Klein's analogy of shock therapy being related to the blank slate in the wake of natural and/or human born disasters fascinates me. I instantly understood her point but still soaked up every page simply so I could be further convinced and educated on this matter. What really threw me for a turn was the history of shock therapy and the idea that it was somehow going to give doctors a clean slate to work with in terms of actual patients. Susana Kaysen's book "Girl, Interrupted" fits into this context perfectly as she details her time spent in a mental hospital in the 1950's. There are tales of shock therapy in this book and for the first time (I've read this book 27 times) I finally understand a bit more about the history behind what results Kaysen's doctors may have been thinking they were eventually going to get. Kaysen got lucky and she got out relatively unharmed but her friends in that hospital were not all as lucky and many of them may have been part of shock experiments in some way or another. What I struggle with is the fact that Kaysen was unwillingly put into a psychiatric ward as were so many other people at this time and that many likely never consented to any of these experiments being done on them.
I was at a loss of words as my body quite literally began to hurt while reading the chapter on shock therapy out of Klein's book. Matt just asked where our morals have gone and I second that question. Cameron was absolutely crazy to believe he was going to help these people but further than that we are now using these ideas to extract information out of "enemy combatants" as we call them in order to legally torture them. We are taking away humanity from an individual and justifying it with whatever excuse sounds good for the day. This is not okay and it is tearing at me to consider myself a pacifist at heart while living in a world that has somehow allowed powerful men (mostly men, anyway) to take away the ability to be human.
Breaking down Klein's analogy a little further, the world is in a state of shock. America is in a state of shock even if it is 7 years after 9/11. There are endless stories to be told of weapons manufacturers making millions and private security firms getting insane contracts but my concern is the people who are being erased. An entire population of people are being erased be it in New Orleans where the public school system has almost entirely been turned over to private charter schools or in any other disaster ridden town where property prices are on a space rise and the former residents will never be able to afford to live there.
In, "Dear Mr. President," the musical artist, P!nk, asks George W. Bush "How do you sleep while the rest of us cry?" I ask the same question of everyone who has made money off of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the countless earthquakes and tsunamis that have wiped out tens of thousands of people and their homes. How do you live with yourself? And furthermore, how do we live with ourselves for letting this happen? How do we even begin to fix this? I ask these questions not to be negative but to hopefully think about what we as a human community mean to each other.
1 comment:
I think that we all have the same initial gut reaction to these readings and that's a feeling of disgust but also fascination. It is amazing to me that these things happen, but just as I'm amazed I despise the fact that people make money off of misery. But that's how life is. Money is made off of sadness, insecurity, anger, and all the worst parts of life. I think that because things like weight loss pills or the millions of other products that have been made to take advantage of everyday situations are so common, we don't view them as taking advantage, we see them as filling a need. Well I just think its profiteering at a smaller stage. At this stage it's called a "business." But that's what all of these situations are, they're business. As sad as it is and as demeaning as it can be, it is something that is almost necessary at times because government cannot handle some of these things with the speed with which the private sector can. So once we get over the initial shock [no pun intended] that profiteering is just everyday business on a grander scale, we can all go back to business as usual [intended].
Post a Comment