“Chains” of Mental Illness, or the “Enslavement” of Gun Control?

17 December 2012

In “You keep saying semi-automatic…,” Ken Wheaton speaks to the mental-health aspect of contemporary American massacres, rather than to the aspect of weapons control.

Writes Mr. Wheaton:

“Me? I find myself not interested in arguing about guns. My mind’s kind of full=up with the sort of person, the sort of brain capable of committing such an act.”

Mr. Wheaton raises what seems to be a point more-important than what sort of guns mass murderers use, and how they get them.
____________________

A compelling issue in Mr. Wheaton’s “gun control” or “mental health” question is the following:

The side of our political divide that is most-averse to controlling weapons is also the side most-averse to implementing a substantive safety net for issues of mental health.
____________________

It also happens to be the side that takes least seriously the ramifications of the “touchy-feely” aspects of contemporary life:

That side’s loudest-expressed attitude toward such issues as “what sort of person” finds reverberation in the attitude that, as long as we have enough guns, we can handle the “sort of brain” that keeps coming into America’s schools and businesses and homes, and opening fire.
____________________

These sorts of persons and brains open up fire, not for criminal gains, but for freedom from whatever chains enslave them.

Meanwhile, those on the “gun control” side see less of a distinction in the different forms of “chains,” whether of mental illness, of bad parenting, or of gun-control laws.
____________________

The point about weapons-ignorance/gun-control versus mental health is sound.

But another good starting point seems to be the way that the different issues seem to align in sets along the opposing sides of our national, political divide.

Regards,
(($; -)}
Gozo!

@GozoTweets

__________
This essay was originally posted as a comment at:
THE WORD O’ WHEATON

Unexamined Capitalism Will Not Serve Us Well

13 December 2012

In response to a comment on a Bloomberg View article, “Romney’s Bain Yielded Private Gains, Socialized Losses,” Online Gym writes:

“Gozo I sort of agree Capitalism remains the most-effective economic model....And yes our capitalist model is flawed. But it takes decades to get it correct....It’s almost like we need to slow down and review our growth and correct what needs to be corrected....”

____________________

This is exactly right: being that capitalism is a human “invention,” of course it has flaws. Perfection is always the pinnacle to which we aspire, not one on which it is given to us to stand.

Given that we exist in a universe cycle of perpetual motion, of perpetual ebb and flow—of perpetual energy and entropy (as described in Newton’s laws)—the Perfect is near-certain to exceed our grasp.

This cycle provides the only canvas available for our great works. Which means that, often, “we need to slow down and review our growth and correct what needs to be corrected.”
____________________

The way I see it, the Conservative mind-set is particularly averse to taking the wrong steps, in fear of making new mistakes. The hazards of “unintended consequences” seems to come quickly to the Conservative mind and lips.

That’s a good thing: the impulsive Progressives need someone to help slow them up. To keep them from rushing willy-nilly over the cliff.

But, then society as a whole needs the progressive risk-takers, such the Wright brothers, who take that cliff-leap and lead us eventually to flying around the world, seven miles up, at a thousand miles an hour.
____________________

The “slow down and review” process began in earnest with the election of Ronald Reagan as President.

Under his guidance, sure, our debt grew to frightening heights. But things also got brought back down to Earth.

America took a breath, a pause, following the heady epoch from the Great Depression to the declines of the Vietnam War and the Great Society.

But it’s now thirty-two years on. This Conservative pull-back has hampered us with ideology that, the more its elements fail, the more its adherents want to double down.
___________________

We need to take a clearer look at capitalism, and how it really works.

First of all, we ought to go read the book, to see how Adam Smith characterizes collaboration as the key element, rather than this thing about “competition” and “greed,” which are essentially side-effects.
___________________

I think it’s a crime that we don’t teach such essential things in our schools. I believe we waste a tremendous learning and growth opportunity in our educational system, by not recognizing the demographic changes of the last century.

American kids no longer grow up in single-earner homes, where they learn our culture’s habits and values there. Instead, our kids learn from television and the Internet and the streets. It’s no longer enough to teach them history and math/science.

We need to teach them how to manage their economic lives. And how to manage our political society as a whole.
___________________

My personal, big question is, “How do we get there from here, when the Right is so-blindingly focused on winning the tug-of-war between sides, that we have impasse at every turn?”

Unfortunately, I haven’t a clue. And so I keep coming around to places like this, getting up on my soapbox, and hoping that I can finally manage to spy something, from perched on the soapbox’s modest height.

Regards,
(($; -)}
Gozo!

@GozoTweets

____________________
Read the originating discussion at:

Romney’s Bain Yielded Private Gains, Socialized Losses

IF GOZO TWEETED: Tweet #0022

16 November 2012

__________

“I voted for socialism, and all I got was Obama.”

—posted by Jack Arnott on Slate(comment to William Saletan, “The Real Romney,” 11/15/2012)

__________

Regards,
(($; -)}}
Gozo!

@GozoTweets

The Republican Party of Projection Needs a New Bulb for its Projector:

12 November 2012

Republican Ideology, as currently configured, has stood up to be tested over the past thirty-two years.

It has failed miserably.

____________________

The Apparent Cause of Republican failure is projection.

Most of what the Right perceives in the Left is actually its own reflection.

___________________

Best Case in Point: the Romney campaign disbelieved Obama-leaning poll numbers because the Republicans thought that the Democrats were skewing the numbers.

Instead, it was the Romney campaign doing the skewing. And thus were their errors worsened, and their trend toward loss made stronger.

____________________

Likewise, This Conservative Ideology—that the Democrats are the party of entitlement. Those of us on the outside of the whole thing see how much it is the Right that wallows in its sense of entitlement.

Such as wondering how they could have possibly lost the election, when their policies and practices led America into the mess, and then they scared much of the American electorate away.

____________________

Karl Rove Accuses the Democrats of winning the election by scaring voters off of the Republican Party. We on the outside see this as ridiculous, of course: the Republican policies and principles are their own  policies and principles. Though some elements are often projected on others, yet do they often state these other ideological elements themselves.

And who more than Karl Rove has thrived, politically, on the promulgation of fear?

The whole ideology of the Republican Party is based on fear—gun-bearing thuggery; misogyny; aliens; welfare abuse; voter fraud; wealth-ravaging inflation; me-first healthcare access; other languages, other faiths, and other cultures—here in “the home of the brave.”

____________________

To “Blame the Messenger”—who helps communicate the anti-immigrant, anti-choice, anti-voting, anti-poor Right Wing planks—exemplifies the Republican culture of entitlement.

And of projection.

Regards,
(($; -)}
Gozo!

@GozoTweets

Capitalist Quote of the Day

from THE WEALTH OF NATIONS, with formatting by Gozo:

Merchants and Manufacturers Complain of High Wages

Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much

of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price,

and thereby lessening the sale of their goods,

at home and abroad.

They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits.
They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains.

They complain only of those of other people.

—Adam Smith, “Of the Profits of Stock,”The Wealth of Nations (Book 1, Ch. 9, Par. 24)

Regards,

(($; -)
Gozo!

@GozoTweets

American “Entitlement” or “Self-Made” in America:

We Americans—Right, Left, or Center—harbor a sense of entitlement: we feel entitled to a share of the sum total of what “we, the people” have built together over the past 216 years. But the Right’s sense of entitlement is unusual:

The Right would have us believe that what makes America great is something that just lies here. As if our condition of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” were something that we just find here, lying on the ground, free for us to pick up and use, to enrich ourselves independent of anything that anyone else contributes around us.

Of course, this is foolishness: the idea that any of us manage to create our great wealth entirely by the sweat of our own brow is absurd.

America’s greatness derives from what we have cobbled together here, and from how we maintain it. Our greatness also derives from the extent that we continue making  access to the resources of America available to all, so that any among us may realize the American Dream.

The following reaction to the Republican candidates’ speeches at last week’s political convention was posted to a “Comments” page of  The Washington Post. Absent our ability to contact the author for permission, it is posted in its entirety.
____________________

Another Warmly Human Person and Self-Made Businessman:

by Bill Weston (8/31/2012 5:22 PM CDT)

My mother and father loved me too. Unfortunately, they couldn’t raise me with the absence of insecurity Romney enjoyed because I was a Depression baby.

At first my father, a “catcher” on a steel rolling mill, kept us going by often working 16 hours straight, but he was injured when a runaway strip of hot steel cooked a stripe on his back (there was no Republican-despised OSHA in the early Thirties).

Then the mill was shut down, and he worked at odd jobs; my mother took in laundry. A furniture merchant brought the sheriff to repossess our furniture, as if we were conservative gun-lovers, but all that happened was that my mother cried.

We didn’t lose our house because Roosevelt’s WPA gave my father steady work at $48 a month. Then World War II opened the steel mill with jobs.

But catching up with debt is slow, and conservative-despised Social Security couldn’t pay for me as it did for Paul Ryan until he was 18 years old.

So when I was twelve, I began working every other evening 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. at a drug store as a dish washer, furnace stoker, prescription drug deliverer, soda jerk, sweeper and mopper. I shed no Boehner tears about that, and until I retired at 63, I was never unemployed.

At sixteen, I had to leave high school to work at a bank, where I rose from check sorter to bookkeeper to the city’s youngest teller. After three years, I quit to make $60 a month more as a laborer in the steel mill. I hated every workday, so I was not sorry the Korean War drew me into the Air Force for four years. I learned a lot, especially on Guam’s bomber base, where I served as a Staff Sergeant and Special Assistant to a Group Commander. 

Then I entered the University of Illinois with $110 a month from the GI Bill, $36 a month for Air Force Reserve service and pay for working 20 hours a week.

In 2 ½ years, I was graduated as the top student in my class. With my journalism degree I got a position as a copywriter for large accounts at a large agency. After five years, I was writing both print ads and high-budget television commercials, which I also produced.

After 18 years, I had won 500 international awards and held the unusual position of Sr. VP, Account Director & Creative Director for several large accounts. Even so, I continued writing and producing television commercials, corporate films and multi-media presentations.

To do more of that I started my own communications company, which I headed as President and Chief Creative Officer. Then I was lured to one of America’s top five ad agencies by the position of VP/Associate Creative Director for Marlboro cigarettes. And until my retirement, I held that position for several other large accounts such as McDonald’s. 

What I didn’t do was consider my rise from the working class, the way Romney and Ryan do as they strive to deceive the middle class, a top qualification to be president or vice president. 

Should they? Should you?

____________________ 

 The above essay is taken in full from the “comments” pages of Conservative Washington Post columnist, Kathleen Parker’s essay, “Romney and Ryan, Running Against Themselves,” following last week’s Republican convention in Florida.

Regards,
(($; -)}
Gozo!

@GozoTweets

IF GOZO TWEETED: Tweet #0014

01 MAY 2012

__________

WHO SAID IT? “No sacrifice at the expense of someone else is too-great a cost for a Conservative American in service of his ideology.”

__________

Regards,
(($; -)}
Gozo!

@GozoTweets