Americans are in Pain

[babylonsister]

Americans are in Pain
Thursday, 23 August 2007
by Carolyn Baker



snip//

And of course, the pain is not just physical. One in ten women takes an antidepressant, and the use of psychiatric drugs among children has soared to unprecedented heights. Juxtaposed with the ever-new potpourri of such drugs available to us, is a decrease in the availability of mental health coverage in employee health benefit packages. If such coverage exists, it is most likely limited to a paltry twelve sessions per year with multiple "engraved invitations" from insurance companies and employers to not use or cease using those benefits.

Viewed from other nations around the world, Americans have no reason to be in pain. We have it all; we are the fat cats of the planet, drowning in "stuff" and feeling no pain whatsoever about the teeming millions of people on the planet who live on two dollars a day and have a life expectancy of forty if they're lucky. Our whining, entitled sniveling is repugnant to the majority of the planet's inhabitants, so why don't we just suck it up and get over it?

For me, the fact that Americans are in pain is not wisely or effectively addressed either by wallowing in our pain or by scoffing at it. Here is where two opposite truths are equally valid. We are in pain-horrible emotional and spiritual angst, AND what is stopping us from looking at what have we done to create the conditions that now torture us and leave us tossing and turning in our Select Comfort air beds? What seductions did we settle for decades ago-or yesterday, that have brought us to the pain we now experience? How are the choices of more recent years that we have blindly condoned because we were so busy being snookered into using our houses as ATM machines that we couldn't look truthfully at the regime hoodwinking us into the Iraq War-how are those choices impacting our daily lives emotionally, spiritually, and yes, physically as our bodies silently seethe with the horrors of war crimes that our government has perpetrated on the innocent? Just because the carnage is not aired nightly on prime-time TV as it was during the Vietnam Era does not mean that something in the collective unconscious of Americans and all earthlings is not writhing in a kind of mass PTSD, an assertion which Pablo Ouziel brilliantly articulates in "Iraq, The Unavoidable Global Trauma."

The American dream has become the American nightmare of debt, stolen pensions, the inability to retire securely, the poisoning of food, water, air, energy depletion, inflation, healthcare so poor that doesn't even deserve to be called by that name, media and educational systems functioning only to dumb-down the masses. Every institution in American society serves one purpose and one purpose only: to protect the wealthy and to numb and sedate everyone else.

Like pre-World War II Germans who refused to investigate what was actually going on within their country and across Europe as a result of Hitler's atrocities, our "innocence" is killing us-eating away at our insides and our emotional well being. We are in pain.

As Americans find themselves mired in ghastly swamps of debt, foreclosure, unemployment, and the crumbling of every institution in American society-as they tell themselves that this is just a blip on the radar screen and that if they just work harder, get a better job, cut back here and there, move to the Sun Belt, or postpone having a child, everything will be just fine. We are in pain.

As governments rattle sabers, spend unprecedented amounts for weapons of mass destruction, and as our rulers declare with straight faces that we can and must carry out first-strike nuclear attacks on anyone who rattles more loudly than we do, images of mushroom clouds quietly form in places within the psyche that we do not let ourselves know about, and we eat more, drink more, exercise more, fornicate more, work more, gamble more, clean more, smoke more, and shop more. We are in pain.

more...

http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/2232/1/

[Demeter]

1. Ain't It the Truth!

[indepat]

2. Oh, the joys of a fascist corporatist neocon PNAC 'pukedom

[babylonsister]

3. It's scary, but it's oh so sad, too. It didn't have to be this way. nt

[indepat]

4. Probably more than 90% of 'pukes are severely harmed by 'puke policies but are too

stupid to realize it or are so blinded by the right as to think 'puke ideology with respect to a single narrow issue brings more good than all the harm otherwise caused.

[babylonsister]

5. Pure ignorance does seem to rule; I hear some of these people

on CSPAN in the am, and I am appalled most days. How could anyone with eyes, ears, a computer, and a brain still believe what they're being fed? And I know some people, like 2 brothers, who fall into that category.

[ladjf]

6. America is very sick. It will take generations to overcome the

trauma of the past seven years.

[skids]

7. I agree with a lot of that...

...but I think talking about it is only the first step in overcoming the angst. A step that it is easy to get stuck on. After a certain point, verbalizing one's emotions becomes not so much an exercise in self discovery as it does a way to trick ourselves into thinking we have addressed the problem. (To wit, the recent study about "girlie-aching" contributing to pandemic teenage depression as a sort of contagion.)

So while it's important not to skip that step (and as one "12-stepper" person I know told me of both grief stages and their methods, you run through these steps over and over in layers, you don't just "go up the flight" once) in the temptation to "do something." it is also important to move on to the "do something" stage at some point.

[babylonsister]

8. At this point, all we have is talk. I haven't seen much action, but my heart

retains some hope, though I'm bitter, disillusioned, and a whole host of things.

[undergroundpanther]

9. So true

And it is about time we looked honestly at the causes of that pain in our culture in our media in our relationships, in the way we treat each other and why we choose the things we choose.

The time for make believe is over.Time to be better people,to sensitize, to stop playing games , draw some boundaries to control people who run roughshod over others and undermine them and to grow a heart reach out,protect each other, be there,and not tolerate the intolerable.we need each other to care about each others pain and not try to deny it a voice. If some fail to mature and develop empathy or a conscience they need to face the consequences of their hurtful choices and bad personalities or CHANGE..

[tomreedtoon]

10. A good President would be a great therepist.

Do these words strike a chord?

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

Here's a web site that contains the whole thing...including an audio clip...

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5057/

Read through the speech. Listen to the excerpt. Then imagine how it would feel if in early 2009, a new President said something similar, relating to our fears.

And then examine the Democratic candidates that stood at the podium the other night, and consider which of them would be making such a speech. Without getting into partisanship, I think that only about half of the Democratic Presidential candidates could speak and honestly mean it.

My late mother talked often about Roosevelt and what he did. She got a lot of it wrong, poor dear; she said "He opened the breweries and put people back to work," as if everybody was sent to bottle Budweiser and that brought us out of the Great Depression. But he was clearly the hero of a generation. He was the therepist and coach for them. If we choose wisely, we could get the person we need.

[libodem]

11. Pain med use is up about 90%

This is a disturbing trend. I confess, since before and after my spinal fusion i have been using some form of hydrocodone. I've had it prescribed before and had little trouble getting back off when 6 weeks healing time was up. This time my back is somewhat better but I have ugly neuropathy in both of my legs and feet. I hold court on myself everyday, feeling like I'm going to be a disappointment to my doctor, the State Insurance fund, and the lawyer. The chronic pain is just a stone cold drag. I'm not back to being a productive citizen and I do have a work ethic. I'm mean to myself. I don't like people who sit home and don't work. I don't like myself too much right now and so there is a sad child in me who wants to do better to please the super ego. Guess who uses an antidepressant? I also have unusually high empathy and compassion....for other people. I worry for the safety of political prisoners, everywhere. I donate to Amnesty International when I can. I can't stand the thought of torture no matter what the reason. I have great psychic pain caused by what I know we are doing to other human beings around the world. I feel bad when we bomb the Afghans off their barren, rocky cliffs and caves. Talk about dirt, poor and living in the stone age. I'm a MITHOP person so it seems even more cruel and crazy to go after families living in caves with fighter jets. We should be dropping care packages. Iraq is 120 degrees with no water and electricity, this is our mission? To deprive little children of clean water? When I'm hurting I know someone has it worse than me and it's probably because some CIA agent has them starving, tied in a stress position, in a freezing room, doused with water. We are feeling the pain of the world, which we have caused.

[Locrian]

12. dont forget other "pain medication"

I'm sure we are seeing in increase in "pain medication" like alcohol etc. People w/o a lot of money and health/mental issues cope any way they can. That means overeating / alcohol / drugs etc. Stress - whether it is chemicals, bad food, lead to issues with metabolism system, adrenal, thyroid, hormones, etc. Stress kills.

Sad thing is (although it is all sad) is that this state we are in leaves us ill prepared to fight the powers. We are becoming nothing more than cattle for the corporatocracy to feed on and use.

[libodem]

13. You are correct

we are so sedated we can let the powers that be tromp all over our ideals. Our constitution is in tatters, private mercenary companies abound, and * has a special little pamphlet instructing his thugs how to keep protesters out of sight. He doesn't want to be confronted with any opposition. Where's the booze.