Friends,
We have been blessed with lives in interesting times. Of course our
hearts and prayers go out to our Texas and Louisiana friends that have been
devastated by nature today.
Our hearts also go out to the poor who experience 4Xs the physical
and mental disease, shortened lives, more divorce and problems with their
children (a parents greatest pain), and recently expanded ranks due to
economic and social policies.
Our hearts go out to the middle class which has shrunk because of
America’s new philosophy and policies and because of hidden taxes (5.6%
inflation, 7% unemployment, international job outsourcing, increased
pollution and related health and environmental management costs-spillage in
economic terms, desertion of state programs by the Feds and cost shifting to
states that must pick up the services and spillage, etc.). We have never
been taxed so profusely and in such insidious ways and it is crushing the
middle class. Open boarders, free trade, international banking, Turing a
blind eye to sweat shop products to satisfy hedonism at the price counter,
bizarre religiosity that looks more like corporatism and big shows with
zealotism rather than Christ like, Buddha like, Mohammed like, Godlike
thinking, and hawkish mentalities and military worship have become our
identity and value system in the New America that redefines every concept to
our own advantage rather than maintains an allegiance to reality.
We allow Governments to spy, torture, move around and between laws
with the thinnest of logic and rational. We justify preemptive wars,
cruelty, theft of property, lieing and manipulating as “necessary for
security and patriotism”. These non-sequiturs are tolerated and get by as
the public marches on like lemming to the sea.
Our hearts go out to the pigs that become the best analogy (putting
lipstick on a pig-meaning dressing up an ugly thing and making it
distractingly pretty on the surface and still and ugly animal at depth) for
our thinking and style of approach to problems.
We sell drugs like we’re all dealers. I just wrote a paper on the
trends in prescription of psychoactive and pain drugs and the electron
microscope studies as to how they mutate CNS cells (dramatically-and
probably really the cause of their positive, as well as negative
effects-interruption of cell function and DNA expression). Yet we sit
around and allow our TVs to be inundated with drug salesmen and women, our
physicians to go largely unsupervised as the over medicate as much as 40% of
America and have no regulation or responsibility to get them to
practitioners who will take a real interest in them and will help them “grow
new neural connections with repeated and focused interaction and learning”.
We sit by as 1-2 out of 10 are addicted by drug dealers on the street and in
the healthcare system and 1 out of three or our school children are drugged.
We sit by while hospitals, primary care centers, nursing facilities, and
residential care centers don’t even have requirements to have psychologists
and realistic non-drug approaches available or in leadership in programs
that can actually change the brain in positive ways. We complacently watch
our healthcare system and the corporate drug system feed our population’s
brains and future for something as transient and superficial as “money”. We
help them put Lipstick on a Pig by ignoring science, adopting palliative
rather than curative approaches, and let them off the hook with diseases and
their treatment that have behavioral and lifestyle origins and major
influences.
My friends, the lipstick is on us! We look in the mirror and see
the lipstick and don’t look further into our apathy, passivity, lack of
dedication to rationality and science, and failure to care about what is
invading our TVs, Schools, Economic Systems, Workforce, our laws eroding,
our values being modified in prurient directions, and our children
inheriting debt, world disdain, and loss of character and ethical fiber. We
leave the next generation confused, more passive, more tolerant of the
intolerable, and more ready to accept the fate of the lemming.
We live in interesting times! However, when I start to think about
the hurdles and challenges that psychology must face, I remember these
things and rejoice that our problems pale in the face of America’s overall
challenges!
By Jerry Morris, Jr,
Psy.D., MBA, MS(Pharm), ABPP, NCSP, NBCC, CCM
Clinical Psychologist
Board Certified Family Psychologist
Board Certified Counselor
Board Certified Case Manager
Board Certified School Psychologist
Certified Addictions, National College of Psychology, APA