[su_dropcap]A[/su_dropcap] few weeks ago, I wrote an article, one I didn’t submit. I’d given it to my son to read. His response was: “You need to see a psychiatrist.”
No, I’m not depressed. I’m worried, anxious—about our planet, the future for my children and yours.
I read the other opinion pieces here, the writers who keyboard their desolation and then close with a sentence or two of hope, some ounce of inspiration. My article offered only tons of despair.
After my son suggest a psychiatrist, he added:
If this is the way you feel, this will have to be your last article. If there’s nothing anyone can do, then writing more articles is meaningless. Would you tell others to give up, that activism is a waste of time.? Black Lives Matter? Would you have told Martin Luther King, Jr. to give in to injustice?
Since my son is a bit of a prepper, I asked if he has any hope. He hesitated and then said, “Little.”
It’s not just endless war—the sheer horror of the slaughter US Empire exacts. It’s more. It’s oil seeping into our oceans. It’s radiation. It’s fracking. It’s factory farming. It’s what we inhale, absorb, ingest. This week, I saw new recommendations for colon cancer screening—colonoscopy at age 45 instead of 50. More and more young people, even teenagers, are being diagnosed with this disease. Is it diet? Is it a diet that’s marinated in pesticides?
Yesterday morning, my son called. “Check your email. I just sent something.”
I read aloud as he listened:
All the harbingers of collapse are visible: crumbling infrastructure; chronic underemployment and unemployment; the indiscriminate use of lethal force by police; political paralysis and stagnation; an economy built on the scaffolding of debt; nihilistic mass shootings in schools, universities, workplaces, malls, concert venues and movie theaters; opioid overdoses that kill some 64,000 people a year; an epidemic of suicides; unsustainable military expansion; gambling as a desperate tool of economic development and government revenue; the capture of power by a tiny, corrupt clique; censorship; the physical diminishing of public institutions ranging from schools and libraries to courts and medical facilities; the incessant bombardment by electronic hallucinations to divert us from the depressing sight that has become America and keep us trapped in illusions. We suffer the usual pathologies of impending death. I would be happy to be wrong. But I have seen this before. I know the warning signs. All I can say is get ready.
No attribution, but none was necessary. Immediately, I said, “Chris Hedges.” There should be a word that defines the identifiable hopelessness of Hedges.
Back now to my bleak essay—which I concluded with the following message to jihadists:
You’ve seen your friends and loved ones brutalized by war, your towns and cities rendered uninhabitable. You know the US and allies talk liberation, democracy, but only deliver carnage as they claim the resources of your country. You’ve turned your understandable rage outward, killing civilians, seizing the only power you have: creating fear. But do you really think that detonating an explosive, driving down a sidewalk and mowing down a crowd of civilians, stabbing men, women, children while you yell, “Allahu Akbar” will effect change? It won’t. Tragically for you and for all of us demanding peace and justice, the US will not end the bloody rampage.
Therefore, your violence will not accomplish anything for your cause. Sure, you might be hailed a martyr by those who believe as you do, but the savage machine of Empire and capitalism will continue its destruction of our planet until even those who benefit from greed, the filthy wealthiest, will be forced to move to higher ground, away from rising sea levels even as carcinogenic and neurotoxic pesticides follow them like a stalker.
Maybe I do need the care of a psychiatrist. Wonder if Hedges sees one.
[su_box title=”ABOUT THE AUTHOR” style=”bubbles” box_color=”#7978cc”] Missy Beattie has written for National Public Radio and Nashville Life Magazine. She was an instructor of memoirs writing at Johns Hopkins’ Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Baltimore. Email: missybeat@gmail.com [/su_box]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
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Things to ponder
While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.
Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
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1 comment
Glad to see you publishing Miss Beattie over here, I usually catch her observations over @ Counterpunch. My son grew up and left home over twenty years ago, within a few years had met a gorgeous girl and shortly thereafter got married; at that point I advised him against bringing children into this mess we call a world and predicted we were headed for a Mad Max world and that he should be prepared to live off the land, camp in the wild, exist as a nomad, all the worst case scenarios were not only in the cards but populating the deck, all slightly different advice than my father might have given me, but that is where we are now headed. 80 miles an hour into a brick wall ( which is how Helen Nearing solved her existential crisis, voluntarily, after watching Scott age out @ 99). Well, if Miss Beattie is old as I am getting now very rapidly, death is unavoidable. It always has been, that doesn’t bother me, the movie Lucky with Harold Dean Stanton has some sage advise on dealing, highly recommend it, and as much as I detest the cruelty and needless suffering inflicted on humanity by the vicissitudes of Capitalist exploitation it has been going on for centuries and whatever lessons we might have learned to stop it have been learned too late. Often death for the individual is a relief from the pain of suffering, the inevitable deterioration of self, I had to say goodbye to my mother, soon I will have to say goodbye to planet earth, what is the difference if we do it one at a time, or all at once. ? The very nature of a carnivorous animal kingdom is extreme cruelty to some, is life really all it is cracked up to be ? Here today gone tomorrow. Death always on the doorstep, showing up unexpectedly, uninvited, randomly inflicted. Would it make it better if I had a magic gun that like Roy Rogers I could roam the planet shooting and murdering every savage cruel Capitalist exploiter of humanity, would wanton revenge make us all feel better ? Would it make anything less inevitable. Life on this planet is a freak of nature, we in the 1% range of proximity to the sun that allowed life to evolve, always on the edge of extinction. Something that precarious can’t be presumed to be “eternal” to begin with, just some bullshit sold to us by our preachers.