CRIMINALITY AND INSANITY.

Organized homelessness in Los Angeles: A concentration camp without walls. 

Information technology has turned American society into one horrible football stadium. Social media and the digital press have made their money by promoting this Thunderdome society, based in simplistic polar thinking and narcissism. This is making the public stupid and reactionary, just like the politicians who make a living by doing nothing in Washington.

Debating the causes of mass shootings is a symptom of mass insanity. The shooters are invariably untreated crazy people raised in violence, just like the jihadis in ISIS and the rioters in Antifa. In the aftermath of violence, those who could have intervened now get a free pass for not doing so. This includes police, psychologists, teachers and family members. 

Looking for somewhere to point the finger? There you have it. It is time that those who do not tend to their own crazy neighbors and relations are held accountable. Only then will the authorities no longer be able to pass the buck. The problem with a society where everyone is considered a victim is the absence of any adults to actually prevent mayhem. 

A stunning example in media recently is the dousing of passive police officers with water buckets by street thugs in New York and elsewhere. What does this say about the people in uniform who are charged with maintaining public safety? What does it say about attorneys and politicians who have sided with criminals and illegal aliens against those charged with maintaining public safety? Are they compassionate or cowardly?

I come by my indignation on this subject honestly. I chose to work in a state hospital when I graduated from nursing school for several reasons. First, as an out gay man, I had encountered the torture inflicted by that system on working-class homosexuals from an earlier time in America. Shock treatments and lobotomies were used to castrate and neutralize homosexuals. I met some of these true victims during my training. 

I was also motivated to work in the state hospital because it covered my own home town, a blue-collar place where mental illness often went ignored until some disastrous occurrence made it unavoidable. I had been violently attacked by one mentally disturbed peer, the product of an alcoholic home. A severely delayed boy in my neighborhood went untreated. He became the object of the worst bullying. My own father functioned with bipolar disease without professional help until he was faced with any serious emotional challenges.

As much as I detested what the state hospitals had done to homosexuals, I knew they were an asset to society. Rather than tear them down, as politicians eventually managed to do, I committed myself to work in the system to improve it. I think I did in the short time I worked there. But it became clear to me that the government was determined to deprive the citizens of that asset. Sanctimonious President Carter, on the urging of his disillusioned wife, a former nurse, set the wheels in motion to destroy state public health systems rather than renovate them. 

Politicians, the predecessors of the current gang of loudmouthed phonies, took full advantage. State institutions, built on huge swaths of public land based on the 19th century concept of providing a pastoral and healing environment for the mentally ill, were fat geese for the politicians to slaughter. Not only did they gain back the revenue that went to sparsely maintaining these institutions, but they also got to throw them into timely land grabs for development. One of the most ancient of graft sources in politics.

So, here we are in 2019. State residential health care is restricted now to those who have already been violent enough to be arrested and charged with a serious crime. Truly preventative mental health care has been eliminated from the public health systems and from private health insurance. A new generation of psychiatrists have been trained to use pills to avoid getting their hands dirty with actual patient contact. Governments and the media have colluded to please the Pharma Industry which pays them well to do so.

But insanity has flourished despite the denial of its existence. Hundreds of thousand homeless Americans live on the streets. Most of these would have inhabited the residential treatment centers (state hospitals) of an earlier time. They would have been kept clean, fed and occasionally rehabilitated by caring staff. The more chronic would not have to live on sidewalks or under expressways.

The media continues to foster the victim culture which entails the dismissal of personal responsibility to deal with one's own demons. The media spent decades undermining the true value of state institutions by exploiting them for fake horror and public voyeurism in films and television shows. The denial of mental illness has become a greater social illness than mental illness itself. 

Criminality and mental illness as entwined. One cannot be treated effectively without treating the other. The obliteration of public confidence in the police and the justice system by media and politicians eliminates the force that keeps society safe from its own violent insanity. The retreat of police administrators from actual policing compounds the issues. 

It is important for all of us to call out crazy when we encounter it in our own lives or in the public sphere. Unless we take the responsibility to demand that police and other authorities protect us from violence and criminality before it becomes lethal, the society itself will continue to unravel. This has been proven over and over again in societies which were once functional and are no longer. It is not inevitable, if we all pay attention and learn from our own mistakes.