Do You Want Relief from Life’s Pressures?

DO YOU at times feel that the pressures of life are just too much? Do you long for relief from them?

More and more people feel that way. This is especially so today because pressures seem to be building up everywhere.

A father supporting a family finds job pressures increasing. National economies seem very unstable. His family’s safety concerns him. A mother feels pressure when she sees the prices of everything continually going up and wonders how she can make ends meet.

Young people see the ‘pressure-cooker’ atmosphere of modern society and are appalled. Observing economic competition, wars, nuclear weapons, pollution, corruption and race hatreds, they ask: ‘Is life worth living at all?’

This situation prompted scientists to write: “Society has reached a stage of development where the stresses and strain produced by its own speed of technological advance are not only overtaking man’s powers of adaptability​—both physical and mental—​but are endangering his very survival.”​—New York Times, June 20, 1971.

How upsetting are today’s pressures? An article in the Reader’s Digest points out this finding of doctors: “Emotional stress can produce real illness​—true changes in the body chemistry and structure of quite normal people. . . . specialists agreed that psychogenic (emotion-caused) disorders account for perhaps two of every three visits to the doctor.”

True, not all stress is bad. Even in thinking, working and playing there is some tension involved. In this connection Vienna-born Dr. Hans Selye says: “We are stressed by joy, by a game. . . . But difficulties arise when a particular stress, either mental or physical, is applied for too long.” So while some stress is normal, too much unrelenting pressure brings irritation, frustration, anxiety and fear. That can be very damaging.

Is there any hope that the world will change so that damaging pressures will be a thing of the past? Based on man’s experience so far, you may quickly answer, NO! Yet, there is every reason to believe that in our time, likely this very decade, permanent relief will be realized!

How is this possible? Well, let us see. But first, it would be good to take a closer look at the pressures assaulting people today.

LIVING COSTS

ECONOMIC EXPERTS SAY: “WORLDWIDE INFLATION NOW THREATENS TO GET OUT OF CONTROL.”

Country Cost of Living Total Taxes Paid

Increase in 1970 Out of Each Dollar

FRANCE 5.7% 36.9 ¢

NORWAY 9.5% 38.2 ¢

UNITED STATES 5.9% 29.9 ¢

UNEMPLOYMENT

BRITAIN reports the worst unemployment in over 30 years.

Of AFRICA’S unemployment one sociologist says: “There is really no solution”

Regarding LATIN AMERICA the Monthly Labor Review notes: “Unemployment and underemployment appear to have grown worse in recent years.”

And in the UNITED STATES one 1971 report says: “Job seekers all across the country find their days filled with frustrations.”

CRIME

EVERY 72 MINUTES IN THE UNITED STATES THERE ARE:

36 Robberies, 2 Murders and 5 Rapes

PEOPLE ARE NOT SAFE ON THE STREETS

“Fear stalks the streets. . . . People flee the streets at dark and, more and more, even in daylight.”​—United States Senator Mike Mansfield.

PEOPLE ARE NOT SAFE AT HOME

Growing numbers of homes are fortified with locks, alarms, guns and watchdogs. As the New York Sunday News observed: “A man’s home is his castle these days only if he has a moat and a drawbridge.”​—January 31, 1971.

WAR

WORLD WIDE, MILITARY COSTS ARE OVER $200 BILLION A YEAR, OR, $23 MILLION EVERY HOUR!

BETWEEN 1914 AND 1970 FOUR MAJOR WARS ALONE CAUSED OVER 71 MILLION DEATHS AND LEFT HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF PERSONS WOUNDED

SICKNESS

THERE ARE MORE DOCTORS, HOSPITALS, MENTAL INSTITUTIONS AND MEDICAL SCHOOLS​—YET MANKIND GROWS SICKER!

FATAL HEART CASES UP

MENTAL CASES FILL 1 OUT OF 2 HOSPITAL BEDS

CANCER​—WHERE DOCTORS FAIL

RISING MEDICAL COSTS BLEED JOHN DOE

V. D. RUNNING RAMPANT

A “PLAGUE YEAR” FOR KILLER DISEASES?

HEART ILLS STILL TOP U.S. KILLER

POLLUTION

AIR: ‘The last vestige of clean air in the United States disappeared six years ago.’​—The New Haven Register (1969).

WATER: “In the the past 20 years, life in our oceans has diminished 40 per cent.”​—French undersea explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau.

LAND: ‘DDT spraying has created a poisonous veil covering the surface of the entire earth.’ (Stern magazine) ‘The German Republic is slowly suffocating in junk and garbage.’​—Schwarzwald Bote.

NOISE: “If noise levels increase in the next 30 years as they have in the past 30, it could be lethal.”​—Internationally known physicist Dr. V. O. Knudsen.

POVERTY

‘It is already too late to avoid famines that will kill millions, possibly by 1975 . . . Already half a billion people are slowly starving, another billion are malnourished.”​—Prof. Paul R. Ehrlich, February 1970.

‘The world in all likelihood is on the verge of the biggest famine in history . . . Such a famine will have massive proportions and affect hundreds of millions, possibly even billions.’​—Too Many, Georg Borgstrom (1969).

EVEN WEALTHY NATIONS HAVE POVERTY

“In the United States an estimated 10 to 12 million of our 202 million people are still acutely hungry.”​—The Fight Against Hunger, C. M. Wilson (1969).

“There are today at the very least 11 million substandard and overcrowded dwelling units in the United States. This is 16 percent of the total housing inventory.”​—Report of the National Commission on Urban Problems, pages 9, 10.

‘This may be the first tangible sign of the collapse of our civilization.’​—Boston’s mayor Kevin White viewing one New York slum area, April 1971.

DRUG ABUSE

IN EVERY NATION

The World Health Organization estimates that more than 200 million people world wide regularly use marijuana. Regarding drug control a Swedish expert says: “At best we have ten years in which to prevent a social catastrophe. . . It may already be too late.”

AT EVERY SOCIAL LEVEL

Soldiers, factory and office workers, even elementary school children are drug users. A former addict confessed: “I shot dope with millionaires in Miami, and I shot dope with bums on the bowery.”

And many doctors see nearly as grave a danger in the abuse of ‘legitimate drugs’​—including pep pills, sleeping pills and diet pills—​part of about 2 billion drug prescriptions filled in 1970 in the United States alone.