Suffering, Madness, And An Opportunity

Is this country in trouble? Is the planet? 

Wherever you lie on the political spectrum, chances are you are not satisfied with the direction humanity seems to be taking. Unnecessary suffering and brutality are everywhere – so much so that to mention them seems trite, tasteless, or histrionic. Economic instability looms. The environment is changing in ways we do not fully understand or seem prepared for. Many seek to blame some person or group; it’s all the fault of George Bush, Osama Bin Laden, the Jews, the liberal media, talk radio hosts, dead white men, living white men, feminists, lesbians, carnivores, drug addicts, immigrants, corporations, Muslims, evangelists, Republicans, the advertising industry (my vote), the WTO, IMF, CFR, NATO, the UN, commies, Nazis, MTV or Richard Nixon’s ghost. Someone blamed me, recently. I don’t blame him for that; as an environmentalist wacko, I am committed to the destruction of the American way of life (God it feels good to get out of the closet about that!) and it feels good to blame – it gives us a plan; we can react. We don’t have to create anything useful, we can just rail against the badguys, forever, and get to feel righteous, and it gives us our identity and we play the game of taking sides and so it goes.

And nothing changes.

So who is to blame? At the end of the day, it’s all true: People – from Bush to Bin Laden to the radical left – are the cause of all unnecessary suffering, people from playboy bunnies to Presidents, from high school janitors to heroin addicts, superstars and fallen soldiers; there is no one else, there has never been anyone else, it’s all been humanity all along – it’s all been a choice.

Is this the best we can do? Is the ‘war of all against all’ our destiny?

It is if we don’t wake up real soon.

We have before a great opportunity, enjoying as we do (whether you define “we” as Americans or, to lesser degree, human being generally) the highest standards of living the world has ever seen, with great resource abundance (for now), relative domestic and international stability (compared to what is possible), a functioning global communication and transportation network, incredible medical and scientific knowledge, several semi-functional international institutions, and a few good ones, and the dominance of the language of human rights and democracy.

But it could slip away. It will if we (here I mean conscious, well-meaning people everywhere) take the reins of power from the greedy, the deceitful, the violent, and the blind, and do something human beings have not yet done, except in very small numbers: consciously evolve.

This won’t happen if we get distracted. Distraction is one of many things that can stop our necessary revolution (fear and ignorance are two more), and distraction is, of course, the bread and butter of American culture.

But every once in a while, events unfold that threaten to interrupt the pleasant distraction. Sometimes I even let myself believe America is going to wake up.

It hasn’t happened yet. I thought it might happen after Columbine. Or 9-11. Or the obvious misuses of power by George Bush, and the global peace movement of 2003. So far, the spectacle continues to lull us all into complacency. We have our circuses, we have our bread.

Britney Spears, once the symbol of breathless, mindless distraction (and also of many of America’s finest vices, from bad taste in music to the sexualizing of children by marketers) has suddenly morphed into a symbol of something else: The effect all that distraction, all that marketing, and all that numbing, careless sexuality, plus a healthy dose of drug addiction, possible ‘hardwiring’ issues 9I despise the term “mental illness”), and dysfunctional family dynamics (there I go gossiping again) has on a young woman who has been idolized, ridiculed and despised by millions of people in their spare time and while on supermarket lines.

She falls apart.

And wouldn’t we all? And who hasn’t wished they could – just stop the ratrace, check out of reality, fall apart for a while? How many people haven’t struggled to keep it at bay, that part of you that just wants to quit trying to be normal and go a little damn crazy?

Not me of course, but the rest of you wackos.

Poor Britney – she was everything we wanted in an object, everything we wished we could be – innocent yet sexy, easy to understand, famous, cute, white, holding a Pepsi, keeping our mind off war, famine, and unemployment checks. Little did she know we wanted more; we wanted perfection, or, absent that, we wanted our chance to throw rocks at her, and to laugh, because that way we aren’t the one getting rocks thrown at us, and crying.

Not me of course, but you other people.

So now she is crazy, and some laugh and some sigh and others aren’t paying attention anymore. Poor Britney, she’s just a kid, and already a mom, and a household joke or pity story. Where is the love?

Will she get help? Unlikely. Ravenous tabloid hacks will tell her they can remake her image, she’ll be bigger than ever after her recovery – not just a star but a hero of resilience. Maybe she will make it in movies, or take up a charity cause. Her image will be rehabilitated- it’s too hot a commodity not to be – but her soul? We don’t have a cure for that. If wealth and beauty and fame aren’t enough, America just doesn’t have an answer.

Even in the mental health field, beyond behavior management and a few helpful medications, the picture isn’t too bright. Sure, we’ve come a long way since forced electric shocks and lobotomies, since dungeon hospitals and hysterectomies as the treatments of choice for the depressed and insane. But we don’t really know what causes mental illness (genetics are only sometimes the root, and even then only a partial factor) and we certainly don’t know what to do about it, or how to integrate those who suffer (upwards of a third of the population by most indications) into society, especially when their symptoms are severe.

Instead, we separate ourselves from one another, hiding who we are – all of us do this, pretending we are what we are expected to be – fine, normal, happy, going on with apparently perfect understanding of why we work, shop, eat, and live as we do. The sick are someone else, and their sickness is their own problem. Clearly, it doesn’t have anything to do with the well, whoever they are.

But might the root of human suffering, and of our conflicts, large and small, be written in the face of Britney Spears? Could there be a connection between violence and depression, between war and anger, between death and insanity? Could the fear and confusion we see in Britney’s face be present in more of us than we’d like to admit? Could the cure she needs be more than a pill – could it be that her healing is tied to mine, to yours? Could she be telling us something important – that what we are doing is not working?

We might look on the bright side. At least our favorite love-to-hate-her child star isn’t as far gone as the two latest headline murderers to grab our endlessly hungry attentions. In New York, a man attacked his psychiatrists, but not until he’d killed the doctor’s colleague in the next office – one shrink just as good as another, I suppose, when the system’s let you down – a system that sells healing but provides, too often, an invisible straight jacket.  In Illinois, a graduate student off his medications unloaded a shotgun into a classroom full of teenagers. Unlike many of their peers, who volunteered to carry weapons around Baghdad and face death daily, these kids chose what they thought was a safe path – college. But there are no safe paths these days, and maybe that’s not a totally bad thing. When we feel safe, and believe danger is far away, our lives can become shallow, and it can be too easy for us to watch the suffering of others without cringing or crying or calling for a ceasefire. When war is a world away, it is too easy to wage. Maybe the unpampering of America wakes a few of us up. Maybe when we know hate can happen here, we will redouble our efforts to love.

That’s my hope. That one day, it’s one school shooting, one celebrity scandal, one preemptive war too many, and a critical mass of people, having had enough, decide once and for all to put a stop to the madness. That is the opportunity of our age – that human beings on every continent wake up together and just stop the world from spinning for a few days, long enough to remember who we are, and what is possible.

But it doesn’t seem to be happening, does it? We remain distracted. We are sick, but won’t call a doctor. We are together, but act as if we are alone. We cry in the darkness, but in the light only laugh.

Our culture declines – whether due to liberal hedonism or valueless capitalism or genetic destiny or original sin – and we decline with it. It is dragging us down and we watch helplessly. We didn’t stop after Columbine and by now these school shooting seem almost obligatory. We don’t have Britney anymore – but we have Hannah Montana, Nicole Ritchie, the New York Giants, American Idol and the ten thousand other flashy blinky people to take our minds off the mystery of pain, the decline of our empire, the tidal wave of history breaking all around us.