Notice the brief flash of the angry smirk as he heads toward the mound. And notice that he couldn’t wait to get in and out of there are back to the friendly confines of some multi-millionaires box where we he would receive the fawning adulation he expects.
Categories: Dubya
This is the face of Wal-Mart’s heartless greed. You tell her her son is dead - AGAIN. And watch her cry. And then think how wonderful Lee Scott and Wal-Mart’s shareholders are going to feel with that extra $470,000 in their hot little hands. This is the face of the victims of American corporate greed.
AOL News runs this obviously biased and Communistic story from CNN:
JACKSON, Missouri (March 29) - Debbie Shank breaks down in tears every time she’s told that her 18-year-old son, Jeremy, was killed in Iraq. The 52-year-old mother of three attended her son’s funeral, but she continues to ask how he’s doing. When her family reminds her that he’s dead, she weeps as if hearing the news for the first time.
Shank suffered severe brain damage after a traffic accident nearly eight years ago that robbed her of much of her short-term memory and left her in a wheelchair and living in a nursing home.
Did you guys know that? Of course, in your hard cold hearts it changes nothing. Too bad her boy got offed for the empire’s insatiable lust for oil but that’s the deal when working class schlubs enlist. Your ass belongs to Uncle Sam. So deal with it. And you still owe Wal-Mart that $477,000, Brain Damaged Debbie. Lee Scott and his shareholders sure as hell need it more than you do.
It’s nice to know that even at a site that attracts so many troglodytes (AOL) that there’s enough people that know that people should matter more than money. In their online polls, the following results:
| No | 82% |
| Yes | 18% |
| Mostly negative | 60% |
| Neutral | 21% |
| Mostly positive | 19% |
Categories: Contemporary Americana · Economics · media
When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful,
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.
And all the birds in the trees, well they’d be singing so happily,
Joyfully, playfully watching me.
But then they sent me away, to teach me how to be sensible,
Logical, responsible, practical.
And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable,
Clinical, intellectual, cynical.
– Supertramp, The Logical Song
I am drawn to stories and posts like this one on Pam’s House Blend.
It may surprise some of my readers that I was once quite the conservative. I do a lot of self-analyzing (not common among cons) and I am pretty sure that the reason I swung to the right side of the political spectrum in my young adulthood was a psychological desire to be accepted by what was then thought of as the dominant social group. This was in the age of Reagan and the ascendancy of Rush Limbaugh, who I wasted many hours I will never get back, listening to.
I know what was wrong with me but it was quite understandable when considered now. I had come from a background of being a from a working class family that, bless my parent’s hearts, always strove to launch themselves into the upper middle class with middling success.
It’s hard to claim working class roots when your dad (in what I will forever call “Ed’s folly”) installs an in-ground swimming pool in the backyard. What did my dad do? He sold carpeting for Sears. My mom was a public school teacher. This was the 1970s when people who had those kind of jobs could aspire to the Great Toys of the Upper Middle Class. And dad wanted to give his family the best of everything whether he could really afford to or not. Try doing that nowadays with similar jobs.
Sure we had that damn pool. It wasn’t heated (that would have cost nearly as much as the pool itself), so in this climate, and shaded by large maples, the swimming season ran from early June to late August. It had its moments which I will fondly remember. It died in the 1985 earthquake. Long story.
Yes we had the pool. But I would come home and find the phone disconnected for non-payment. Occasionally the house would grow cold in the winter when the ‘rents had to scramble to find cash for the oil delivery. And we actually had a memorable vacation to Wyoming in 1970 - paid for by a loan by Sun Finance.
One of the ‘luxuries’ my ‘rents went into serious hock for was to send me and my sister to a local Catholic grade school where we were, quite frankly, among the lower earning families.
At Notre Dame, the nuns clearly favored the kids of families who paid by Plan A. That was the plan where you simply paid for the tuition all at once at the start of the year. We were Plan D people - monthly payments which I dutifully carried to school when I was old enough to be trusted with them. Early on I was well aware of the differences in treatment. Some kids got all the cushy parts in the plays and positions of authority. Some kids, despite all their best efforts, didn’t have a prayer. And I mean that quite literally.
Even though dad did his best to provide us with the American Dream ™, it was quite clear in my 8-1/2 years of incarceration at Notre Dame Elementary that my ‘rents were rank poseurs next to the attorneys, doctors, business executives and such whose kids surrounded me. Add to the fact that I was bookish, fat and had a funny last name, you can imagine what I endured for years. Not nearly as bad as the kids referenced in the House Blend post, but for a sensitive boy, the imprint was deep and long lasting.
I think the reason my dad would so often get mad at my attitude was that as hard as he was trying to give us “the good life” I could see how far short we fell in relation to the kids we went to school with and I let him know it. I never forgot going over to Jimmy C’s house to pick him up for a play date and having the door be answered by their maid. Why can’t we have a maid, dad?
I can understand why he would be mad at me for that. But he didn’t have to build the pool or send us to a pricey Catholic school. I really wanted to stay in the public school I had started kindergarten in. To this day, though, I wondered if I would have been as sensitive to class if I had stayed there. I might have been happier overall. More on that later.
In any case, I do believe that I had a deep yearning to finally be accepted by the country club type Republicans I went to school with (remember the TV show “Square Pegs?” I could relate. It hurt). And that spilled over into my young adulthood when I went against most of what I truly felt inside of me to try, one last time, to ‘be felt as acceptable; presentable.’
To make a long story short, without the requisite breeding in both money, status and religiosity, it wasn’t going to work. There were a few moments of clarity that brought home the fact that I was trying very hard to be accepted in a social group of people I inherently despised. Call it leftover Stockholm Syndrome or whatever, but I felt I had to try to fit in.
One time was during the debates over Hillary Clinton’s health care plan. I went with the rest of the Young Republicans to a public forum where we listened to the ’sob stories’ and then one of the members of our group got up and lectured the poor women whose daughter was refused care at a local hospital about the necessity of genuflecting before the free market capitalist system of America because it had been given to us by God through his prophet Adam Smith.
The woman responded from her heart and gut with a ferocity that perplexed poor Joe (the oberfuhrer of our YR group) who sat down muttering to the rest of us about being ‘attacked’ for merely reciting Biblical economic truth.
A light went on. I instinctively felt sorrier for the woman and her daughter than I did for Joe.
Yeah, I know, muddle headed liberal commie bastard not recognizing the wisdom of his betters. If the goons from Lone Star Times, Free Republic or any other Modern Fascist sites read anything more on my blog or even this entry, they probably have their rope hanging fingers itching about now. Yeah, I should have been strangled in the crib.
I think, though, the reception we had for visiting YRs at the Bond Court Hotel in downtown Cleveland was the tipping point. Here I was in my ill fitting suit sitting on couches around all these trust fund babies actually smoking these big fat cigars (again a Limbaugh affectation brought to us courtesy of the YRs from Dayton) and it just hit me: what the hell am I doing here with these people?
And so the recovery started. As is my won’t I made a very wide and pronounced swing from one extreme to the other. But then again, I WAS Jimmy Carter in a student debate back in 1976 at Notre Dame. So I was returning to my original roots and basic human impulses, just more so.
In fact, I’ll never forget the aforementioned Jimmy C who led the Gerald Ford debate contingent, mention that Carter’s modest health care proposal of the time was “socialism” and seeing most of the other sons and daughters of medical professionals visibly recoil in horror at the mention of that dreaded S word.
But the one common thread that ran through all of my close encounters with the right wingers throughout my life has been one very undeniable (at least to me) salient fact - they were all bullies of some sort or gravitated to bulling types of people or behavior.
And of course, they grew up and continuing their bullying ways in business and politics or wherever they found themselves planted. They gravitate toward the aforementioned right wing sites or start their own (like Captain’s Quarters or Little Green Footballs or insert your favorite here:). You can see a rhetorical string running through all of the writing and commenting on these sites that go right back to the playground: America was good to me - if it wasn’t good to you or you didn’t make it, it was probably your own damn moral failing and you should probably have the shit kicked out of you for it.
After all, ask yourself - how many bullies do you know who espoused liberal politics or social theory? ALL of the bullies I have ever met or known were conservatives. It’s the natural outgrowth of a basic belief system that rests upon the premise that ‘might makes right’ and those that are the successful players of the game of social Darwinism both deserve everything they were able to get AND that it proves that God loves them more.
And having observed these people up close and personal for many years, if they were truly honest with themselves, they’d admit it. In most cases, the arrogance comes out over fine Scotch among the table talk of trusted people. The odd thing happens once and awhile when one of them forgets they’re in front of an open microphone and makes a racist joke (like Earl Butz) or a funny about nuking Russia (Ronald Reagan). After the requisite public apologies they go back to their clubs and make the same remarks all over again. I know, I’ve heard them - the racist, sexist, homophobic table talk. And I have to say that now I AM ashamed at myself for trying to suck up to these people. Perhaps my vociferousness today is some kind of psychological ‘make good’ for those days. I am truly sorry for having supported people like that in my past. I often wake up remembering these incidents and hating myself for them.
Yeah, I can hear the cons reading this thinking: ’self-hating liberal white guy’ and ‘you were truly unworthy of us.’
Yeah, I know.
When you spend your entire life feeling like you were dropped here from outer space as some kind of grand cosmic mistake, you second guess yourself a lot.
It also helps if you raise a son who is autistic and see the way even our so-called enlightened American society treats these kids. It humanizes you beyond what any book or speech could ever do.
So when I read stories like the ones in the Pam’s House Blend post about kids who were persecuted at school by the ‘herd’ because they were gay, appeared effeminate or different in some way, my blood begins to boil. Yeah, sue the bastards. But that plays right into the cons’ view of liberals as ‘momma’s boys’ who run to the court when they get hurt.
I have always said that the proper response to bullies is a well swung baseball bat to the chops, complete with the flying teeth and blood splatter. It’s one of the reasons, as a strong supporter of the Second Amendment (yes, THAT one) that I support groups such as Pink Pistols (because armed gays don’t get bashed - for real). If anyone needs to arm themselves in America, it’s liberals and those of us who are ‘different’ some way from the ‘norm.’
I have no doubt (because I’ve heard too much of the table talk in person) that many, if not most of these conservatives, if they really could run the country the way they wanted, would start building concentration camps for the people they hate. Oh, in public, they’d strongly deny it, but you’d be surprised (perhaps not) at how many of these people actually are, at core, real live fascists.
It’s one of the reasons I urge my fellow lefties to stop with the nice talk and realize that people like Sally Kern really, really, really, viscerally hate you and, if they had their way, would be herding you into extermination camps. Stop being nice and playing Marquis of Queensbury rules with the language. Call a fascist a fascist. Call a hater a hater. Don’t let people like Jonah Goldberg and Bill O’Reilly get away with it. If you have to start swinging fists and being impolite on television or radio, do it. If anything, you’ll get more respect from average Americans who generally only understand violence as a way of solving everything.
I know a lot of liberals still believe they can reason with and change bullies. They feel that by ’stooping to their level’ they will somehow become that which they hate. I wonder if the folks at Jews For the Preservation of Firearms Ownership would buy that rationale vis a vis 1930’s Germany? In the Unitarian Universalist church I used to belong to in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, I would ask these people if they’d be the first ones to politely board the boxcars to their own destruction? They didn’t care for the analogy. I didn’t care.
After awhile even a beat dog with little to lose starts to contemplate one last satisfying bite into their tormentor before getting the last bullet. Until this species reaches a different stage of evolution, we are still faced with the stark fact that if we want to be allowed to live in some measure of safety and respect, the only language that the bully understands is force.
Harlan Ellison wrote a great short story in the Approaching Oblivion collection (1974) tited One Life Furnished in Early Poverty, where, as a grown adult, he went back to his youth (strangely enough in nearby-to-me Painesville, Ohio where I lived once) and meet the kid he had been. A kid who had been mercilessly bullied for being Jewish.
If you’ve never read it, you should. It may bring tears to your eyes. It did to me. Ellison, as Gus Rosenthal, fights off the bullies and befriends the young man that was him as a youth. But then something unforeseen happens. Rosenthal sees the kid becoming too dependent on him and realizes that for better or worse, the child he had been needs to go through these trials alone in order to grow up as the guy who would later feel deeply enough to write these stories.
But Ellison’s description of the bullying he endured in Painesville, which really bordered on the calculatingly cruel, cut very close to the bone for me. But where I fall is that I very vividly remember, even after 30 years, all the kids we, quite literally, bullied completely out of the school - people like Greg A and Chris H.
And yes, I said we. For to distract attention from the reasons I was bullied, I joined in the torment. If I could pull an Ellison in real life, I’d love to go back as an adult and kick the shit out of Jimmy C, Harry N, Robert L and some of the others who tormented these innocent kids. Wherever they are, I hope that Greg and Chris aren’t as fucked up as I am from elementary school. Even now when I think of them and others, I feel sadness and shame for what I didn’t do. Yeah, the nuns, by turning their backs to these scenes, taught us well what life would hold.
No, some of us CAN’T quite move on. Ellison never really moved on - his experiences in Painesville formed the leitmotif of his work- he turned his angst into a body of literature. Not being as talented (I can’t write fiction for shit), I guess the other parts of my remaining life are some kind of make-good for either standing by silently or joining in those taunts.
I have always hated bullies and being bullied. Read from that what you will.
Categories: Getting Personal
I went to bed last night not feeling well at all. I had a bad sinus headache and wasn’t feeling too well overall. So perhaps that has something to do with a very long and vivid dream I had. Since it could possibly be an omen of some kind, I will write it down here.
I am living in the future in some city. While there was a faint perception that it might be downtown Cleveland, it didn’t look like it. But the gist was that some kind of disease had wiped out generally half of the population of the country. The figure I got was 125-135 million people in the US had died.
Anyway what that meant in the dream was that parts of the civil infrastructure, as well as business and residential areas, were untended and uninhabited. There were signs posted along downtown streets for people to avoid walking under window washing platforms and other scaffolding and things variously hanging over streets from various high rises. I consciously walk around some of these areas in the dream. Why the survivors don’t go up and bring these hazards down is beyond me, but that’s a dream for you.
I am reminded in the book Warday that an abandoned Manhattan suffered from untended cornices, windows and other building adornments falling into the street. Perhaps that is the memory that fuels this.
The virus that killed so many people has almost apparently run its course but not completely. Affected people still walk around and are occasionally spotted by people who examine the inside of their mouths. If their tongues are spotted, off they go. But the interesting thing about this dream is there is no fascist infrastructure. There is fear, plenty of it, but the people are led off humanely and the thing about the survivors is that they take great pains to go about their business as if everything is normal when it clearly isn’t.
Again, there are no flying tribunals or jackbooted police or anything. In fact there is a noticeable lack of any authority structure.
I live, with a group of people, in a very nice modern downtown hotel. Why I have no idea. I clearly have a room on the 9th floor. I am in an elevator and I know I must press the “9″ button. When I arrive at my floor, I go into a very well appointed (but not luxurious) modern room with a nice bed and other accoutrements. There is a woman with me sort of tangentially. I don’t see her but I feel a presence occasionally - not sinister or anything.
The thing about being on the ninth floor is that for some reason I get the feeling that this is desirable to be somewhat well above street level so you can see your surrounding area. There is a fear of people with the virus. The poor people only suspect they may be ill but don’t know for sure until diagnosed on the spot. They wander into the hotel lobby and people try to avoid them. Somehow their physical appearance is a tip off. I’m not sure how.
Again, there is a palpable sense of fear in this dream but not terror. It’s hard to explain. I place a chair under the doorknob of my room, ostensibly in case one of these wandering virus holders tries to get in. Locks on the door apparently aren’t a concern.
We are served meals in the lobby. The food is nondescript.
Later, our group organizes forays into the surrounding area. Why I am in this group and why they must live in this hotel I cannot say. We walk (yes walk) to a local mall.
Here’s the thing about the mall. It seems like any one level American shopping mall with the requisite stores. This mall seems to be in a horse shoe shape with either ends of the horse shoe lit and busy but the interior bend of the mall is dark and it is implied that this is for the same reason other parts of the city are uninhabited - there are not enough people or resources to keep the entire thing lit and active.
But people stroll through the mall with their kids in strollers and such and behave as if their is nothing amiss. I find it somewhat incredible in a way as I observe. People stroll through the darkened part to get around to the other side of the mall. There are stores selling consumer doo-dads as if nothing has happened. One store is selling in house spas like the ones people replace their bathtubs with and also put outside on decks. As I pass, the sales men are standing by these spas as the water merrily bubbles away. I find it all a bit fantastic.
If I remember more about this, I’ll post it.
Parts of this dream may have indeed been influences by recent re-watchings of The Matrix and Soylent Green. That may explain some of the ideas and imagery but this was one of those rare dreams were the scenes and story are consistent and the images vivid enough for me to recollect them here. That is very unusual for me.
Categories: Getting Personal
Only used because I love the movie “The Matrix” so much. In this case, newspapers are in the crosshairs and it seems now that doom is certain.
NEW YORK The newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years.
According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 — the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.
The drop-off points to an economic slowdown on top of the secular challenges faced by the industry. The second worst decline in advertising revenue occurred in 2001 when it fell 9.0%.
Total advertising revenue in 2007 — including online revenue — decreased 7.9% to $45.3 billion compared to the prior year.
There are signs that online revenue is beginning to slow as well. Internet ad revenue in 2007 grew 18.8% to $3.2 billion compared to 2006. In 2006, online ad revenue had soared 31.4% to $2.6 billion. In 2005, it jumped 31.4% to $2 billion.
As newspaper Web sites generate more advertising revenue, the growth rate naturally slows.
Categories: Journalism
Gotta give the PD props for keeping this issue in the public forefront because its going to get a lot worse. Of course, they’re not going to go for the real root causes of why some many middle aged guys are offing themselves. That’s where I come in.
In the early 1980s, young adults had among the highest rates of suicide in Northeast Ohio. Today that same generation of boomers, now in their late 40s and early 50s, is behind a surge of suicides among middle-agers.
While the elderly are most likely to carry out suicides, there is growing recognition of boomers in crisis. Experts say disappearing jobs, fraying families, drug and alcohol addictions and untreated mental illness are eating away at the generation that supposedly has the best of everything.
After spending three months in constant visits to a local convalescent center (where old people are sent to die) I can clearly understand that the elderly are the most likely to carry out suicides. In many respects, they carry them out for the same basic overriding reason the guys in their 40s and 50s are now on the fast track to catching up in the suicide sweepstakes do - they feel used, abused and tossed aside like yesterday’s garbage. Our society worships youth, money, sex and obscene conspicuous consumption. At some point, if you’re kicked out of the game you suddenly find you become invisible - you no longer count. And this is reinforced every time you turn on the idiot box - do you live like these people? Then you must be some kind of loser. And you should go away.
Research has found that post-World War II children are prone to depression and other mood disorders. Then recently some startling numbers came out of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: The suicide rate among Americans aged 45-54 jumped about 20 percent from 1999 to 2004.
The knee jerk reaction will be that this was truly a candy-ass generation that was spoiled and now has a hard time handling personal adversity. Insofar as this is true, one must remember that until this point in our history, we didn’t have a mass culture predicated on instilling the virtues of ‘you are what you own’ into its people. People could handle the Depression (the Great One) because the 1920s were a blip of prosperity that, contrary to popular mythology, most people didn’t really share in. We didn’t have televisions and the kind of mass consumerism we have today.
What you have to remember is that when you bombard a developing mind with images of how society is and how you should be, that kind of brainwashing has deep and lasting effects on people. Edward Deming and the tactics of mass commercialism and such things as ‘brand identity’ were in their infancy in the 1920s. Now we have a whole host of social pathologies that can directly trace their origins to advertising as propaganda. The whole body image crisis is a great example. Anorexia nervosa was unknown until Karen Carpenter died of it in the 1980s. These impressions, made thousands of times - cars, homes, clothes, lifestyles, etc., have an impact.
There as a time when all a man had to have was the love of a good woman and some kind of steady income. Now he has to show several different successful faces in society and at work. I also find it incredible that the base issues of home, family and love no longer hold the wolf from the door. Many women do not understand that how society sees the man has become, sadly, more important than how she sees him. To understand why more and more middle aged men commit suicide we have to face the fact that we have created, in the last 50 years, a society that made him useful and wanted and then, as they hit their 40s, changed the rules and those that were casualties of outsourcing and youth were told that their services were no longer needed - not just at work but on the street as well.
And to many men who were doing their best to hide mental illness, this was a death sentence of the soul.
The news was no surprise to Dr. Joseph Calabrese, a psychiatrist and longtime director of the mood disorders program at University Hospitals Case Medical Center. People born in the 1950s and ’60s have rates of bipolar disorder and major depression two and three times higher than previous generations, he said. Most are untreated or inadequately treated.
There are two reasons for that. One, of course, is that most American men still are taught by society that mental illness is a moral weakness to be hidden at all costs. Check out any site that tell you what to say and not say at a job interview: we have to present ourselves as grand, glorious and Godlike or we will be denied an opportunity to earn a basic living. And even when we get the job, so much of who we are must be sublimated at the worksite because there is no pity in capitalism. As I was told at the age of 16 at my first job at McDonalds: “either fake a smile or go home.” And that brutality, which is what it really is on a psychological level, takes a gradual toll on a person - regardless of age, sex or gender. But we won’t change that, will we?
The second reason is that therapy, even if one seeks it, is often beyond the reach of many men who have lost their jobs and their health insurance. In many cases, although this is starting to change, even decent health insurance pays paltry sums for mental health care. In America we still see people who seek mental health help as malingerers until proven otherwise and who wants to spend money to coddle someone’s weakness? Even battle hardened Iraqi war veterans with serious PTSD are being shamed as malingerers and denied precious mental health care. They understand that our country and society, having used them and abused them, now just wants them to go somewhere quietly to die.
It works the same in the military as it does in civilian life.
A Plain Dealer analysis found white middle-aged men in Ohio have especially high rates of suicide — more than twice the overall national rate.
Attention is often focused on triggering events such as financial crisis or soured relationships. But mental illness underlies the vast majority of suicides, experts say. It’s often compounded by substance abuse. Boomers have high rates of that, too.
Ohio has it tough due to our economy and a general malaise that I have found in the population, having returned from a 10-year absence. There is a certain sense of fatalism among northeast Ohioans that makes this population seem listless and depressed in many cases. Our winters and lack of recreation and resources taken for granted elsewhere also compound the problem. The thing is, you see drearier landscapes in Central Illinois and it seems to be different there. For what reason, I’m not sure. Perhaps its an agricultural base vs. a formerly robust industrial base. In any case, we live in are where one could walk into an auto plant or a steel mill and raise a family on your wages and have enough for vacations and some of the finer things in life. Now, again, the rules were rewritten, always to the detriment of the working class for the benefit of the smaller ownership class. But now people are noticing because the rules are also being rewritten for the white collar middle class who are now seeing their jobs disappearing. And they are being told in ways large and small - retrain, lower your expectations, keep your damn mouth shut and don’t complain.
Mental illness and substance abuse go together like a horse and carriage. You almost can’t have one without the other (apologies to Frank Sinatra). But it’s true and it’s a cruel irony that while more desperate people in pain seek to self-medicate, our society makes it more of a criminal act to do so. The legalization and regulation of marijuana would go a long way to helping people self-medicate because pot is so much more safer than booze. But, again, we live in a society that seems to take great delight in kicking people when they are down. More and more decent people who are looking for a few hours of being free from pain are being locked up to support local prison economies and for-profit prison industries. Rather than spending money on actually helping people in need, we choose to lock them up. Now I am not talking about legalizing crack cocaine or anything like that. But we have to find some way of making proper mental health and job resources available to people or we will continue to see these pathologies grow.
There are those who will always choose criminality over work. I’m not talking about those people. I’m talking about otherwise decent people who have done all they can, worked hard and obeyed the law and paid their taxes and petted their dogs, etc., even while, in many cases, fighting mental illness. But there comes a time, and middle age is right about it, where these guys look all of their efforts being eaten away by changing economic rules that they had no say in. Or maybe they were just victims of vindictiveness at work. The American Dream, that ever-shifting goal of attaining the ‘good life’ that is thrust in front of our noses 24/7 by the idiot box, starts to recede in the rear-view mirror. And these people start asking the central question many suicidal people ask before they start to serious contemplate offing themselves: “is that all there is?”
To those who are mentally healthy and reasonably affluent with strong family structures, all of this might seem like poking your head into a foreign dimension where nothing makes sense to you. I understand that. All I am asking is for you to try to understand what so many of these otherwise good people are going through. Don’t just read the PD story and say, ‘oh, too bad, those people need help’ because that person could very well be your brother or father or someone else in your life you never suspected was going through these agonies. And they are not weak and undeserving of your attention.
Carolyn Givens was busy running the Ohio Department of Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services when she found out her husband, Greg, was mentally ill and a substance abuser. In 2003, Greg drove to a park and slit his wrists. He was 50 and had lost his job a few days earlier, and had not told her. Police found him before he bled to death, and he survived.
“I missed signs,” says Givens, who is now executive director of the Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation. “I thought he was tired. He seemed very tired. I didn’t know he was depressed.”
First of Ms. Givins, I don’t know you but please try not to be so hard on yourself. Most men keep these things closely guarded secrets precisely because they don’t want the people they love, the people closest to them, to worry about them.
But here comes a very big red flag and I’m glad to see it here: complaints of being tired. This is one of the most overlooked symptoms of the suicidal, especially in men. Often we will tell our loved ones when they ask why we seem so down that we are tired. And, truth be told, we are very tired both physically and mentally. It’s a fatigue that transcends simple sleeplessness and cannot be cured with a good night’s sleep, which is often elusive anyway. In the military, people speak of soldiers with the ‘thousand mile stare.’ Again, it’s the same in the civilian world. You’ll know that stare when you see it. It is a cry for help.
I’m not saying that a suicide watch should be mounted for every middle age man who loses his job, but there are signs to look for in addition to the obvious disappointment over being cast aside by your employer.
The thing I wonder, and I hate myself for typing this but it must be said - did her husband want himself to be found in time? I hope so for both of their sakes. I sincerely hope he is doing better now.
Several experts said job loss is high on the list of traumas that push some down the darkest paths.
From her vantage point in Stark County, Carole Vesely has seen it firsthand. A recurring theme in suicide notes is a former breadwinner who can’t support family and feels worthless, she said.
“When I interview people who have attempted suicide, the most classic statement I hear is, ‘My family would be better off without me,’” she said.
Ladies please hear me on this and believe me: for many if not most men, our jobs define us. We don’t like it, of course. We’d like to be thought of first as decent human beings, good fathers, loving husbands. But our peculiar system of American capitalism has cast many of us in the role of ‘we are what we do.’ Think about it in this way: how many women define themselves by how they get paid? In most cases, I’ve found women basically live for their after job hours - then they ‘do’ what they do to make themselves happy and derive gratification from life.
But we’ve been stuck in the world of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, like it or not. Note that the book and movie were from the mid-1950s and we still haven’t figured it out or admitted that this way of life is ultimately corrosive to the soul. With a fatalism born of hard experience, men still bear the burden of having to prove their worth as human beings in the marketplace. And as the bar of what is defined as success keeps rising and the ability to attain that bar get even more problematic, the casualty list of real lives will grow.
And we seem completely helpless to stop this crazy machine.
You can also use Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman as a perfect example of what we’re talking about. Widely regarded as the most depressing of American plays, Death of a Salesman acts as a momento mori of the American Dream and is often shunned when performed by the very people to whom it speaks. But its essential truths continue to become even more prescient to our culture today.
Was Willy Loman a ‘loser?’ Many have commented over the years that, indeed, he was. I find the most poignant parts of the play when his wife Linda demands that “attention must be paid” to Willy by his sons and, perhaps, by society at large. Her plea resonates throughout American history and is most often ignored.
But the two works I have mentioned were created in a brief and rare period in American arts and letters when introspective pieces were honored and considered. Nowadays, perhaps, the best we get is something like Glengarry, Glen Ross or Wall Street, which still romances the dog-eat-dog culture of American business. And even Glengarry author David Mamet now seems to have drunk the Kool Aid of conservatism. Success and money will do that to some people. You start to believe the old adage: ‘I did it, why can’t these other useless punks?’
And the casualty list grows.
University of Akron psychologist James Rogers said suicide trends are not well understood, but he said lack of job stability and the collapse of pension and health benefits play a big role in the middle-age phenomenon.
“My dad worked 35 years in the same place. A lot of folks our age grew up in that world, which has dramatically changed,” said Rogers, who is president-elect of the American Association of Suicidology. “Those things have to contribute in some sense to a feeling of helplessness as we get older. Does it cause suicide? There’s no one thing that causes suicide.”
Of course those things contribute. And of course, there is no one thing that causes suicide, generally. There is, of course, a belief that whatever happens to our economy, such as the so-called non-negotiable inevitability of globalism, will cause some casualties and, while that is regrettable, not everyone can or should be saved. Despite protestations to the contrary, we need to admit that in most cases we still allow our society to operate under what has come to be called ’social Darwinism.’ To some people, the people that they step over on the sidewalks to get to their jobs are actually testaments to the effectiveness of our form of capitalism: some people simply aren’t fit to compete and live and, therefore, we shouldn’t spend our hard earned tax dollars trying to turn natural born losers into winners.
Now imagine the shock when that same self-sufficient denizen of the capitalist class hits 50 and his boss tells him that his ideas and ethics (let’s say its an ad agency, that’s always a good one but it can apply to many businesses) are outdated and new fresh, young-thinking blood needs to be brought in. We appreciate your 20+ years at the firm old man, but surely you see the rationale in our decision? We’ll give you a good reference of course. Now if you could just clean out your office and check in with personnel for your exit interview on the way out. . .
And then the same man finds himself a few hours later on the sidewalk staring at the ‘bum’ he had walked over just that morning and something clicks in his head. Not . . . that . . . far. . . from. . .
And what will he tell his wife and loved ones when he gets home? He’s a used up old man at 50.
Is that all there is?
Loree Vick, a former local TV anchor and now media relations manager for University Hospitals, lost her husband, John, when he committed suicide three years ago. His was another case of a man who largely kept hidden the psychic pain of depression, and what Vick now believes was unrecognized bipolar disorder. John lost his job as a business executive at age 51, and he began a two-year downward spiral.
“He was able to mask it by being successful, being with family, having things go well for him,” said Vick, who has joined a local group called the Suicide Prevention Education Alliance, and who speaks publicly to cope with the emotional fallout.
“If you have a mental disease, you’re less equipped to handle setbacks and traumas in your life. It becomes debilitating,” Vick said.
True. I’m glad to see this vignette in this story because so many people here know of Lori Vick from her TV work. And it brings home the painful fact that success and appearances are both deceiving and fleeting. When Sinatra sings “riding high in April, shot down in May” he wasn’t kidding. It happens to a lot of people and some are more equipped psychologically to deal with it than others.
To many men it is an absolute truism that a lot of internal pain can be masked by the outward trappings of ’success’ as defined by our capitalist/consumerist culture. Once the mask is ripped away, however, there’s little to fall back on. One would obviously ask - well what about his lovely wife and family and home, etc?
Again, like it or not: we are what we do. I wish it was different but do you ever notice when men introduce themselves to each other, generally right after the names its “so what do you do for a living?”
I am reminded of the Bruce Springsteen lyrics to “Out of Work:”
I go to pick my girl up
Her name is Linda Brown
Her dad invites me in
He tells me to sit down
The small talk that we’re making
Is going pretty smooth
But then he drops a bomb
“Son, what d’ya do ?”
I’m out of work
I need a job, I’m out of work
And then:
I’m out of work
These hard times, they’re enough
To make a man lose his mind
I’m out of work
Up there you got a job but down here below
The bounciness of the song belies the desperation in the lyrics.
And in the case of Vick’s husband, how many men want to admit that their wife is ‘carrying’ them until they can find a job? Ladies, most of you have no idea how hard this is for most men. Yes, it’s a sexist carryover of a society we thought we changed. But there is more about the society that never changed in regards to work, self-worth and sex roles, than did change.
In Cuyahoga County, which averages about 160 suicides a year, an effort is under way to conduct psychological post-mortems. Information about mental health histories and events leading up to suicide could bring greater clarity to populations at risk and guide prevention programs.
“We’d have some greater insight into what’s going on, because right now we don’t know,” said Rick Oliver, who oversees the county suicide hot line and sits on a county prevention task force.
The Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation hopes to raise money for pilot programs in Cuyahoga and Franklin counties, Givens said.
Isn’t it funny in a dark sort of way that American society is so good at locking the barn door after the horse has escaped? Post-mortems are, I suppose, less expensive than actually providing easily accessible and affordable mental health services for people.
But as long as there’s more money to be made in Viagra than keeping depressed men from offing themselves, I suppose nothing will change. We’d rather have our tax dollars go to bigger and better warships, guns and methodologies of killing people than actually saving lives. If that sounds harsh, tough. It’s true. And it brings up something else that often gets overlooked among the suicidal.
It’s this: people who are very sensitive and intellectual suffer a great burden in American society. Introspection, intelligence and sensitivity are not valued in our society - try making money with those traits. But the thing is, people who have this hard gifts are the ones who figure out, many in their childhood, just how insane is the society they’re being brought up in.
In many cases, they struggle their whole lives feeling somehow that maybe they were put here by accident, that they are ‘mistakes’ in a culture or society that doesn’t quite feel what they feel or perceive what they perceive.
Many of them do their best all their lives to work and fit in. But they always know that this is a game they never wanted to play in the first place and they feel, not without reason, that the game is rigged against them.
We lose the resiliency of our youth in many cases, to bounce back, to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off and try again. I suspect that for many of these men, they hit middle age and, having tried their best to play the game all their lives, stare into the gaping maw of the downside of their lives and ask:
Is that all there is?
And in their heart of hearts they absolutely believe that their families, most of whom do not understand them, would be better off without them bringing everyone down at Christmas time or at other family gatherings. After all, they know people don’t like to hear ‘whining’ and after awhile, it becomes apparent to them (in their minds) that no one really cares whether they, the core person inside them, lives or dies. They spare others the pain of themselves.
Calabrese of University Hospitals said the post-mortems would reveal “undiagnosed, untreated illness for a long time.” In the past 19 years, three dozen patients treated in his mood disorders program have killed themselves, he said.
“I always go back and obsess about these things — it was completely unpredictable,” Calabrese said.
“My explanation is we got them too late. We get them after they’ve had illness for decades.”
We “get them?” I’m sure you didn’t mean it but it sounds like your capturing butterflies in a net. And that’s another point. Many people are reluctant to seek mental health because they have a fear that if they confess their darkest thoughts, the analyst will press a little unseen button on the desk in front of them and the burly men in the white coats will come and take them away, after, of course, they check their insurance coverage.
This is exactly what happened to a woman I knew who went to seek counseling at Laurelwood in 1995 about problems she was having getting along with people at work. After checking her insurance coverage, the nurse locked the doors on her, told her she was ’suicidal’ and ‘homicidal’ and then the facility proceeded to see how many days they could collect on her insurance before ‘releasing her’ back to to the community.
Because of that incident this woman will never, ever, seek treatment again. And remember the poor guy who hung himself near Legacy Village a month ago? The one Regina Brett wrote about? Yep, they turned him out as soon as his insurance ran out. There’s the lesson - as long as your illness can make money for some doctor or corporate entity we’ll pretend to care about you. The second the money runs out, you’re dog meat on the street.
And with 19 fatalities in your program, maybe your effectiveness should be reviewed rather than this ‘aw shucks, too late’ mentality. Always gotta protect the institution, I get it. Believe me, I get it. And I bet your patients do as well.
Look, this isn’t all that difficult. In many respects all we have to do is completely remake American society.
Start with bullying in the schools. Listen to and respect people as human beings worthy of being here, not as disposable widgets like the readers of the Lone Star News replying to the story below do.
Get serious about ending the stigma about mental illness. Provide for affordable treatment and medications for people in need. Don’t like that? Then keep building more prisons and digging more graves. Your choice.
But most of all listen. The people who are thinking of killing themselves are really talking to you, albeit not always verbally.
Addendum:
Needless to say the brain-dead are crawling out from their mid-day rocks at the PD site to spew their little ignorant comments:
Reminds me of the suicide crisis we had during the great depression, and the recession of the 70’s.
Not.People have been getting layed off, or flooded, or tornadoed, etc.. since the begining of time.
Only now they are whiny, spoiled, selfish, frightend, and MEDICATED.
So how do we attempt fix it?
Carolyn Givens was busy running the Ohio Department of Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services when she found out her husband, Greg, was mentally ill and a substance abuser. In 2003, Greg drove to a park and slit his wrists. He was 50 and had lost his job a few days earlier, and had not told her. Police found him before he bled to death, and he survived.
“I missed signs,” says Givens, who is NOW EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR of the Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation. “I thought he was tired. He seemed very tired. I didn’t know he was depressed.”
We MUST do better than this…
Selfish people do selfish things.
Categories: Who We Are · health care
If you want to see just how cruel and heartless corporate America can be, check this out. Olbermann just had a field day with it, giving Wal-Mart a well-deserved Worst Person in the World award:
Debbie Shank used to stock shelves at night for Wal-Mart so she could spend time in the afternoons with her three sons. Now she lives in a nursing home, requires around-the-clock medical care and owes Wal-Mart almost $500,000.
The story of the Shank family is heartbreaking in the sense that it could happen to anyone. Driving home one night, Debbie’s car was hit by a tractor-trailier, leaving her brain-damaged and paralyzed. After collecting health insurance money for hospital bills (Debbie’s policy with Wal-Mart paid for over $400,000 worth of emergency care), the Shanks sued the trucking company responsible for the accident, hoping to provide for Debbie’s long term needs.
Now Wal-Mart has sued the Shanks, citing a line of fine print in Debbie’s insurance policy that entitles the company to any lawsuit settlement. Wal-Mart intends to collect $470,000 from the Shanks, despite the fact that this will undoubtedly bankrupt Debbie’s family.
A CNN interview with Jim Shank, Debbie’s husband, gives some insight into how difficult the legal proceedings have been. Wal-Mart earned $100 billion in the final fiscal quarter end of 2007, meaning the company earned the disputed $470,000 in just 38 seconds. When confronted with a lifetime of medical bills and longterm care, Jim Shank was understandably disspirited.
“They are quite within their rights. But I just wonder if they need it that bad,” he said.
Wal-Mart already has a reputation for treating its employees poorly, but for Wal-Mart to take Debbie Shank’s money shows that Wal-Mart and the Walton family are truly heartless.
Wal-Mart could take its legal victory and simply do the right thing and leave the Shank family and their money alone. Surely, even CEO Lee Scott himself would agree that the Shank family has suffered enough.
Actually no. From InjuryBoard.com:
A Wal-Mark spokesman expressed the company’s sadness about Shank’s condition but said the company had to pursue repayment out of fairness to all participants in the health plan.
Oh yeah, fairness. Pardon me while I die laughing. The fairness of Wal-Mart to its employees with that remarkable health care plan. Oh yeah.
But hey, if you think THAT is bad, you haven’t seen the best examples of heartless America, corporate anus-sucking Texas assholes (isn’t Texas the breeding ground of most American fascist assholes?) as the comments from this absolute piece of mis-bred human garbage blog known as Lone Star Times.
To quickly recap, a tragic accident happened to a Wal Mart employee. She was covered by the Wal Mart health insurance plan and the plan paid out $470,000 for her care. Her family hired a lawyer and sued the company that caused the accident and received a $1 million award. Of which her lawyer took $583,000, 58.3%. The Wal Mart health plan then sued to recover the money it paid out, as specified in the plan’s charter.
Take a look at how CNN reports this story. First, they include the fact that her 18 year old son was killed in action in Iraq after her accident. No question, this adds depth and color to the story but is it relevant to the matter at hand? Or does it simply lend sympathy to the cause?
No because you can’t have sympathy when the poor little corporation needs to be protected from big bad disabled people who are screwing those God-fearing stockholders out of $417k.
Look, I’d go on but I just get too mad. I hate the fact that I even have to share the planet with people so small, so greedy, so hateful, so unfeeling, so devoid of any semblance of humane feeling that they have to write such shit. It reinforces my opinion we should have let Texas and the rest of the Confederacy leave the union so they could forever dwell in their miserable backwater. But no, we had to win the Civil War and have Reconstruction and civilize these people. But it ended in 1877 and they resisted civilization and now we have the problems we have in this country.
If Wal-Mart cared about smart PR they’d stop this kind of heartless raping of sick and helpless people for the sake of capitalistic excess. But they don’t. Boycott Wal-Mart if you’re not already doing so.
Categories: Economics · health care · right wingnuttery
Despite recent acknowledgements from the likes of Alan Greenspan, Gen. John Abizaid, and others that oil and permanent (or, if you prefer, “enduring”) military bases were among the main objectives, Frontline avoided any real discussion of such delicate factors. Someone not already aware of how our media has become a tool of the Bush administration might have been shocked at how Frontline could have missed one of President George W. Bush’s most telling “signing statements.” Underneath the recent Defense Authorization Act, he wrote that he did not feel bound by the law’s explicit prohibition against using the funding:
“(1) To establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq,” or
“(2) To exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq.”
So the Frontline show was largely pap.
Well what did you expect? The Military-Industrial complex largely gutted the life out of PBS which is now almost wholly dependent on the sponsorship of big oil and other industries to underwrite their major projects.
And the rest of the so-called ‘liberal media’ really isn’t and therefore you will not see anything substantive on the nets.
Categories: Censored! · Journalism · media
For a few seconds Chris Wallace must have been channeling his dad and thought he was working for CBS News in its heyday.
Well so much for that.
Last Friday, “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace appeared on “Fox & Friends” and railed against the show for what he called “two hours of Obama-bashing.” Almost immediately, he knew his position was unpopular, calling into host Brian Kilmeade’s radio show to discuss how mad the other hosts — and Fox executives — were towards him.
In an interview with the New York Observer’s Felix Gillette, Wallace goes further, admitting,
“I didn’t have any second thoughts about the substance because I still believe what I said was right,” said Mr. Wallace. “But after the fact, you do think to yourself–on a professional level with colleagues I very much like and respect–should I have done that off camera?” “It’s a close call,” said Mr. Wallace. “I’m not sure I’d do it again.”
“I know a lot of liberal critics like to snicker at the slogan ‘fair and balanced,’ but, in fact, we take it very seriously,” he added. “My feeling is that a lot of time ‘fair and balanced’ means giving the conservative point of view because that doesn’t get reflected in the mainstream media. In this particular case, I thought ‘fair and balanced’ meant giving more of an explanation of Obama’s point of view.”
Wallace also admitted that an unnamed Fox News executive sent him an email after the “Fox & Friends” appearance to say, “isn’t this the kind of thing we should be talking about off camera, not on camera?”
I bet a lot more was said and communicated to Wallace by Fox honchos than what he’s admitting to. One might ask: so wouldn’t some other network pick him up if Fox had fired him over this?
The answer is perhaps, perhaps not. There is no such thing as a ‘liberal media’ anyway unless people believe that NBC News, for instance, is as liberal as their parent company, the giant defense contractor General Electric, wants them to be.
But the main problem is that Wallace spoke against the product on the air. Remember what Howard Beale said about TV news in the movie Network - at core, they’re selling soap. You don’t critique the product being peddled on the air even if you’re right! That’s a lesson I learned while I was on radio. Truth doesn’t matter at all - truth is what the general manager decides is truth. The days of some kind of ’sacred trust’ that on the air people had to their audience is long gone if it ever existed at all. And that goes for print as well, unfortunately.
Perhaps only a real titan like Walter Cronkite or Ed Murrow could speak speak out and tell the truth on TV - Cronkite about Vietnam and Murrow about Senator Joe McCarthy. Now the careerists (Wallace included) that populate the greasy pole of TV news know exactly what they are - whores.
And what is particularly odious about this incident is that Wallace knew he had to do more than just a simple make good for his bosses - he actually had to defend the ‘fair and balanced’ slogan which anyone with a room temperature IQ knows is total bullshit.
I wonder if had to excuse himself and throw up afterwards.
Categories: Journalism · media · right wingnuttery
I’ve only been saying this on this blog for how long?
I’d like to suggest a very simple strategy for American liberals: Get mean. Stop policing the language and start using it to hurt our enemies. American liberals are so busy purging their speech of any words that might offend anyone that they have no notion of using language to cause some salutary pain.
Why, for example, not popularize slogans that mock the Bush loyalists as “suckers”? Something like, “There are two kinds of Republicans: millionaires and suckers.” Put that on a few bumper stickers and I guarantee a lot of “South Park Republicans” will quit the GOP. They just smirk when you tsk-tsk at them for being disrespectful. They want to be disrespectful; every normal young male wants to be.
And this, of course, brings up a big issue: At some point liberal writers are going to have to decide if it’s OK to be young and male at all. For better or for worse, millions of American men hold on to playground ethics long after they leave elementary school. For most of them, the 2004 election came down to a classic playground scene: Would John Kerry defend himself when attacked by bullies? Liberals, still stunned by the way a legitimate combat vet like Kerry was beaten by a combat-dodging spoiled brat like Bush, never understood that for millions of voters, the question wasn’t how well Kerry fought in Vietnam but whether he would fight in 2004.
A LOT of Alternet readers got stuck right there. One poster said they read the part about playground ethics and then refused to read the rest of the article. Although I have commented quite a bit on this thread (as kegbot1) I refrained from answering that poster but the problem is: Dolan is right.
Many, many, many American men do NOT evolve from the basic playground bullying stage and it doesn’t prevent them from becoming very prominent players in out society. And they vote AND they also influence the coverage of issues in the media.
So implying they are suckers and not backing down may indeed have a better long term effect than trying to play nice and reason with them.
And if nothing else, making your opinions heard on local politically neutral boards gets your message out rebutting the repugs as I did with the insufferable Joe Amschlinger here.
Silence is no longer an option when everything good and decent about our society and planet is under dire threat.
Now a lot of women readers also stopped and complained about that playground mentality analogy as well. I understand their objections but the vast majority of the shot callers on the right are male both in the media and in the political structure. There are only a few Ann Coulters (thank Goddess) and Laura Ingrahams. We have to deal with the world as it is, not always as we would wish it to be. Yes, testosterone gets us into these messes but it is exactly the testosterone that needs to be confronted.
I’m often reminded of the Woody Allen line in the one movie (I can’t remember it now) where his friends (like many of the posters on Alternet) kept telling Woody that Nazis need to be met with biting sarcasm and ridicule. Woody kept saying: no, no with Nazis you have to give them a punch in the face.
And that is it exactly - at least a rhetorical punch in the face.
Categories: Getting Personal · what's left of the left
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