Aug 22 2007
AMERICANS ARE IN PAIN
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By Carolyn Baker
8/22/07
Originally published at Speaking Truth to Power
Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the making of action in spite of fear; the moving out against the resistance engendered by fear into the unknown and into the future.
~ M.Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled~
Yesterday’s news brought forth the not-surprising revelation that the use of pain medicine in the United States has nearly doubled in the last ten years. Various rationalizations abound-the baby boomers are aging, and there are more of us, and well-you know the song and dance that basically attributes the use of pain killers to the hoards of graying flower children who wish they were feeling groovy instead of arthritic. Not far behind is the rationalization that whereas physicians two decades ago used to inform patients that pain was part of the healing process, they are no longer doing so and are prescribing pain relievers instead. According to an Associated Press story on August 20, “Hydrocodone use increased 217 percent; morphine distribution went up 180 percent; even meperidine, most commonly sold as Demerol, jumped 20 percent” during the past decade.
And of course, the pain is not just physical. One in ten women takes an antidepressant, and the use of psychiatric drugs among children has soared to unprecedented heights. Juxtaposed with the ever-new potpourri of such drugs available to us, is a decrease in the availability of mental health coverage in employee health benefit packages. If such coverage exists, it is most likely limited to a paltry twelve sessions per year with multiple “engraved invitations” from insurance companies and employers to not use or cease using those benefits.
Viewed from other nations around the world, Americans have no reason to be in pain. We have it all; we are the fat cats of the planet, drowning in “stuff” and feeling no pain whatsoever about the teeming millions of people on the planet who live on two dollars a day and have a life expectancy of forty if they’re lucky. Our whining, entitled sniveling is repugnant to the majority of the planet’s inhabitants, so why don’t we just suck it up and get over it?
For me, the fact that Americans are in pain is not wisely or effectively addressed either by wallowing in our pain or by scoffing at it. Here is where two opposite truths are equally valid. We are in pain-horrible emotional and spiritual angst, AND what is stopping us from looking at what have we done to create the conditions that now torture us and leave us tossing and turning in our Select Comfort air beds? What seductions did we settle for decades ago-or yesterday, that have brought us to the pain we now experience? How are the choices of more recent years that we have blindly condoned because we were so busy being snookered into using our houses as ATM machines that we couldn’t look truthfully at the regime hoodwinking us into the Iraq War-how are those choices impacting our daily lives emotionally, spiritually, and yes, physically as our bodies silently seethe with the horrors of war crimes that our government has perpetrated on the innocent? Just because the carnage is not aired nightly on prime-time TV as it was during the Vietnam Era does not mean that something in the collective unconscious of Americans and all earthlings is not writhing in a kind of mass PTSD, an assertion which Pablo Ouziel brilliantly articulates in “Iraq, The Unavoidable Global Trauma.”
The American dream has become the American nightmare of debt, stolen pensions, the inability to retire securely, the poisoning of food, water, air, energy depletion, inflation, healthcare so poor that doesn’t even deserve to be called by that name, media and educational systems functioning only to dumb-down the masses. Every institution in American society serves one purpose and one purpose only: to protect the wealthy and to numb and sedate everyone else.
Like pre-World War II Germans who refused to investigate what was actually going on within their country and across Europe as a result of Hitler’s atrocities, our “innocence” is killing us-eating away at our insides and our emotional well being. We are in pain.
As Americans find themselves mired in ghastly swamps of debt, foreclosure, unemployment, and the crumbling of every institution in American society-as they tell themselves that this is just a blip on the radar screen and that if they just work harder, get a better job, cut back here and there, move to the Sun Belt, or postpone having a child, everything will be just fine. We are in pain.
As governments rattle sabers, spend unprecedented amounts for weapons of mass destruction, and as our rulers declare with straight faces that we can and must carry out first-strike nuclear attacks on anyone who rattles more loudly than we do, images of mushroom clouds quietly form in places within the psyche that we do not let ourselves know about, and we eat more, drink more, exercise more, fornicate more, work more, gamble more, clean more, smoke more, and shop more. We are in pain.
And of course, American readers of these words would want to know immediately “what to do about it.” But as an historian, I keep repeating that until you understand how you arrived at where you are, you won’t be able to proceed elsewhere. The “doing obsession” is yet another addiction which we would do well to recover from as quickly as possible. As I stated clearly in my article written a few weeks ago entitled “What to Do? What To Do?” the first step in our recovery is being willing to be, yes BE with the pain we are feeling or sense is impairing our health and wellness.
One of the best “prescriptions” I’ve run across is that which Sally Erickson, producer of “What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire” states in her blog “Depression Is a White Peoples’ Disease”:
It’s the disease the civilized have learned to contract in the face of feelings we are afraid to feel. So we don’t. We depress the real, legitimate feelings of sadness and grief, anger and outrage, fear and loneliness. And yet, these feelings are natural, healthy responses to our current human and planetary predicament. When we do not identify and express, and instead “depress,” these feelings, the end result is the emotional fog and lethargy that people routinely label “depression.”
Erickson recounts her experience of producing with Tim Bennett their extraordinary documentary and the overload she felt as a result of trying to assimilate voluminous information regarding energy depletion, climate change, population overshoot, and die-off and the depression into which she sometimes slipped-and her discovery that talking with trusted others about her feelings was her best medicine. “Piece by piece,” she says, “Tim and I work our way through the myriad of emotions that come with staring down the world situation. As we dig into ourselves, always beneath what might have been termed ‘depression,’ we find feelings. We discover that when we identify and express those feelings, the emotional grey goo of depression eventually dissipates. And along the way we discover strong and courageous parts of ourselves that have been dormant.”
I would not pretend to claim that simply talking about one’s feelings will cure insomnia, depression, or the body’s aches and pains, but I do not hesitate to suggest that some or much of our pain could be alleviated by owning what is so and talking about that with all who will listen and validate us.
Perhaps the most predominant emotion Americans experience is fear-fear greatly fostered by our government and its propagandistic obsession with “the war on terror.” Without consciously realizing it, many Americans are walking around terrified of something that may never happen. We live our lives with comforts incomparable with the day-to-day existence of most of the world’s population. For the most part we have clean water to drink, food to eat, and shelter to live in. While violence, assault, rape, and robbery are prevalent in many parts of our nation, they are not institutionalized as they are in some countries. Compared with most societies on earth, we live a relatively safe existence, yet we walk around in terror. Perhaps it really isn’t terrorism that we fear, but rather that some part of us knows that dozens of species have gone extinct while we’ve been reading this article, that all of our cherished institutions along with our infrastructure are crumbling, that polar ice caps are melting, and sea levels are rising, that the war in Iraq and the so-called war on terror will never end in our lifetimes, that our children’s futures are fraught with landmines of debt, pollution, violence, and nuclear madness.
In my opinion, the most sane and rational act under these circumstances is talking in detail with our friends and loved ones about our feelings and experiencing that while that doesn’t “solve” the problems, it releases enormous energy that we were investing in denial and numbness and empowers us to explore and choose our options. Yes, we all know people who refuse to go where anyone who has read this far must certainly have already gone. We can and do feel compassion for them, yet there are those who will listen. So find them-and talk-and listen because we are all in pain, and deep listening and truth-telling are our best medicine.
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It would appear that these statistics are greatly distorted. Doctors and Pain Management Clinics are literally being forced to close their doors due to the politically correct policies of the D.E.A. in some states, while other physicians (like mine) have no choice but to move to another state in order to practice their life saving skills.
Since it is now well known that some government entities are heavily involved in the illegal drug trade the decision was made to go after doctors and pain patients in the farcical “war on drugs.” Average, decent Americans are being targeted by the D.E.A. if they require pain medication to survive and carry on some semblence of a normal life. This is ludicrous and insane, yet, it is happening and most Americans are none the wiser unless they are placed in this very precarious situation. Cancer patients are some of the worst sufferers some being left with no physician authorized to prescribe pain medication. Many succumb to depression due to the physical pain and eventually commit suicide. But, hey, lets make damn sure they aren’t addicted to a drug before they die even if that means they could die in peace.
I know, because I’ve suffered with chronic pain for over 20 years. And I can assure you that no doctor is prescribing me the addictive drugs mentioned in this article, at least not today. My story is rather unique because my pain is considered “invisible” by the medical community. Although I have managed to rise above my physical problem and get on with life the medical community provided very little in support both emotionally or physically. In the end, one’s medical fate is a personal choice to either live in a solution or die with the problem.
This same philosophy should be applied to America’s politically correct policies, that are suffocating the country and gagging the population. Other than family and a few friends, whom should we be talking to about the realities of today? Probably no one and I would even be cautious of people that do know me considering that the government is urging us to spy on each other. Even my family disagrees with me on what the real truth is. Some of us can see it staring us down plain as the nose on our face, while others see something else entirely different. The various interpretations of the truth and the reality of present day America is as challenging to understand as is religious diversity. There lies the root of the pain for most Americans. Some days I want to walk out of the house and scream to anyone who will listen to “wake the hell up.” I am always asking myself why people cannot see and understand what I have come know as absolute truth. Are they psychologically that blind or just ignorant, or worse, do not want to know the truth at all? That is an even scarier thought.
“The American dream has become the American nightmare of debt, stolen pensions, the inability to retire securely, the poisoning of food, water, air, energy depletion, inflation, healthcare so poor that doesn’t even deserve to be called by that name, media and educational systems functioning only to dumb-down the masses. Every institution in American society serves one purpose and one purpose only: to protect the wealthy and to numb and sedate everyone else.”
Beautifully put.
P.S. People are getting hooked on “Oxy cotton”, and other drugs because the society is collectively miserable, and living in denial. White people tend to not like to go visit the streets for drugs. All they need to do is find someone with a little sciatica induced back pain, or someone who gets a tooth pulled, and it’s party time. The doctors are ramming these drugs down throats, and people are popping them like Pez, plus they are legal, hence “not bad”. I’m sure the only tolerable way to TRULY enjoy American Idol is to be high on Percocet anyway.
Of course there are those out there who have real pain and need medication, but teenagers swallow a couple of these pills before they drink a beer now. These prescription drugs are in fashion, and very valuable on the street.
A very good, eloquently written commentary by Ms Baker.
However, who owns and operates the mass media, Wall Street, and in charge of America’s foreign policies that have devastated the world?
Maybe finding the source of the numerous and overwhelming problems in the US and calling them out is a good start to maybe find a way to change course and rearrange the discourse instead of waiting around for the utter and total devastation of the coming Collapse.
After the filth murdered the Wellstones, I knew that we were under a Nazi regime and that soon we would all be dead. At that point I just assumed I was dead, like any experienced combat soldier. I put signs in my car windows that say “Bush ordered 911″ or “Republicans Return to Their Own Vomit”, etc. Since I live in Wyoming, I figured that I would be murdered in short order, but so far I’m fine, after 4 years of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. If you put good hateful signs in your windows, you outflank the crook media, and cell phones often do the rest.
The only way to counter demoralization, which is the stock and trade of the filth, is to cultivate a black and intelligent hatred. Anger is an exhausting weakness and just an expression of demoralization. But, hatred is an instinctual reaction to those who would like to kill you. Republicans are full of hatred because they know that liberals would like to revoke their license to steal. That is why they don’t have to think except in terms of slogans.
The world has a minority of crooks and their suckers. The rest of the world just a bunch of lazy cowards. If you don’t overcome your physical cowardice now, you may have to be equally cowardly inside a concentration camp.