Fornits

Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora
An open discussion about the troubled parent industry

On 2005-06-05 20:42:00, Deborah wrote:

"*** It's funny how when this shit happens to arab people who aren't even US citizens the world unites against the US govt. When we do it to our own kids, no one blinks an eye. Says a lot about the society our parents have created. Time to change!



I think this article speaks to that issue, as well as the Teen Warehouse Industry.



http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/content/view/73/106/



Comfortably Numb



Did you feel for those Iraqis who were tied down and had attack dogs baying and chewing at them? Did seeing the pictures and hearing the stories make you sick? Or were you like most of us ? engaged by the drama, entertained by the scandal, yet comfortably numb about the whole thing?



Many have replaced empathy with an ?I?-centered

sentimentality. Feeling has been turned on its head: caring is now a means not for taking action, but for feeling better about oneself or getting attention. We ride the emotional dramas in the tabloids, wear colored ribbons, and express our love for God and country. Meanwhile, we take no action ? at least none driven by empathy.



Empathy is how we respond to the plight of fellow

human beings. It is the bedrock of our moral

sensibility that allows us to feel for others, to put ourselves in their place. If you cannot feel, how can you act outside your own wants and desires? To many today, it seems easier to just deny feelings of empathy, to react to  them ?rationally? as a weakness in this hard and fast world.



But this has a cost. Losing feeling for others, or

never developing the capacity to feel deeply at all, means closing off a fundamental part of being human. We feel less not just about the millions of innocent people killed by violence in the past decade, or the thousands of civilians killed in America?s wars for peace, but also about, say, our own partner, neighbors or parents. All feelings run along the same neural

pathways.



Shutting down some means shutting down many. In the process, we become less human. As this happens, we not only stop feeling the pain of others, we become more capable of inflicting it. This is the darkest side of empathy?s erosion. If feelings underlie an empathic response, numbness makes brutality viable. Thus, as you happily switch off from humanity, you become a threat to it. We were comfortably numb about the torture at Abu Ghraib, and so were the GI guards who carried it out. Americans didn?t say sorry because they didn?t feel sorry. Simple as that.



And if we can?t feel for others, who will feel for us?

Perhaps this is part of the general worsening of

mental well-being. As a recent World Health

Organization study shows, there?s a near-perfect

correlation between the rise of alienation in the

modern world and the decline of people?s mental

states, with mental dysfunction growing globally. As empathy falls, behaviors predicated on its lack have been pathologized, like narcissistic and antisocial personalities. But these are not symptoms of organic disease. Instead, it is the social system that is in need of radical treatment.



Consider the example of antidepressant drugs like

Paxil and Zoloft. It is now understood that these ssri antidepressants shut down peoples? sexual emotions. What remains less appreciated is that they produce their mood-altering effect by essentially manufacturing apathy. Are these drugs popular, in part, precisely because they shut down our feelings? It is a frightening notion. Medicating our numbness is one thing, with a long and lonely history. But a culture medicating itself into comfortable numbness is something else. It is no longer the symptom but the cure.



Richard DeGrandpre

"

On 2005-06-05 15:51:00, Anonymous wrote:

"This is Andrea - and a troll?  I will not defend myself to any of you nor what I do the ones who are here who know about me and what I do I have great respect for - as we all have our opinions and have gotten past a lot of struggles.  Again to cut/copy/paste is wrong whether you agree with folks or not it is wrong just plain wrong.  Again, your opinions matter this is America - but I do not nor should anyone bash a parent who is desperatly seeking help for their child ever.  At least they are trying - unlike a lot of other parents I know who just abandon their children to the state!  Someone has to come to some sort of truce here and I reccomend and will so on struggling teens that this not keep going on - to continue to feed into a thread like this is a waste of time and energy.  (as I am typing myself) this is the last message I will post here period, you all are out of control.  Good luck with  your ventures in life, be safe and healthy.

Andrea"