Pretty much.
This is a reddit post my SO sent me. It challenges the “it’s crazy people” narrative and points out the problem is fundamentally American culture.
Summary
What if the reason we have a culture of violence is not because people can’t see a therapist, but because from the moment they enter school, Lesson One in U.S. History is:
“Okay, kids, here’s what you gotta know about America. Number one: You’re free to say and believe what you want. Number two: Someone, someday, will be out to get you, and you and all your buddies will need guns to kill them. And the people you will need to shoot might be in this very room or in the house next door.”
I’m sure everyone is rushing to bring up mental health, but you know what is really disturbing about our conversations about mental health?
Not only are the conversations themselves opportunist (we only talk about it after a shooting), we also bend over backwards to talk about it in the method that most cleanly absolves us of our own responsibility in crafting the uniquely American culture of violence.
We act like mental illness is just this disease that you can “catch” for no reason at all. Like there are just Mental Illness Spores floating around out there and one day you just breathe it in and whoop, you’re crazy! You’ve been cursed and there’s nothing we can do except hope you don’t find a gun before you get a chance to see the Therapy Wizard!
Sure, depression can be totally arbitrary sometimes. Sometimes it’s just senseless and pervasive, and people become depressed even without any good reasons, or sometimes your brain gets twisted because some enzyme made it somewhere it shouldn’t have been.
But you know what? A lot of time time, mental health problems happen as a direct response to the values and pressures placed upon people by the society that surrounds them.
When waves of overworked Japanese salarymen commit suicide, we don’t just say to ourselves “Oh man, if only Japan had more therapists! If only they had access to better mental health care!” No, we recognize the presence of certain kinds of toxicity in foreign cultures when we see it. We say dude, that culture needs to start rethinking their whole shit.
If a woman forced to stay in the home and wear a burka against her will, suddenly committed suicide, I wouldn’t just blame the vague specter of “mental illness” and wish she’d gotten to talk to someone about her mother.
It should be the same thing here at home. When we hear about the mental health crisis in poor urban black communities, it’s not because they’re short on ink blot tests and reclining couches, it’s because they need grocery stores, and decent jobs, and cops who don’t act like they’re enforcing martial law.
When we hear about Puerto Rico having a sudden epidemic in mental health problems after a hurricane, I don’t think “Gosh, I really hope those folks get their Xanax shipment soon!” I think “Fuck, of course. They’re losing their loved ones to preventable diseases, they don’t have power or clean food or medical care, or even the comforting illusion that the rest of the nation considers them full citizens.”
No, when a society suffers a mental health crisis, they’ve usually earned it, and the nature of the crisis usually reflects the values of the society that brought it about. Systems and processes and care facilities can help you identify, quarantine, or heal the crazy. But culture is what synthesizes the crazy in the first place.
And the United States has earned every bit of the epidemic we suffer now. Whether it’s radical white terrorism, disaffected schoolkids, or just nutsos with guns, we’ve earned every one of these shootings, and it can’t just be because these people didn’t make it to a therapist on time.
It’s our values, stupid. It’s because we indoctrinate our citizens into thinking that they are deficientif they can’t scrape together a successful life out of this crucible of capitalist indifference. We fill the minds of the have-nots with shame and guilt beyond anyone’s ability to fully cope with, and we fill the minds of the haves with supremacist fantasies that convince them that it’s okay to treat others like dirt, or they deserve to get away with anything if they’re rich. We tell foreign children studying their asses off that they haven’t earned the right to live in the one place they’ve known as home, and we tell native-born Americans that their entire way of life is under attack.
By kids.
But most of all, we worship the fantasy of the gun. Not just the guns. It’s the narrative that guns represent.
We’ve all heard the saying, right? “To a man who has a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” Well, what happens to a nation founded upon the idea that one day, there will necessarily arise a problem that can only be solved if everyone has guns?
If you enshrine that idea into your country’s constitution, what will you get, except a society that’s always looking for the fabled “nail” that justifies the ownership of this horrifically dangerous hammer that they’ve just got sitting there?
I mean, if that royal tyrant that our founding fathers told us to fear just…never appears, we’re all kinda just left with our dicks in our hands, right?
Come on, we didn’t need the 2nd amendment so we could own a shotgun and protect ourselves from thieves in the night. We could’ve found some way to allow people to protect themselves without an amendment. No, we have an amendment because our founding fathers, for better or worse, believed in the secular version of an apocalypse prophecy.
And a political apocalypse prophecy needs an enemy, so we make up the enemies instead. But in order for this to work, the imaginary enemy has to be domestic and covert (otherwise, the military or police should be able to handle it). So what do you get?
There could be Muslims in your community, I say! Muslims! Or it’ll probably be those thieving blacks! Mexican rapists! Or the G-men in the suits! Or Hillary Clinton and the Pizza-Pedos! I don’t know who yet, but dammit, there’s gotta be someone out there that I bought this gun to protect myself from! Or else why would I have it? Why would George Washington warn me that I’d need a gun, if there weren’t dangerous people lurking out there?
You can’t escape the filter of paranoia that re-colors our political discourse. How could you? It’s built into our constitution, and placed pretty high up on the priority list, right behind free speech. Is it so crazy so suggest that that paranoid perspective has integrated itself into our conversations about poverty? About race? About labor? About war? About justice?
I’m not saying all our problems would go away if we get rid of guns. All I’m saying is that we might be suffering from the same issue that you would see in a suicidal Japanese salaryman whose sensibilities are so woven in with the cultural norms that push him to that brink, that he can’t step back and see that there are entirely different ways for a civilization to be organized. The words “Why not just go home after 8 hours?” don’t make sense when you’re living in the problem.
America seems like it’s suffering from a similar kind of myopia.
It’s like we’ve simply never posited the question: “What if there isn’t as much to fear as we thought? And even if there is that much to fear, what if the sources of those fears are only strengthened when we tell a society that they need to be ready to kill what they’re afraid of?”
We’re all psychologically (if not literally) locked and loaded but with nowhere to go. We’ve built a cultural identity around it.
So now we’re more afraid of that question, than we would’ve been afraid of the imaginary threat. And we’re more dangerous to ourselves than that threat ever could’ve been.
