This post is a commentary on Jim Styro's eloquent post last Friday. Read the whole thing; here's a sample:
Anyway, after Fort Hood yesterday and the Orlando engineer "going postal" today, I think the President needs to get on the tube and try to talk this country off the ledge. I know my idea is a little over the top - but clearly some of us, maybe a lot of us, need a time-out; and the President may just be smart and articulate enough to pull it off.
I wish the people who needed to hear President Obama would listen, but ...
... the Glenn Becks of our nation have a vocal minority of the electorate so riled up that they'll take anything Obama says as Mein Kampf revisited. Obama might say something about peace, and the wingers will start screaming about how it's code for having their guns taken away or appeasing the Islamo-Communisto-Fascists or pretty much whatever you can imagine. (These commentators are wolves in clowns' clothing.) Some of this agitation comes from racism; some is the standard, post-Gingrich GOP tactic of having a huge hissy-fit whenever Democrats do anything. (This complements the Democrats' tendency to be huge wusses -- but that's another story.)
But there's another factor at play here that I don't think the President or anyone else can talk people down from, and that's severe mental illness. You can't reason with a psychotic person; I learned this the hard way once upon a time. You have to help them get proper treatment, which is often no simple matter. Certainly medications are key, but there's more: as Mark Vonnegut says,
"We have more effective medications with fewer side effects. I should be happy but I find myself uncomfortable. More and more just about all the questions and all the answers about mental illness are about medication. Mental illness causes poverty and poverty causes mental illness. The same is true of trauma, prejudice, lack of education, lack of skills, loss of spiritual values. Learning how to live well in spite of your illness is at least as important as medication."
People with mental illness, just like people with any kind of illness or disability, need extra help, and when society doesn't collectively provide that support (you know, all that "brother's keeper", "welfare state" stuff), then we're going to see more and more borderline cases go over the edge. Like canaries in a coalmine, except sometimes the effect is more like a match in the gas tank - boom boom (apologies to "What's Eating Gilbert Grape", one of the best films about disability ever).
Public mental health services in the US generally suck (for those who need them the most), and they've particularly sucked in the military. The fact that an Army psychiatrist was the shooter couldn't possibly be a better metaphor for that. The guy needed help, and had no business being on that job. But the military's whole strategy with mental health -- as with the Iraq War itself -- has been to obfuscate and deny. Soldiers are sent into a stupid and pointless war with insufficient body armor and inadequate breaks between tours. Veterans with PTSD are diagnosed with "personality disorders" in order to avoid treating them. Why should it be surprising that a mere psychiatrist, who provides services that the military isn't particularly interested in, should fall through the cracks?
I'm not saying that a perfect system would have prevented this particular shooting, but putting serious effort into creating a better system would lead to improved quality of life and fewer premature endings of lives within the military and among veterans. The same is true for healthcare on a nationwide scale.
Flashback: good commentary here and here from the incisive & pseudonymous blogger "Roger Ailes" on mental illness and the Virginia Tech shootings of April 2007.
*Apologies to Paul McCartney ("Mr. Bellamy" from 2007; YouTube)