I can agree with the violent acres post on depression but I do think it misses some very obvious points. I believe that, especially in rich countries like America, one has vastly more freedom and power over one’s life than elsewhere. The fact that relatively few seem to understand this, and talk about being “pressured into living a life they would have never chosen for themselves” is, to my mind, ridiculous.
In a society like America, that pressure is entirely in one’s own mind – which suggests to me that it is in fact ‘broken’ even though the fix is unlikely to come from the kind of drugs a doctor will prescribe. Almost nowhere is one more ‘free’ to make one’s own choices – whether that is throwing out the TV or taking a pay cut to do something more fulfilling.
It seems that we as a species can very easily fall victims to our own success. Once we remove the real struggle for comfortable survival, and therefore the deep satisfaction of overcoming it, we start wanting to invent new problems for ourselves and yet become too lazy to do anything about it.
I suppose I do agree with the post’s author, but I’m just a bit more preachy.
You are perpetrating the Great American Lie: that in such a rich country, everyone is free to live a good and meaningful life. This is an ugly, barbaric, and violent nation whose wealth resides in the hands of 2% of the citizenry, the uber-elite. Go ahead and keep licking the arse-crack of Big Brother, you’re a deceiver anyway. Homelessness, poverty, disease (that could be healed but for lack of health care) and ignorance (due to crappy public education) haunt this American life like a screeching banshee. Are you one of its disciples?
Zeke Krahlin
4 Feb 10 at 4:21 am
Point 1 – I am neither from, nor in, America.
Point 2 – Here in my country we have a welfare state, and although there is of course poverty, there is also a high degree of freedom and opportunity – compared at least to much of the rest of the world if not a fictional ideal.
Point 3 – Big Brother, and the whole of Orwell’s book 1984, is far more about an extreme form of Socialism (an all-pervasive state) rather than the extreme form of capitalism practiced in America.
You might be served by trying to deal with facts before leaping both to conclusions and down people’s throats.
pete
10 Feb 10 at 10:50 pm