Above All, Please No Creepy Fake Smiles

 [We are up to date now. Reminder: these are my own versions, pretty much as submitted, with occasional graphic embellishments and added notes. The titles don't usually match.]

Today’s topic is insanity.

Ha, ha, that wasn’t very specific was it? Everything is insanity! The voices tell me so.

Seriously, an insane man recently killed some people while trying to kill a Congressperson, and this has been taken by many as a call to action. I don’t like what happened either, but honestly a lot of these calls to action are just nuts.

The idea that mental illness causes good people to do bad things is generally false. Mental illness most often causes good people to do good things that aren’t practical and not in their own best interests, or good things that aren’t efficient. Whereas, it causes bad people to be bad out in the open. Mental illness itself is morally neutral, like pneumonia.

When I was 12 I was visiting the house of another kid I’ll call “Charlie”. Charlie was the little brother of a former babysitter of mine. I hadn’t seen him in years. His parents begged my parents to get me to play with Charlie, because he was so lonely. His idea of playing that day was to hit me repeatedly with a stick, for half an hour, until I finally snatched it away from him, and broke it in ten pieces.

The parents, when notified of all this, sobbed, and said, “It all started when another boy threw a rock at Charlie’s head. He’s been mean like that ever since. That’s why he has no friends.”

Very sad, very tragic, very false. When I’d known Charlie before the tragic blow to his head, he was also a vicious jerk. He was just more efficient at it, and didn’t do anything so overt, so he could drag it out longer. All the blow to his head did was put him off his game. He lost his gift for creating deniability.

My mother was verbally abusive to people who visited her near her death. They excused her for it by saying it was “the brain tumor talking”. But she hadn’t had a talkative brain tumor 22 years earlier when she decided it would be fun to burn the back of my hand in one spot over and over again with a cigarette.

It’s all irrelevant until you start talking about prescriptions. The most popular prescription for the latest tragedy isn’t as bad as Homeland Security was for 9/11, but it’s just as illogical. We can’t be forcing ourselves to be civil just to keep from touching off a Jared Loughner.

It’s like saying, “we can’t integrate the Armed Services, Mr. Truman, it will touch off some violent racists, and there will be riots in the barracks!” Well, we did it anyway, there were riots, and anyone who says “I told you so,” give them a dirty look for me.  

It’s not that we shouldn’t be civil, it’s that you can’t be civil for that reason. It isn’t a sustaining reason to be decent. You have to be decent and civil to begin with. Some of you aren’t, and you know precisely who you are. Don’t strain yourselves to act civil for the sake of public safety. We’ll all see through your phony civility, including the Jareds. Be civil for the sake of your own self-respect, or forget it.

Topical local applications

The typical Seattleite is always smiling and civil.

Most of you good readers live in the Greater Seattle area, AKA The Passive-Aggressive Capital of the World. Is this is a great place to observe phony civility in its natural state, or what? If you say it is, the teacher likes you. If you say “what,” the teacher smiles at you, says, “let’s get together sometime” and avoids you from then on.

As I write this, the state legislators debate eliminating programs that help pay for mental health treatment and the survival needs of the mentally ill. This is happening because state voters wouldn’t approve higher taxes for the rich, for fear that it would cut into their own chances to be rich one day. Who’s crazy in that picture?