Yes, I know, today we have single moms, working couples, the decline of the family, drugs, Newtown, etc.; but I submit this does not compare with the Great Depression sandwiched between two world wars.  Visit the Tenement Museum in lower Manhattan and see how Jewish immigrants and others lived in the early 1900s (when, by the way, global life expectancy was 30, compared to almost 70 today). If you want to understand what stress is, imagine what U.S. Army veteran Brendan Marrocco is dealing with, having lost all four limbs in Iraq and just undergone a double arm transplant; to his credit, rather than complaining, he apparently is soldiering on with his life, a role model for the rest of us.

Nostalgia is not what it used to be. True, the past was better in some respects — for example, Robert Putnam and Charles Murray have noted that the bonds of community used to be stronger – but the good ole days were never as wonderful as some want to imagine.

Today, we complain about widening rich-poor gaps and poverty, racism and sexism, gun violence, and the threat of global warming. Never mind the fact that a reality check will reveal that there has been a tremendous growth in per capita income worldwide sinceWWII; so much progress has been made in our becoming a more diverse, inclusive society that in the 2012 U.S. presidential election, during the primary season, at one point the leading contenders for the nomination in both parties were African-American, while the last four U.S. secretaries of state entrusted with the fate of the nation were either women or black; the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has documented that, lots of violence notwithstanding, we are probably living in “the most peaceful time in our species’ existence” based on everything from homicide rates to the frequency of interstate war; and despite the real long-term specter of climate change, we no longer live with the immediate threat of Armageddon, of being annihilated in 15 minutes by 10,000 nukes aimed at us, as was the case during the Cold War in October 1962.

I am sorry if it seems I am kvetching about all the kvetching going on. We should always aspire to improve the human condition, but we also need to learn to cope with life’s ups and downs a tad more than we seem willing to do these days.