Guess what? Mental illness has no race, creed, or dollar value! Yup. You can be the President of the United States, or a leader in any country in the world, and you can still be a full-blown psychopath.
Do societies recognize this very much today? That there is a direct connection between a person’s sick, inner world and the world where supposedly “sane people” reside?
I’m against having over 300 million guns in any one population. In this instance, it’s euphemistically called the “United” states. They aren’t united, and have never been united, except when it comes to making money. Then, we’ll cooperate, punch the time clock. devise the best (preferably the most distant and destructive) weaponry money can buy to protect our capital pursuits. Treat the lower classes like they “should be” robots to fill-in the proper forms, go to the “right” schools, wade through endless government control mechanisms that are mostly computerized now (including missiles and nukes).
I was a college teacher. Big deal. I was able to hunker-down in the trenches with real people inside a small space classroom. We got to know each other probably better than most families today because it was a continuous period, usually three times a week, and they were (in my classes) able to write about very deep topics in their lives and what was outside them which most affected their daily routines. In other words, the “dreaded” LIBERAL ARTS!!!
When my fellow creatures began to fall from gun violence, we seemed to have escalated our own violence around the world (coincidence?). In my school, a colleague was teaching a Creative Writing class (my classes were all, in one way or another, creative writing classes LOL). I took her class once because I’m a creative writing “addict.” Like most of creative writing courses, I enjoyed it because I got to yak on paper through characters I created in my head.
Long story short, she had a young male student who was writing very descriptive and violent creative “stories.” She talked to him, and he said he was thinking about writing a screenplay. She knew violence was at the heart of Hollywood (a la most of successful Hollywood stories), so she didn’t think much about it. Also, her husband was a Vietnam War Vet, and they lived in seclusion out in Jamul, in forest fire country.
This one kid became what is today called an “active shooter,” and he shot and killed folks at the local gym where he worked out. As she went back over his paper, the scene he had described was exactly like the one he perpetrated in “real life.” She was devastated, blamed herself, and took an early retirement.
We’ve had several other “active shooters” in schools in San Diego since then, and they increased in number exponentially every year, all over these “United” States, until I retired.
But I was still teaching when the Asian shooter strafed the kids at Virginia Tech. I took notice because I was getting fucking paranoid. I had fellow vets in my classes coming back from “live fire” combat. They had “chits” that told me I could never teach anything in their presence that might trigger them.
So. Lesson One: Society doesn’t want to “trigger” people with mental illnesses in academic settings. Makes some sense, and yet it doesn’t, on a much deeper and profound level.
If I’m a veteran, and my dad was a combat veteran, then why can’t I let my students discuss what happened in their lives? All wars are nearly the same: “They tell you who the bad guys are, you go out, you try to kill the ones who want to shoot you.” Except, it’s not that easy to “unpack,” to use the parlance of academics and politicians who’ve never seen modern combat in today’s proxy wars.
In today’s wars, you have folks who aren’t in the fucking military. They’re highly trained, paid mercenaries. And you have child “hajis” who want to prove their stuff, so they pick up a stray gun and point it at you. Do you fire? He’s got a gun, motherfucker. Shoot or don’t shoot. In a matter of seconds, you decide life and death. You do. Not your sergeant, not the field general. YOU.
That’s also mental illness. Except the mentally ill decide for even stranger reasons than being told to do it by superiors. Their superiors are created in their own fucking heads, man!
Back to VA Tech. An Asian guy. Coddled by the Administration and his psychologists, even though they knew he was violent and having psycho/sexual/violent ideas. He was shooting iPhone videos up his classmates’ skirts in a poetry class. The women reported him. What did the Administrators do? Why, they gave him his own, personal, poetry class tutor!
When he went on his shooting rampage, he was one of the most coddled mentally psychotic students in the history of American education! So much for liberal thinking on the matter, huh?
Nope. We just promoted a certified psychopath into a PhD program for supposed “experts” on criminal behaviors! And there was a psycho snail trail he left in his history of social dealings online, and folks reported all the communication and unemotional signs in his personal behavior. Did that stop them from promoting this kid? Nope! He answered the right questions on the tests. He filled in the right computer bubbles, and thought up the cool research ideas. He was LIVING IN HIS OWN HEAD, however, when he did it. Not in the heads of his supervisors and/or other “normal” folks. He was, in fact, very willing and frightened to talk about what was going on in his life. Nobody took it “seriously.”
What is serious in this society, anyway? Is it only when it happens to YOU that it gets serious? That seems to be the MO of Congress and Academia. Until the gun is pointed at you, or the knife is at your heart (as it was to Dr. M. L. King’s heart by a madwoman at a book signing), then we don’t give much of a fuck, it seems.
Oh yeah, we pray a lot, and we hide from violent actions that might “trigger” us (meaning the individual “us,” or the “us” we are told is legit by the insane society in which we happen to be thrown into through no choice of our own). But who understands the “real us”?
The U.S. us. Nobody. That’s who. Those other folks in other countries don’t understand the real us.
People want the freedom to discuss anything that’s important to their lives, as they live it. That’s the First Amendment. They don’t want to escape life, and folks, life continues in your head from trauma, whether you will it, or you don’t will it. It’s not under your control–ever! Of course, if our society succeeds, and we all become “robots” or “androids,” then no problem, right? Is that the direction we want to head? That’s the path, sadly, I see. Power to the individual and fuck the People and their real welfare.
Nothing to see here. Move along. Don’t change and learn from our mistakes. What mistakes? None here. I’ve got my computer, my social media, my coffee, my cat, my underwear, my mind (on a limited loan basis–mostly to assuage what the Man tells me it’s good for).
My son works three blocks from this place. He and his hard-working ass could be next. How close does it have to get before we allow the Truth to leak out?
