"Stress" - Bob Ketchum

Description: What is it that is universal, has no borders, and crosses the boundaries of race, color, nationality, and creed? What is it that everyone in the world feels daily and yet can do little about? It's makes people sick. It kills people silently. It can consume your entire being. Talking about it helps a little but in the end it can poison your mind. It causes people with years left in them to question their own mortality. Not even children are safe, but for adults it is an everyday reality. It looms larger and larger with each passing year, like a creeping unknown. Your conscious mind can acknowledge it even though resistance is futile. Your subconscious feeds on it whether you are awake or asleep and yet you are in denial concerning its existence. People takes years and years of drugs trying to combat it. Psychiatrists earn a healthy income trying to explain it. Combat soldiers call it "PTSD", and it has grown to epidemic proportions, now entering normal societies. Entire books have been written about it and still people succumb to it sometimes without even realizing it. It can be defined but not completely cured. By definition it is described as: "Referring to the consequence of the failure of an organism – human or animal – to respond appropriately to emotional or physical threats, whether actual or imagined." It's just a short little word but it's meaning is worldwide in scope: S T R E S S Stress is the greatest threat to mankind. Stress is universal. No matter where you live, there’s Stress….. Waiting patiently to eat up your life. Everywhere you turn you are bombarded by Stress. Well, I got sick of it and wrote a song about it. That was almost twelve years ago. Today I see that stress has taken root in every facet of everyday life for almost everyone on Earth. I have had friends tell me that today this song is even more relevant than it was when I released my "New Tricks From An Old Dog" CD in 1999. Several of those friends prompted me to consider making a music video for this song, and this summer I decided to do just that.