James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 27, 2013
Reference:
There is a video slide slow circulating on the web, which shows how Argentina went from being competitive with the United States 100 years ago to its present indigent state, and how trying to tax its way into a healthy economy has failed.
Not surprising, there has been a lot of discussion on how that could happen to the United States, or why it could never happen here. Both discussions are of thoughtful people who care, and are expressing their honest concerns and/or views on the subject.
And yes, violence and gun control has surfaced as well as an adjunct to these discussions. Given this, and because I started this early in the morning, when my old mind is somewhat fresh, and as combative as it is likely to get all day, I let it rip, knowing it is only my point of view, and no other, but not knowing if it has any value to anyone else.
Asking the Right Question
Is the right question: how do we take guns -- in this case assault weapons -- out of the hands of Americans? I say that is the wrong question. The right question is why are so many Americans killing each other with guns?
It isn't the kind of weapon. It is what drives so many Americans to use this nonsensical act of violence to expiation their rage?
I've never owned a gun; never fired a gun until I was in the military, and then not very well. I am the exception. My son owns every conceivable kind of gun you can think of, and owns a piece of real estate in the wild where he likes to go off and fire his weapons, why, I don't have the foggiest notion. He never saw a gun at home, never heard me talk about guns, but there you are.
I don't care if Americans have five guns per individual. It is part of our persona. In New York State in the Revolutionary War, a squadron of British soldiers was dispatched to a country settlement to secure it for the British. All that returned were their horses.
This mentality, this violent DNA in our make up, has been part of the American spirit since the Pilgrims. Europeans, and yes, the Japanese, thought Americans were soft and too addicted to their comfort to be fighters. Americans were called "doughboys" in WWI as a derogatory sobriquet.
The Great Divide between Moral and Physical Courage
If you read on that war, or WWII, you'll see there are no better fighting men on the planet. I have read, perhaps you have as well because I know you are quite a reader, that ordinary farm boys discovered they "liked" war. It was like giving them permission to expatiate their demons by killing. This is not very health, and health is what I'm driving at.
My da was fighter, never knew a man he was afraid of, but he was not the same kind of fighter when it came to the vicissitudes of life, where dealing subtly with authority and creating a persona to best achieve his aims was outside the bounds of his courage.
Instead, he was a whimperer like many Irish of his class were, complaining and punishing his family with his angst but doing nothing in the workplace about it. This gave me the license to show the other side of the coin to life. I did it for all those years in work, and now I do it as a wordsmith.
Regarding nascent aggression, something I didn't know I had, I found delight, yes, delight is the correct word in hitting people on the football field, where I was given permission to display and exercise my demons in a socially acceptable way. It sometimes scared me because it felt so good, so delicious to crush someone with a tackle. Now that is sick, and I had enough sense to know it was sick, given my temper and my size when I was young.
It never occurred to me that I needed a gun, but I can imagine a person who is living in a personal hell who has access to guns as a young and immature person can go off the rails.
In my case, I always feared, and it almost happened when I was in the navy, that that same anger would get the best of me, that it would be expressed and expiated as it had on the football field, that I would destroy somebody with my hands. That is sick. I can say this now because I'm an old man, and can hurt no one because I have the strength of a baby.
Mental Health as a Palliative to a Sick Society
What am I driving at? Mental health.
We live in a very sick society, which gets sicker by the passing day. Politicians who seem to have their heads up their asses, and I'm talking about the president on down, think taking guns off the street will solve the problem.
It would appear that they think they can make us like Europe, jumping through hoops, like Europeans have always jumped through hoops throughout their history be those hoops the arsenal of war lords, kings, despots, renegade gangs or dictators.
We Americans are members of an experiment called democracy, and as one reader says, it is democracy that is in jeopardy, and I wonder how many people reading his words know that he is talking to them, a Canadian no less, someone outside their purview.
My BB tells me I dwell on the same things, ad infinitum, and she is correct. I do. Leaderless leadership is one topic I have beaten to death; MBAs is another. I suspect to the point that many don't take me seriously anymore.
I do so because our education is sick and getting sicker. A reader from another planet, China, wonders why I am so hard on MBAs. I never answered them because the "China miracle" is repeating just what has put us in the soup, and God help us if China becomes as violent as America.
Again, I refer to the Canadian's incredibly salient argument on the nature of Wall Street. He says they think, bundling securities, and reselling them is dealing with a "product," when there is no product except exchange of paper. Incredible!
Existing on a Diet of Wall Street “Products”
And for this these Wall Street brokers get million dollar bonuses, these best and the brightest, who are armed with MBAs instead medical or engineering degrees; these best and the brightest, who don't know Nietzsche from Nixon, and could care less, these best and the brightest, who think they are a success because they make the big bucks, while for me they are a terrible waste of talent, and therefore quintessential failures, and part of the disease of our Republic.
For years, and it is basic to my novel (A Green Island in a Black Sea), I was part of the army of Americans sent across the globe, ordinary sorts, innocent and gullible, who carried the religious capitalistic doctrine of the United States, which was to bleed their respective lands of their natural resources and give them pennies for attention, and expect them to be happy with the deal.
We were sent out into these far off places with no knowledge of the culture, unable to speak the languages, not interested in what interested the people, but still expected them to be interested in what interested we Americans. We expected them to envy us, and want to be like us. Alas, because of this warped perspective, we expected them to emulate us to the letter.
Why are we so surprised at their built up resentment, at their palpable hatred, at their pervasive animosity? I tell you why, because we are not listeners but tellers, not learners but knowers, narcissistic to a fault, and yet, in our self-ignorance, we are always surprised by their violent reaction. When you have nothing, and little prospects of gaining anything, you feel you have nothing to lose. When that becomes a punishing mindset, you are fair bait for demigods, and you are the most dangerous entity on the planet.
We don’t need police on school campuses
What does that have to do with my premise? Mental health.
We don't need policeman on our school campuses. We need mental health professionals that are schooled in seeing any signs of untowards behavior.
I've written much about "six silent killers" of passive behavior, which I have seen in many professionals that have come into the system, and many workers not designated professionals who come out of high school, or drop out of high school, and expect to be taken care of the way they were taken care of all their lives to that point.
We have a factory mentality, a compartmentalizing of everything, and we experience this from birth to death now, as children have to have all this attention of parents controlling their every minute, and then it goes on to the factory of education, a compartmentalizing of everything, and then it goes into the job or profession, a compartmentalizing of everything, and then we wake up one day and see we are old and we can't remember ever having had an original thought or ever thinking of taking an original step that wasn't dictated to us by another.
The incredible wonder to me, and yes I get a lot of criticism on my blog for this, is that this compartmentalizing of everything has been perfected to the nth degree with these handheld devices. These are the quintessential tools of the factory mentality as placebo effect, or indeed, as pacifier.
It is early in the morning, and I've gotten many many responses to this Argentina video slide show, and it only makes me aware of how complete our cultural programming has become. It isn't going to change because it isn't believed it has to change. Am I predicting Armageddon? I suspect it will all end one day with a whimper, not a bang.
Be always well,
Jim
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