[Dean's World] Celia Farber: Good Morning America

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Celia Farber:
Good Morning America
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1203092665.shtml


   I cried yesterday afternoon, last night, and again this morning. Not
   all horror stories in the news break us--if they did we wouldn't
   survive--but this shooting at the University of Northern Illinois has
   pushed me over the edge. Late last night as I was looking at the
   headlines on my computer, I saw the figure go hideously from 4 to 5,
   and this morning, 7. They say it's the fourth school shooting in one
   week. The side of me that believes it can agitate, report,
   investigate, expose--that side wants to scream bloody murder about the
   repressed data on the connection between SSRIs and homicide/suicide.
   Go ahead and find one school shooter who was not medicated on one or
   several psych meds for "depression" and I will admit faulty logic.
   Until then, I stand firm. There should be a national campaign this
   instant to protect our children from this insanity. My son is 13, and
   just got accepted at a very good public high school here in New York
   that was the one school he wanted to go to. As a parent, I am brought
   to my knees. He is everything to me and will have no choice but to
   send him into a potential war zone when he goes off to high school.
   Those parents who today woke up to dead children, how can their grief
   ever end? It will be there when the mountains crumble. How can any
   "issue" matter in this country more than the question of whether brain
   altering chemicals in the form of SSRIs are creating murderers in
   sneakers and sweatshirts? You don't think so? Then go look up the
   histories of school shooters in this country since Columbine. You
   won't find an unmedicated one.

   I don't care if they teach my son that the earth is flat. I don't care
   if they teach him anything. I care only that the school's policy on
   protection from carnage is. I want to see the plan. I want, in fact,
   to know how many students in the school are on drugs--legal drugs,
   psych drugs. I have no such right, but that doesn't stop me from
   wanting it. I want there to be professionals who watch for
   signs--glassy eyes, a morose demeanor, a sense of profound alienation,
   a personality that doesn't quite seem human but a bit...chemical and
   desensitized. That kid...needs love. Attention. Inspiration.
   Intervention. That kid does not need meds. 

   To see these imagages of these bloodied students being carried on
   stretchers, of students praying, holding each other, hands clapped
   over mouths in shock, eyes red and cast upward toward the heavens as
   the increasingly cold and empty "WHY?" is cast across the sky like an
   exercise in futility.

   Put some muscle and sinew into this "WHY," America.

   Don't make it a Hallmark card. Let's really ask "why?" and let's get
   answers. Let's ask "how?" and get answers. This country is falling
   apart in our hands, and it doesn't matter who becomes president,
   unless they can begin to answer the question of how and why these mass
   shootings have become a routing part of the American post-apocalyptic
   landscape.

   Have you noticed that everybody is on drugs? Have you noticed that
   people aren't very human anymore? That people hardly see, connect,
   touch, remember one another anymore? That everybody is alone, stone
   cold alone, and gasping like fish in a shallow pond, and not knowing
   why everything hurts so much?

   It's supposed to. We're not supposed to live anymore. We are supposed
   to take their drugs and die real slow. And abandon one another, little
   by little, and buy more cheap decorations to hang on the walls of our
   slums where love has departed. Hence the need for numbing the pain
   that keeps the psych business booming. Were we permitted a path back
   to our true emotional foliage, we would find that we like being human,
   we know what to do when something hurts, we cry, then we smile again.
   Without vulnerability and sadness, we are a nation of monsters. The
   pills that were designed to block sadness have created a grief that
   transcends every scale. It's not human.

   Let's start a movement that once again permits Americans to feel sad
   and to cry and to stand up again and start over the next day, rather
   than run to the pill pushers. I consider them murderers.

   And if you want to sell me on all the millions who have been "helped"
   by anti-depressants, I say tell that to the parents, standing over the
   graves of their kids.