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Economic Apartheid Kills

Joel Hirschhorn ^(2,872) United States

Joel Hirschhorn

http://www.delusionaldemocracy.com

Prisoners of Hope

Posted Monday, November 16, 2009 (4 days 14 hours ago.) Viewed 119 times.

Hope is a wonderful thing. How can we live with sanity in this seemingly crazy and inexplicable world without hope? More than ever, hope seems an absolute necessity. Considering all the advertisements for antidepressants, we cannot avoid thinking that if we lose all hope then serious depression may await us, with only an expensive prescription medicine to save us. Add overeating to a hopeless existence and killer obesity awaits us.

In so many ways, hope is constantly being sold to us. Endless advertisements for products solving our eating, mental and sexual problems offer us hope if only we will spend our money on them. Hope is for sale everywhere.

Politicians have always sold us hope also. In the annals of hope marketing surely President Obama will forever remain champion. In a way, he got a Nobel Prize for selling hope. He made millions of voters feel more than a little guilty if they rejected not him but rejected hope itself.

For huge numbers of people hit hard by the economic meltdown and facing hunger, homelessness, health crises and a very bleak future, hope stands between holding on to life and oblivion. They cannot afford to buy hope, like the rest of us, so they must find free hope that they can cling to, waiting for the storm to pass.

Now you see it. Don't you?

We have become prisoners of hope.

We are vulnerable. We are waiting for hope either to materialize more strongly, to get more of it, or hit the unthinkable, because so much of the time we need more of it.

We have become addicted to hope.

We are made to believe through multiple cultural forces that hope is all around us, waiting for us to buy just the right product, vote for just the right politician, watch just the right movie, wear just the right piece of clothing, visit just the right place, believe in just the right religion. In other words, if we just alter our behavior in just the right way, take just the right action, we can relax by achieving more hope.

Here is the dirty little secret: Hope is a fiction. Hope is never meant to materialize. Hope always remains a mental fiction of our own creation.

We are inexorably prisoners of hope.

To give up hope can only take us to despair. So, we keep ourselves imprisoned, ready and anxious to accept the next offer of hope. They I mean THEY know this truth. So, they keep creating new hope-things to sell us. Buy them, believe them, consume them. Keep hope alive.

There is no key to get out of this prison.

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Killing for God

Posted Monday, November 09, 2009 (11 days 15 hours ago.) Viewed 650 times.

The highly disturbing mass murder at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas reveals the obvious truth and some more obscure ones. Surely there is no surprise anymore when a person kills because of some religious conviction. This has gone on as long as humans have had religious beliefs of any kind, from the most primitive societies to the most advanced ones. What is more intriguing is what truths about the event are not so easily diagnosed and accepted.

The Muslim Army major and psychiatrist was protected from recognition and control by authorities because of two major attributes. It is abundantly evident that his belief about the wrongheadedness of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars was no secret. So too was his views about the disastrous impacts of the wars on other Muslims. The fact that he was himself a Muslim protected him, a kind of reverse racism that now is often part of American culture.

A 9/11 era of Muslim terrorists obviously made it difficult for his colleagues and superiors to face the facts, or at least carefully and deliberately examine his thinking, beliefs and behaviors more critically. He may have been a closet terrorist and murderer, but that was because the door to his closet was intentionally kept shut by a great many people fearful of being condemned themselves for picking on or attacking a Muslim.

Not only did his Muslim status protect him from legitimate examination, but it seems likely that it helped him obtain a promotion to major after only a short time after his extensive Army-paid educational activities when he actually performed professionally and before he served in the current battlegrounds. The latter would place him in a position where he could be contributing more directly to killing Muslims which is why he wanted out of the Army.

The fact that he was also a psychiatrist also protected him. Other medical doctors clearly refused to look closely at his psychological makeup, his rather unhealthy lifestyle (aside from his religious behavior), namely his anti-social characteristics. This was a man without extensive human relationships either in his professional or personal lives. Even his relationships with his patients seem clearly to have been both unusual at times and improper. He was one sick and lonely psychiatrist that clearly needed extensive therapy and counseling. How could the Army medical establishment not see all of this and take appropriate action?

Apparently the answer is that the Army has an enormous need for psychiatrists to provide care for an army of very mentally disturbed soldiers harmed by their war experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, so much mental illness among soldiers caused the Army to ignore the mental illness of one of their own psychiatrists.

If justice is to be honestly and deeply pursued, then a rather large number of Army officers should be held accountable for creating and maintaining a system that allowed the killer's Muslim and medical credentials to keep him safe from examination that could have prevented the massacre in Texas. The Army had invested a huge amount of taxpayer money in educating the killer and it apparently wanted a return on its investment. Killing US soldiers is the return they got.

And here is something for ordinary Americans to consider: The killer psychiatrist had a peculiar but not necessarily insane kind of logic. He could justify killing his fellow US soldiers as serving God just as easily as the US government has justified the killing of so many thousands of the same US soldiers in the two current wars, as well as Muslims. These two wars have nothing really to do with fighting an enemy that currently and truly threatens the US. What are President Obama and so many other elected government officials killing for? What an ugly and terrible truth to face.

Considering that the lonely Muslim psychiatrist killer openly stated that he was a Muslim first and an American second, he surely believed that killing soldiers for his God was preferable to US soldiers killing more Muslims for their government. That compulsion made him a terrorist but not insane, which means he should not get off from being executed for his crimes. Nor should the many Army officers get off from letting him get the opportunity to kill.

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Greed Conquers Guilt

Posted Tuesday, November 03, 2009 (17 days 16 hours ago.) Viewed 822 times.

What has devastated the US and global economy? The simplest explanation is unrestrained personal greed. People everywhere have had no reservations about abusing business practices, ethics, laws and cultural norms because all they cared about was amassing personal wealth. Most have also betrayed family members, friends, employers or clients. Greed is an ungodly sin that drives desires, ambitions and behavior. Greed pollutes civilization.

"I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself," said Ivan Boesky in his 1985 commencement speech at the University of California. He was sick, wrong and evil. Greed is our common enemy.

Governments have utterly failed to create and enforce laws that would prevent the disastrous impacts of unconstrained greed, whether it is in the financial world or anywhere else or among government workers that find ways to steal obscene amounts of money. Nor have religions controlled greed.

Is something missing in modern times? Yes. Strong feelings of guilt, before people commit their terrible deeds, before awful people are identified and found legally guilty. Emotional guilt must act as a deterrent to legal guilt. Guiltless greed has supplanted innocence among so many people that it rips the social fabric and brings down whole economies. Greed drives economic inequality. It pushes the middle class down into the lower class.

Once upon a time human beings were personally constrained because of strong feelings of guilt. Guilt served as the internal controlling mechanism for bad behavior or, better yet, just thoughts of behaving badly. In other words, guilt had preventive power. In better times guilt was a powerful force of negative feedback in peoples' lives. When guilty feelings go, so do shame and responsibility.

Something has clearly gone wrong in family, cultural, religious, business and education systems. In Greed We Trust has become an evil addiction guiding the lives of far too many people. They are not satisfied with a big piece of the pie. They want everything. When possessed by greed, no possessions are enough.

Seeking success within moral and legal boundaries has succumbed to unlimited self-centered selfishness. It is not enough for people to fulfill all their everyday needs and then some. They are compelled to become millionaires. Millionaires are self-propelled to become billionaires. Billionaires are self-driven to become bigger, higher ranked billionaires. Celebrities want to be even richer and more famous. Politicians want even more power and the considerable wealth that those outside government have. Corporate CEOs thirst for ever more money no matter how many perks and dollars they already receive. They want still more mansions and bigger yachts.

Modern greed has no limits. Culturally, greed is like a cosmic black hole that sucks in whatever it can conceive of. It has nothing to do with legitimate needs. It produces no remorse. It cares not about the pain it causes other people or about society. Greed is stronger than any drug addiction, any religion or moral value. Personally, greed is an emotional cancer. Among these sick people, it displaces any effective feelings of guilt. Guilt has no payoff as long as greed is repeatedly successful in delivering excessive wealth. Successful greed is so visible and in many quarters idolized that it keeps attracting more believers. Putting relatively few of these greed devils in prison does not seem to curb this trend.

"Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction," said Erich Fromm. This is what we must teach children. There is never enough for the greedy. When satisfaction is impossible, happiness is illusory.

It comes down to this: Either society through parents, teachers and religious leaders once again instills strong feelings of guilt for thoughts of greed, starting with children, or humankind continues sinking into oblivion. Self-imposed feelings of guilt must be seen as a virtue. Evil greed is an epidemic far more deadly than the flu. Generosity must replace greed; it is free of guilt.

Here's a great bumper sticker: Guilt Prevents Greed.

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What Physicians Know

Posted Sunday, November 01, 2009 (19 days 11 hours ago.) Viewed 1,778 times.

I had a long conversation with my favorite physician, who has operated on me twice successfully. He is an incredibly kind person without an ounce of greed or pretense. Like other physicians I have spoken to, he spoke eloquently about the terrible times he consistently has with private health insurance companies.

While he praises Medicare for its simplicity and certainty, he has absolutely nothing positive to say about private insurers. They take up huge amounts of time of him and his staff, trying in every possible way to deny services to their customers (his patients) and also to pay as little as possible to him. His endless struggles with the insurance companies make his life miserable. Meanwhile all he cares about is giving his patients the very best care and not making them suffer because of their insurance carriers.

Like so many of us he sees the need for major reforms of our health care system, but remains pessimistic about what Congress and President Obama will eventually deliver. He is incredulous at how executives of private insurers make vast amounts of money while making physicians and their patients suffer endless annoyances and negative impacts on health care. And they get away with making people pay more and more money for worse and worse insurance.

He also has many stories about patients that do not take medications for long term chronic conditions because they cannot afford prescriptions. He gives out as many samples that he can get, is angry that people in other nations pay much less for brand name drugs, and feels terrible for his patients because the health care system has let them down.

What would be the ideal solution to the current health care mess? My doctor believes that opening up Medicare to everyone would be wonderful, and the system could be opened up immediately. I totally agree. There is no sound reason for Congress to protect the private health insurance industry. But of course they always have and always will because it is the source of huge amounts of money for political campaigns.

While no one should be forced into Medicare, just making it available to all who want it would be fair. If private colleges compete with public ones, and private for profit hospitals compete with nonprofit ones, why shouldn't health insurance companies be put in a similar position?

Corruption blocks true and necessary health care reform. Remember that the next time you vote.

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