At a political fundraising dinner on Tuesday night, President Donald Trump said he plans to announce tariffs on pharmaceuticals soon. "We're going to tariff our pharmaceuticals, and once we do that, they come rushing back into our country, because we're the big market," Trump said at the National Republican Congressional Committee dinner in Washington, D.C. "And when they hear that, they will leave China, they will leave other places, because ... most of their product is sold here, and they're going to be opening up their plants all over the place in our country -- we're going to be announcing that," he continued.
Nearly every news outlet has picked up on this story, pointing out that the US domestic supply chain is not equipped to deal with this. The raw ingredients of almost all medications are made overseas, even for drugs that are manufactured in the U.S., meaning tariffs could drive up the costs of several medications including over-the-counter painkillers as well as antibiotics, heart medications and asthma drugs. Pharmacy and economics experts said such tariffs could also lead to drug shortages and could even potentially stall research and development. ABC News
So the week didn’t start out on a positive note, and that was only added to on Thursday when a person I was meeting with described how they were afraid to go to sleep as they were terrified of what new disaster they’d wake up to. However, on that afternoon, a friend e-mailed me the picture posted above and it was a bit of fresh air. It reminded me of the power of hope and the need to cultivate it daily.
My thoughts turned to Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist who wrote “Man’s Search for Meaning” about his experiences in the camps. "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way."
Frankl believed that having hope can help one survive and thrive, and at the core of hope is having a sense of meaning and purpose in one’s life. Below are two videos that discuss this topic as well as previous posts on this topic.
Resources
Searching for Meaning When You Are Chronically Ill
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