American Psychopathology

Posted on August 31, 2003 in Book of Days Social Justice

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: “It’s my belief we’re all crazy.” (after Trudy the bag lady)

When I look out at our insane world, at the men and women who get too much pleasure from seeing the bombs fall on Iraq and the red, white, and blue blindfolds that the patriots pass out, I wonder if there’s a cure.

We are, as I mentioned earlier today, a “go-along” society. In many another nation, people take to the streets when the government tells them “oh, for the sake of the New York banks, you have to take pay cuts and forget about unemployment.” Yet we have allowed legislators and the Bush Junta in Washington to actively discuss gutting Social Security, to deny us health insurance, to cut back on benefits for the people fighting over in Iraq, to contemplate cutting the minimum wage, and to cut taxes for the people who need it least.

• We panic if a man runs nude through a summer exhibition game or if grafitti appears on walls in our downtowns.
  
• We scream — despite statistics to the contrary — that America is in moral decline, that we must fear road rage at every stop light, a terrorist in every municipal court house and bank.
  
• We let ourselves be denied adequate vacation time.
  
• We believe that an actor with a business degree from an obscure Midwestern college “deserves a chance” at running the state’s highest office.
  
• We say nothing when a black-robed gang of five allows the loser of the last presidential election to assume power and start handing out favors to his friends.
  
• We kneel down around a block of stone on which seven out of ten of the mentioned sins are not crimes. We cheer for the man who defies separation of church and state, who seeks to undercut our sacred pact of nonopinion on matters of religion where government is concerned.
  
• We allow profits from the companies we work for to be squandered on jacuzzis that we never get to sit in and Learjets in which we never get to ride.
  
• We give money to enrich televangelists who actively live lives that are not the example of Christ.
  
• We say that we hate terrorism and we allow our president to actively block investigation of those most responsible for financing it.
  
• We work too hard in the belief that by doing so we’ll end up in the top 1% of all wage earners or, worse, we believe that we’re already there just because we can afford to indebt ourselves to buy an SUV rather than have to slum in a used Toyota.
  
• We nod stupidly when segments of the public commons are sold off or given away to elements of the private sector in the name of the sacred cow of so-called “market accountability”.
  
• We create new kings of industry and allow ourselves no checks on their power.
  
• We would rather pay exorbitant amounts for health care than use a practical, single-payer system that would do everything private plans do for a fraction of the cost just because we’re more afraid of those we vote for than those over whom we have no control. And because we don’t want bag ladies and homeless veterans getting their health care “for free” with money out of our pockets.
  
• We believe everything the media tells us and cheer when it shows our bombs destroy a target. We get angry at the messengers when they show that there were women and children living there and that they are all dead or maimed.
  

To not feel depressed, to not feel anxious, to not feel concern about the way America carreens through the world is, I think, crazy. The cure is to stand up with our votes and voices. To see sense rather than illusions. To live within our means and to be generous. To tell our government that it is high time to tell the usurers and wage slavers who hold us as their thralls that they must respect limits. No one possesses the right to hold dominion over another person. Even the Bible does not grant that right to Adam and Eve.

It’s time to wake up, to demand freedom and common sense in the way we live our lives. It’s time to take the cure.

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• Shameless Agitator
  
• Joker on the Run

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Write a December memory.