I have long believed that all of society could be looked at through the psychological perspective. And I think, at some point, one is able to diagnose one’s immediate social environment as lacking all the signs of mental health. In response to the ongoing Travon Martin controversy, I’ve been horrified by the willingness of our society to make this more complex than it actually is…This is a clear cut case of murder, and our legal system no longer responds to the community’s right-mindedness, and because of this we get people feeling an unreal conflict between their allegiance to ‘the law’ and their allegiance to good sense, and thus good sense gets weakened by ridiculous laws. Our society has an overdeveloped fetish for power, such that we ALMOST ALWAYS defend the perpetrator’s perspective. Bullies have taken over. Regardless of the racial implications, this is a clear-cut case of domination, and our society has grown attached to dominance as a primary virtue, and this is why I believe we have regressed to a primitive state.
I’ve added the image of Rick Santorum to this post to further my argument that the society has gone clinically insane. This man is so obviously crazy, and the fact that we treat him as a ‘public figure’ instead of asking him politely to go home, the fact that millions of people think of him as a leader, these facts must be looked at objectively, as evidence of a social condition, a condition of actual mental degradation. It would be easy to point to these two cases as places where action needs to be taken, but these are symptoms, mere symptoms of a disease so widespread that it affects the daily lives of all of us reasonably sane people on a daily basis. I fear that we are overrun by madness, and that the only sane response is to develop some sort of underground, where we can develop political principles that are strong enough to take into a public sphere, that can withstand the onslaught of uncivilized primates.
(Disclaimer – I have since posting learned that the Santorum quote is a satirical mix of real quotes and made-up ones, but I stand by the spirit of this post.)
(Double disclaimer – Oddly I have since learned that both of these stories are playing with the truth in ways that are deeply suspicious, that they hide motivations that cannot be parsed. I would like to retract this post, but I am leaving it to show my own capacity to get drawn into this propaganda machine, but I am not giving up on the hope of being vocal, of being involved…because when the good people of the world retreat from the public space, then horrors are inevitable.)
I found out that the image of Santorum is not a direct quote, but created by a satire site. I am not in favor of blurring reality like this…and perhaps it speaks to my inability to detect the satire…but in this case, i’m afraid I cannot be blamed…I stand behind my diagnosis.
as i watch the media and community get bogged down in discussions about sweatshirts, and gun laws, and Travon Martin’s school record, i realize that something else is happening here, and it ain’t a search for justice…i wrote this on facebook:
just don’t trust the media anymore, this whole Travon murder, the Kony 2012…it’s all getting so weird, that it’s hard to get a handle on what is true…and i think that is kind of the point…i think there is something to be gained, by people other than ourselves, by these emotional exchanges, about things that ought to be handled by local authorities, without constantly having to have ourselves arrested for protesting…the whole thing stinks from top to bottom…underneath all of it there is something racial, and i find this disturbing since this has historically been used to divide the poor so that they cannot resist the excesses of the rich…