Diseased Society

Please excuse the tardiness (and promiscuity) of this post-it appears that we have been having some technical difficulties.

But we’re back on track once more.

So…I have come to realise that we’re actually falling apart. If society has become the equivalent of a comfort blanket from your childhood, then it is falling apart at the seams…It is worn and tattered, and serves no purpose anymore. It was once good….But something happened to it along the way.

I mean society is showing more and more symptoms of being unwell.

You know when aunt Matilda starts acting a bit odd in her old age? Everyone pretends it isn’t happening, humours her, and goes along with her weird requests and peculiar tendencies….As though it is completely normal. No one questions her occasional need to pee in the potted plant in the corner of the room, or that she has stuck an alarm clock to her fridge door using duct tape-so that you can’t even see the hands on the clock.No one talks about how she sometimes forgets your name, or feeds the cat at the table.

Well, society is full of weird people that we choose to ignore and full of weird occurances that we refuse to face up to. Fair enough that we have mentally disturbed people littered about, there are places for them to go, treatments to have…bla bla bla. But what about when society as a whole is showing disturbing symptoms of derangement? What then? It’s not as though we can just schedule an emergency appointment with our therapist.

You know that something isn’t right when people get paid more to stack shelves in a supermarket, than they do to teach children maths and geography. A study was done where many many people were asked to name one (just one!!) country in Asia, and only a third of the people could. I mean where on EARTH do people think China is?!?

You know that things aren’t right when footballers and models get paid more money than they can actually spend in their lifetimes. We elevate them to hero status…we place them on pedestals and talk about the ins and outs of their lives instead of focusing on our own. Where is the sense in that? It’s like a sick sort of perversion…voyeurism of the least pleasurable kind.

I mean where are our brain surgeons? Where are our firefighters? Where are our real heros?

We are waiting for a miracle, a modern day messiah, something to inspire us…And we turn to people who smile and have their nails done for a living.

And what about the earths resources? We are running our of natural gas, coal, oil…we are told to try to use as little as possible, as these things are not coming back….So we turn down the gas when we are frying our bacon…we walk to work instead of driving our cars…we try not to water our lawns, because of the decrease in rainfall.

THEN we go and send HUGE space crafts out of our atmophere, (just to look around-its not even like we’re at risk of alien invasion or anything), using more gas as fuel than a million of our little gas cooker stoves ever could. Where is the logic?

How are we benefitting from these deviant behvaiours? Why do we choose to let this happen? we hand over responsibility to other people and then sit back and think to ourselves that something is lacking from our lives.

If that’s not the symptomatology of a seriously mentally disturbed society then I dont know what is.

Freud started out studying people that were completely physically healthy, and seemed happy enough…but they kept having subtle symptoms that couldnt be explained, like a reoccurring head ache, leg pain, or neuralgia. It turned out there were lots of things making them seriously unhappy underneath it all, but they chose to sweep these things under the carpet rather than face them. So, these issues, not wanting to be ignored or forgotten, found other psycho-somatic ways of being expressed. Through pains and other weird seemingly non-connected symptoms.

Is society doing the same?
Ignoring the bad things? Under rug swept…Then the same things appear in other places, in other ways.

The thing that disturbs me is not so much that these things happen…But that no one questions it. No one says: ‘Man its messed up that some footballer gets paid more than a doctor researching cancer…we could be saving people’s lives…or we could be watching a great football match on TV.’

And it’s not even like it’s total strangers that are affected by cancer. One in three people get cancer. I’d like to think that I know more than three people.

Where is our curiosity about these things? we dont even question society’s fucked up ways. We just carry on as though it is normal.

I say let’s go ask Aunt Matilda why the hell she doesnt just use the toilet. Let’s sit down and talk to her about her duct tape issues. Even if we can’t do anything about it, at least we’re not ignoring the fact that it’s there.

-Probably stressed out Probable Sushi.