America, it's time for your meds

Student (a “normal”-looking 16-17-year-old): “I can’t study today, Miss. I didn’t take my medication”.
Teacher (flusters a bit, then gives in): “Uh, OK, you’d better sit this class out, I guess.”

This kind of scene is a common occurrence these days, according to a recent Washington Post article by high school teacher Nancy Schnog. Ms. Schnog works, incidentally, not in a crime-ravaged inner-city ghetto but in the ultra-upscale suburb of Potomac, home to many of the capital’s top lawyers and politicians. As a pragmatic and reality-based professional, she avoids an emotional response to the situation, preferring to sound out child guidance and medical experts before developing an ad hoc study strategies program for her charges – so I’ll take the liberty of providing the sense of outrage which is missing from her article.

The stress-inducing conditions that lead so many teenagers to be medicated turn out essentially to be the many “pressures on their lives” and “brain-unfriendly lifestyles structured by adults”. In short, welcome to the modern world: unfriendly indeed not only to brains but also to hearts and spirits. Yet to medicate oneself or one’s family in response is to eliminate any chance of a natural and spontaneous response – including rejection, indignation and a desire for change (is it any surprise that the movers and shakers of this world don’t encourage their offspring to rebel against it?) Adolescence is a time of conflict and dissonance anyway, whether we grow up in Potomac or in Anacostia (99% poor, 99% black, 9 miles away), in Zurich or in Nairobi; it’s the frontal impact of our childhood dream-world with the reality that actually surrounds us, the painful acknowledgement of our own and our parents’ limitations, and of the gap we suddenly can’t pretend away between who we’d like to be and who we really are. How we deal with this gap is both a measure of who we are and a marker for the people we’re going to become as adults – and medicating the problem away is an outstandingly bad start to the process of growing up, denying the pain and the challenge rather than responding to it.

And while we’re on the subject of denying reality, the news has been full recently of stories about the rise of the Tea Party Right and its new icons such as Christine O’Donnell, Republican candidate for Joe Biden’s former Senate seat in Delaware. Like her putative role-model Sarah Palin, this champion of fiscal probity and straight talking is trailing some troublesome baggage (in O’Donnell’s case, some $60K in unpaid tax bills and college tuition fees) – but to her followers those are merely the signs that she’s suffered like them, with them and for them. Anyway, since most of the Tea Partiers believe that President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim determined to turn the USA into another North Korea, the evidence threshold for them is clearly very low – it’s about who’s speaking, not the data they amass to support their case.

Here, by way of a bit of real data, is a chart depicting America’s headlong rush towards Socialism over the past 30 years. Interestingly similarly-shaped charts would show the decline of the nation’s transport and communications infrastructure, and of its advantage in secondary and higher education – both areas where the USA once led the world but is now trailing many European and Asian nations. All this bears witness to the New Right’s success in siphoning money away from public-benefit expenditure and into the pockets of the ultra-rich, while deregulating business to the further benefit of that top 1% (or, even more, the top 0.1%). That’s why, of course, right behind and firmly underpinning the supposedly spontaneous and “just plain folks” Tea Party we have massively corporate-backed interest groups such as Dick Armey’s Freedom Works and the Koch Brothers’ various front organizations, not to mention Fox News Corp.

The denial of reality that’s involved here is reminiscent not of adolescence but of a much earlier stage of development, namely toddlerhood, where the dissonance between the world we desire and the one we experience is simply too great to be borne and we opt for the former – until our parents drag us kicking and screaming back to theirs. Bill Clinton has several times warned of the corporate hand in the Tea Party glove, and of course President Obama (a parental figure if ever there was one) speaks repeatedly of the need for massive investment in infrastructure and education. But what use do toddlers have for bridges and trains, schools and universities? – they just want to be told that the candy jar is full, or if it all too obviously isn’t full, a nice simple story about who stole the candy. And provided that story comes from a trusted source like Sarah or Glenn, it doesn’t need to have the smallest element of truth in it, or of evidence to support it. That’s the great thing about toddlers: they may be darned stubborn at times, but they’re quickly and easily turned by a determined adult. They’re not seeking their own way in the world – they’re nowhere near ready yet – just flustered and unhappy and looking to be comforted.

It sometimes seems that much of the USA is afflicted with a debased form of the belief propagated by the book & movie “The Secret” (itself, as Marcus Anthony – http://22cplus.blogspot.com – has usefully and cogently pointed out, a distorted and debased version of the Law of Attraction). The idea – very toddler-like – is that I only have to want and believe hard enough for reality to become whatever I want it to be: secretive right-wing billionaires become defenders of the common people, official birth certificates become Photoshop fake-ups and vice versa, and, above all, everything that’s going wrong is the fault of the bad guys (liberals, immigrants, foreigners etc.) And if ever a glimpse of reality should still appear through the cracks; well, there are always the meds.

The main problem with denying reality or medicating it away isn’t moral but practical – why shouldn’t we all float away on a pink cloud of pharmaceutical and Fox News oblivion if there were no consequences? But there are serious consequences: it weakens one’s ability to overcome difficult circumstances, and makes one vulnerable to manipulation by anyone with a likely story and an ulterior motive. Toddlers don’t look behind the scenes to see who’s pulling the strings; they take the puppets as real and autonomous agents. An unhappy, confused and easily manipulated populace with no real agenda in search of comfort and/or vengeance are easy meat for the powerful corporate interests who aren’t confused, know exactly what they want, and have a very precise agenda.

And in this fairy story the wolf not only eats Grandma but convinces Little Red Riding-Hood that she is Grandma – complete with a spoonful of medication to help settle the little girl’s doubts. America, you’d better wake up; the beast’s appetite is far from sated yet.