Schizophrenia what we call several brain disorders that distort reality. Sometimes people see hallucinations or hear voices that tell them what to do--and sometimes these actions are destructive to the schizophrenia sufferer and the people around them.
The word "schizophrenia" comes from the Greek and literally means “split-mind.” It’s what happens when a mind is at war with itself. Schizophrenics, without treatment, are sometimes forced by their disease to act against their own self-interest.
We are familiar with thinking about conditions like schizophrenia as they apply to individuals--the mental health field is a real growth industry. If you haven’t been in therapy--probably for something less severe than schizophrenia--you know someone who has been.
There are ways to treat schizophrenia, to manage it, to cope.
But what do you do when your culture has become schizophrenic? How do you treat an entire nation at war with itself?
I make no bones about my staunch support of liberal democratic ideas. Some of you spit the word “liberal” as if it were a libel, but I take it at face value. Liberal comes from the Latin liber, meaning free (man).
In my book, to be a liberal is to be an advocate of freedom. It is to protect freedom from those that would infringe upon it: large corporations; religious demagogues; social engineers.
I consider myself at war, albeit a civil war, with all of you. If you defend nutty religious positions, if you are in favor of corporate protectionism, if you believe we can standardize test our way into the future, then I oppose you in every way.
You are wrong, and you are doing harm to those you purport to help.
Fortunately, your numbers are small. You are well trained, and you have loud and often shrill voices, but you are few and weak at the core.
You are easily combatted. But you, unfortunately, are not the problem.
The problem is the rest of us--the average Joe, the average Jane. The people without a rigid ideology have become embroiled in ideological squabbles we care very little about. We have listened to the voices--on T.V., on the radio, on the internet.
The people who take life as it comes, who don’t presume to know how to make a better human being, have been seduced by the voices.
For the most part we just want to go to work, enjoy our friends, and raise a family. If we have a job and are treated fairly we are essentially contented with the big fiscal questions of debt and taxes, eternal salvation, and educational theories.
And we are the vast majority of us.
But we are divided against ourselves. The disease of schizophrenia is upon us, and there is no national prescription, no Zyprexa dosage that will protect us from the damage we are doing to ourselves.
Unemployment is killing us. The shrinking middle class is destroying democracy. Rapid depletion of natural resources is dimming our future. Attempts to reinvent the wheel as a collaborative set of culturally relativistic ovals have only succeeded in getting us stuck in the mud.
But still we are compelled to act against our own self-interest. We cut off our noses to spite our faces because the voices tell us to.
Today in Washington the voices are working earnestly at our self-destruction. The stupid, ham-fisted debt ceiling debate rages on, and on.
With a little luck, however, the rest of us will come to our senses and convince our representatives to do what is practical, not what is pure.
There’s no Zyprexa for America, but maybe a dose of reality will do the trick.
Let’s toss out the ideologues and get back to the ugly messiness of compromise--our freedom depends on it.
Is there any way to bring the American Left and American Right together?
source: missionviejo.patch
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