Sleep, Dreaming, and National Suicide

[Subdivisions]

by Eric Andrews

The news lately is a blizzard of destruction: wars, recession, the financial crisis, deficits, drugs abuse, and border wars, random violence, declining education, energy crisis and the Deepwater Horizon, national policy, corporate malfeasance, collapsing communities, bankrupt cities, states, and nations, the list goes on and on. How did we get here? What’s causing all this bad news?

To me it’s simple:

All these effects are symptoms of Depression.

Not Economic Depression, like the 1930s stock crash, but National Depression, the psychological state.

Let’s take them one at a time: what do people do when they’re Depressed? Shop? Overeat? Make themselves physically ill? Get doctors to medicate? Abuse drugs to self-medicate? Are they unable to care for themselves, others, and even their children? Are their tempers short, and prone to irrationally lashing out, even at the wrong people, both at strangers and with their own people?

And when confronted with a problem, they cannot muster the concentration to investigate, discover, and then enact changes to solve them, like our energy policy, but muddle about in listless thoughts and pointless actions, eventually dropping it?

When faced with imminent, deadly danger, financial, as with the financial crisis; bodily, as with the Mexican Border Wars and ceding a swath of territory from Mexico to Phoenix to the Drug Cartels; or with internal disintegration, as we see every day with law, contradictory taxation, sovereignty, what is the response of the Depressed? They don’t care. The Depressed have no sense of urgency to danger, no remaining sense of self-preservation.

Often, as we’ve read on various challenges, Peak Oil, our trade deficit that comes from the imports, our lack of common sense in law, I’m sure we’ve all asked ourselves:

Are we crazy? Are we trying to commit national suicide?

And I’m here to tell you in no uncertain terms the answer is "YES!", that’s exactly what we’re doing, complete with the panoply of symptoms and not-so quiet cries for help.

...snip...

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjun10/Eric-Andrews06-10.html

[patrice]

1. Consciousness is really much more expansive than most folk assume. We're living

wrong, so we're unhappy, so we're living more wrong, so we're more unhappy, so . . . .

And if you say anything about it, there's something wrong with YOU.

[XemaSab]

8. Koyaniisquatsi

(sp)

[Jeffersons Ghost]

2. what an odd OP K&R

[Political_Junkie]

3. That's it.

Sad, but true.

[elehhhhna]

4. I've been saying this for months! Never saw people so apathetic and

just generally depresssed as in the last few years. I'm told that the people in the streets of Moscow give off this vibe -- bummed unhappy anxious --

[azul]

5. How would you feel if you found out that the cars you love

to drive and the food you love to eat are killing the planet? And you are too embarrassed at being duped and too proud of the lifestyle to be able to change, even if the options should somehow present themselves today?

Then there is the optional endless war in which we march to debtor's prison..., and the Hague....?

That is the real downer: you know you are hooked emotionally in destructive society behavior and yet, somehow, cannot act as reasonably and as responsibly as you should.

[elehhhhna]

6. ain't no "if" about it. I know how the above feels. although marching the right people to trial at

den Haag would lift my spirits immensely. I have family only a few miles away -- let's all horn in on them for Cheney's trial!

[RagAss]

7. This country shit its collective pants on 9/11.

[XemaSab]

9. As we did during Pearl Harbor

but 9 years later, my grandparents had three kids (with a fourth on the way) and a nice house on a quiet street in Fresno, ya know?