Insanity

Yesterday I saw a man who had verbally assaulted me on the subway about a month ago. He was walking between lanes of traffic on a highway. He is tall and willowy. I believe he's dangerous. Most likely a paranoid schizophrenic with a long history of drug abuse. While I and my companion, to whom I was explaining my acquaintance with this character, were aware of him, drivers and other pedestrians paid no attention to his overtly bizarre antics as he walked in traffic. After noticing my notice of him, he snapped a rude gesture at me and then moved onto the sidewalk before moving off down the road. 

What kind of society are we? Thousands were milling around the city for usual Sunday events. Events, the new form of pretending you have a life, if you do not have a happy internal one. Many of these events were 'humanitarian' or educational in nature. Church services, a nationally hyped memorial holiday, lectures at museums. Yet, the invisibility of impoverished madness in traffic is acceptable, preferred. 

Where does the true insanity lie? Citizens loudly rally around politicians who rant against socialist programs, like mental health hospitals and halfway house programs for people like this wandering wraith. Taxes which pay for programs which would intervene in the lives of children of women with genetic mental illness are decried as nanny-state exorbitance. Ah, but there are no outcries about $50 baseball tickets or $100 concert tickets or $10 cocktails. 

Part of my practice as a retired psychiatric/hospice nurse is trying to live with the consciousness of the basic callousness of those who choose a materialistic life. This motivates my writing of this blog on many mornings, as I live on the streets of a city as materialistic as any on the planet. Friends have said, "Just ignore it. I do." But how much ignoring can a person do before the lights dim within his mind? Ignoring our relationships to one another, friends or strangers, is the very root of the insanity that plagues our relationships and our society.