The Globalization of Indifference

I don't like knocking on the doors of strangers, even if they are my neighbors, but I do. I do because I am worried about my country. I am worried about the future for my grand daughters. I am concerned... I cannot sleep very well when I think. Thinking has become a challenge.

I was born in 1956, 10 years after the second world war.  My father was part of that war. My grandfather made his fortune from that war. My mother, a pacifist by nature said, " What else could be done about Hitler?"

Life was cut and dried for my parents. They sent us to Catholic school, took us to church every Sunday and gave us a warm and loving home. They talked about 'when' we would go to college, not 'if'. As parents go, they get an A-. They were really into grades.

The minus is because they could not see into the future. They refused to bend when the 60's hit, and their 2 oldest kids entered a world which they were ill prepared to understand, much less navigate. Drugs are not the main cause of mental illness, it is far more complex than that. The 2 oldest are still mentally ill. I feel sad for my parents. I have 2 kids and every day I thank the universe that they are not mentally ill.

I ponder the question of mental illness continually. Nature, nurture, drugs, toxic chemicals, environmental pollution, existential sadness......so many factors in the soup of humanity.  I seek enlightenment, not so that I can become a guru, but so that I can outrun depression and mental illness.  It works,  I can say, yoga brings me to another level. I wish my older siblings had been able to find something to give them peace before the black dog of depression got its final firm intractable grip upon them, and they fell.

The current weird political scene brings the whole metal illness issue forward for me. I watch the machinations, the angry rationalizations, the caustic sound bites. It reminds me of the bad days when my sick siblings were verbalizing. I know sickness from close up. It is a manifestation of something buried deep inside a wounded person. The person does not know how much harm their sickness creates. The wounded person is too narcissistic to have a sense of the whole.

I wish it were possible to beg the world not to fall into the mental illness hole. "There it is". I might say. "Watch out, don't step there-  it is horrible and hard to come away from!" But words are only words. We live in a world of too many overblown, ubiquitous words.

When spring blossoms, the air warms, flowers bloom, I feel the benediction of nature. I thank the sun for browning my skin and sprouting my seeds. I take the children out to feel the world, the woodsy woods and the windy wind. What else can I do? And I still love words, believing they will untangle us from the tangle.