begin quote "I meet Sasha after a long workday, and he is tired, his hands dirty. He doesn't feel totally comfortable--or safe--in this bar with survivors of the Nineties. The city he describes is a violently conformist place. "People here are very aggressive toward toward anyone who doesn't look like them." he says. It's a local, working class uniform: tracksuit, buzz cut with a hint of bangs. His peers, Sasha says, are often children of ex-cons. "They don't respect the law", Sasha says. "A real man is either in the army or in jail.' My sixth grade teacher told us that." So Sasha learned to fight, with fists, with knives. Once he walked home after a fight covered in someone else's blood, and he is strangely, beatifically cheerful as he tells me this.
What Sasha really wants to do is to escape to cosmopolitan St. Petersburg and open a bar. He's been there a couple times; it's where he feels most at home. But his girlfriend won't move unless he buys an apartment there. Between his salary and hers, his dream likely will remain just that" end quote from about the middle of page 84.
end quote.
This reminds me a lot of the attitudes in the 1950s here in the U.S. Then it was like that even in Los Angeles where if you weren't in the army or in jail you might be considered to be a "pussy". Fights and blood on the school grounds were pretty normal then. Twice as a child under 11 I had people put knives to my throat and tell me they were going to cut my head off by older boys then. One of the boys that did this to me committed suicide before he was 25. These were difficult times for many people. It's still this way in Russia and Racist and Anti-Semitic there too like it was in the 1950s here. Putin is like this too.
I was lucky when I turned 18 in 1966. Because I had had whooping cough and then childhood epilepsy it saved my life and I didn't die in Viet Nam as a soldier, come home in a box, or come home with PTSD so bad I wandered the streets until I died. (You still see Viet Nam Vets wandering the streets talking to themselves today, even though they are all now 60 to 80 years of age.
I was lucky. I got a 4F which means I wouldn't be drafted unless the U.S. was attacked and went to college instead of dying or going crazy in war like 50,000 died and 250,000 came home with PTSD then.
But, this article sounds like the U.S. in the 1950s when people were macho and self destructive to the extreme.
Men died young in the U.S. then that smoked cigarettes and drank Liquor a lot in the 1950s too. Here is an article about how 35% of Russian men still die by age 55 from drinking too much Vodka:
Russian men losing years to vodka
Spirit linked to 35% of cases where a man dies before age 55, with study citing national sport of spectacular drunkenness
Russian men who down large amounts of vodka have an "extraordinarily" high risk of an early death, a new study says.
Researchers tracked about 151,000 adult men in the Russian cities of Barnaul, Byisk and Tomsk from 1999 to 2010. They interviewed them about their drinking habits and, when about 8,000 later died, followed up to monitor their causes of death.
The risk of dying before age 55 for those who said they drank three or more half-litre bottles of vodka a week was a shocking 35%.
Overall, a quarter of Russian men die before reaching 55, compared with 7% of men in the UK and about 10% in the United States. The life expectancy for men in Russia is 64 years, placing it among the lowest 50 countries in the world in that category.
It is not clear how many Russian men drink three bottles or more a week. Lead researcher Sir Richard Peto of Oxford University said the average Russian adult drank 20 litres of vodka per year while the average Briton drank about three litres of spirits.
"Russians clearly drink a lot but it's this pattern of getting really smashed on vodka and then continuing to drink that is dangerous," Peto said.
"The rate of men dying prematurely in Russia is totally out of line with the rest of Europe," he said. "There's also a heavy drinking culture in Finland and Poland but they still have nothing like Russia's risk of death."
Alcohol has long been a top killer in Russia and vodka is often the drink of choice, available cheaply and often homemade in small villages. Previous studies have estimated that more than 40% of working-age men in Russia die because they drink too much, including using alcohol that is not meant to be consumed, like that in colognes and antiseptics.
Drinking is so engrained in Russian culture there's a word that describes a drinking binge that lasts several days: zapoi.
Peto said there was some evidence of a similar effect in Russian women who also drank heavily but there was not enough data to draw a broad conclusion.
The study was paid for by the UK Medical Research Council and others. It was published online in the journal Lancet.
Other experts said the Russian preference for hard liquor was particularly dangerous. "If you're drinking vodka you get a lot more ethanol in that than if you were drinking something like lager," said David Leon, a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who has also studied the impact of alcohol in Russia but was not part of the Lancet study.
He said changing drinking patterns in Russia to combat the problem was possible but that it would take a significant cultural adjustment.
"It's not considered out of order to drink until you can't function in Russia," Leon said. "It just seems to be part of being a guy in Russia that you are expected to drink heavily."
• This article was amended on 4 February 2014. The original version said fewer than 1% of men in the United States die before reaching the age of 55. The figure is about 10%. This has been corrected.
Researchers tracked about 151,000 adult men in the Russian cities of Barnaul, Byisk and Tomsk from 1999 to 2010. They interviewed them about their drinking habits and, when about 8,000 later died, followed up to monitor their causes of death.
The risk of dying before age 55 for those who said they drank three or more half-litre bottles of vodka a week was a shocking 35%.
Overall, a quarter of Russian men die before reaching 55, compared with 7% of men in the UK and about 10% in the United States. The life expectancy for men in Russia is 64 years, placing it among the lowest 50 countries in the world in that category.
It is not clear how many Russian men drink three bottles or more a week. Lead researcher Sir Richard Peto of Oxford University said the average Russian adult drank 20 litres of vodka per year while the average Briton drank about three litres of spirits.
"Russians clearly drink a lot but it's this pattern of getting really smashed on vodka and then continuing to drink that is dangerous," Peto said.
"The rate of men dying prematurely in Russia is totally out of line with the rest of Europe," he said. "There's also a heavy drinking culture in Finland and Poland but they still have nothing like Russia's risk of death."
Alcohol has long been a top killer in Russia and vodka is often the drink of choice, available cheaply and often homemade in small villages. Previous studies have estimated that more than 40% of working-age men in Russia die because they drink too much, including using alcohol that is not meant to be consumed, like that in colognes and antiseptics.
Drinking is so engrained in Russian culture there's a word that describes a drinking binge that lasts several days: zapoi.
Peto said there was some evidence of a similar effect in Russian women who also drank heavily but there was not enough data to draw a broad conclusion.
The study was paid for by the UK Medical Research Council and others. It was published online in the journal Lancet.
Other experts said the Russian preference for hard liquor was particularly dangerous. "If you're drinking vodka you get a lot more ethanol in that than if you were drinking something like lager," said David Leon, a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who has also studied the impact of alcohol in Russia but was not part of the Lancet study.
He said changing drinking patterns in Russia to combat the problem was possible but that it would take a significant cultural adjustment.
"It's not considered out of order to drink until you can't function in Russia," Leon said. "It just seems to be part of being a guy in Russia that you are expected to drink heavily."
• This article was amended on 4 February 2014. The original version said fewer than 1% of men in the United States die before reaching the age of 55. The figure is about 10%. This has been corrected.
No comments:
Post a Comment