And it takes a village. And consider for a moment, the state of the village. Families and clans have shrunk drastically. Say what you want about moms working, but she’s your main nurturer. I remember an older woman (patient) who looked me in the eye and said forcefully: “The moms went to work and the kids went to shit”. There was air conditioning taht came along, and forced everyone inside. Then the TV came along, and then cable, and then  forty million channels and access to everything everywhere all the time and PRESO! Nobody home outside. They’re all inside their homes. What’s a young ape to do? But Google stuff.

For my whole career, from back in the 80s, behavior has been doing nothing but getting worse, and worse. First it was apparent that kids were going crazier, and at an earlier age. By the 90s there was the fascination with guns, and eventually school shooting, and later mass shootings. From 2000 on the came the apparent increases in all the autism spectrum disorders, and in the past decade or so, more identity  syndromes, almost certainly exacerbated if not in many cases created, by the emergence of internet platforms and their special poison: algorithms.

Somewhere and somehow, in that big frontal lobe of electricity where such actions are generated, there is a subset of these instincts that we refer to as “traits”; and there is a “CEO” in charge of them, who actually says and does what you do and are, and this is the identity. Or what so famously we call “the ego”, or “the self”. In most normal people the CEO keeps good control over the traits. It is self-reflective, witnesses appropriately instead of in a biased manner, and does so seeking the positive and pleasant results of such competent interaction. It learns from mistakes and successes and is thus functional, and valuable.

Ahem. If, however, something goes badly wrong in the nurturing process, or if there is a basic brain chemistry problem, or developmentally the “CEO” is just not somehow in charge fully, the raw electricity of “traits” take over the helm, and watch out. Because when these raw centers (anger, self-protection, narcissism, possessiveness, are examples) get thrown into control of the identity, the result of this “tail wags the dog” phenomenon is the behavior of all the people you don’t like, and wish never existed.
In extreme cases we see “identity syndromes”, whereupon, for a time, an identity completely unconstrained can become robotic, and service to a primate’s imitative behavior. So from school shooters and mass shooters, to insurrectionists and even misbehaving politicians, something has happened, and the “ego on the loose” makes headlines. As society grapples with what to do about it.

It used to be that these behaviors were utilized when there was a threat of some kind, where embarrassment or other social consequnt was possible. But what is happening now is that these mechanisms are more of a modus operandi than a situational option. The internat has allowed such like-minded individuals wo echo their grievances, and thereofre can feel vindicated or at leastsanctioned, perhaps alleviating their senses of error and misperformance. We are now living the realities of these micro-pellets of the societal machine.

They show up online as misinformation campaigns, which are cynical releases of disordered minds, who must seek the attention of the great audience out there, all from the seat of their pants. Though loud mouths at council meetings and school board activities. Simple, awful, toxic, and sad. And us.

So, if it’s true, why? Why are we going bad? Is it the genetics of social behavior being ousted since such behavior is so barely necessary any more? I mean, if you so desire, you can be a big enough ninny that people will come and pick you up, clean you, feed you, address your medical needs, and provide various protections, and feel good having cared for someone so needy. To varying degrees, more and more dysfunction is just the self on the loose, on the attack. An MO for mental survival in The Modern Age. The 180 degree flip from the great cro-magnon leap where a larger sociaty where everyone had a more specific duty, rather than the roaming hand to mouth survival of their predecessors, the Neandertal.

Modern Age Neandertals. How cool. And in just a few generations. So if you thought we were getting away with 50% divorce rates and shrinking of the clan, and AC and TV’s interference with our physical self, and a largely unhelpful government, and then unfettered exposure to internet madness with a supercomputer in everyone’s hand, it sure looks like we weren’t.

Gloomy? Sure. So what can we do? Are the genes just broken and breaking and what we are seeing is unstoppable and unrelenting?  Remember this: society pays for the sins of dear old mom and pop. So anything we can do for kids, young parents, moms (!), keeping families together, that’s where we can improve and promote solid identity development. Because, yes, it does take a village, and we all need to ask ourselves, what can we do to help in that equation? Can we expose more people to would-be mentors? Is there any policing of platforms? And my God, what are going to do about Republicans?

What is most clear is that narcotics are a special poison to the human mind. Masquerading as pain relievers, they actually and simply serve as euphoria agents, in which state pain doesn’t register any longer. In the setting of acute injury or painful illness, there’s nothing like them, and for this we need them. But the problem is that some real “can do” and enjoyable thoughts result from their use as well, because these drugs are “turning on” the areas of the brain where we experience pleasure and feel the general goodness of life. So, people want to take them to get this feeling, which is entirely understandable. With this effect, it turns its users into “the people they want to be”, this narcotic feel-good-about-everything state. That’s what long-term use is all about, and it has nothing to do with pain. For the sadness in the heart of people with chronic pain syndromes, they serve to mitigate the misery or their existence through the artificial inducement of euphoria.

The bad news is this. After a time of regular use this effect fades, and we say the brain has adjusted and is now “tolerating” the drug, blunting the effect. And if the supply is interrupted, within hours a “readjustment” will begin, and in fact, by definition, addiction is defined by the existence of this withdrawal syndrome that follows stopping a substance. It is this withdrawal syndrome that is so awful and keeps people from going clean from narcotics. And they will do just about anything to not hurt like that and feel like that, for three days non-stop. The abdominal pain and diarrhea, and how every bone in your body hurts. And the headaches, oh the headaches. No sleep, no break from it. For three days, just you and your misery. And that cold-turkey looking back from the mirror. People say when it’s over they feel dead, like there’s nothing left of them.

It’s hard to say how long it takes before such “tolerance” develops, where you’re only treading water, and taking the opiates in any form to keep from withdrawing. I’d say if you’ve been taking one several times a day, like they’re prescribed for things like broken legs, for a period of weeks and not months, you’re probably getting there. And if you’ve been at it for two or three months, that’s probably gotten you there for sure. When you try to quit, we’ll know.

More bad news. Once a person has been to the point of addiction there is no going back to the old you. It’s like a head injury sort of, where you recover but there’s a something missing or different. And you’re a fight with your boss or a death in the family from falling back off this wagon, even after years of sobriety from them. So the problem is a gift that keeps on giving. We will be living this for many years. It’s why we already have been living this for years.

We all say it started with “the pain scale”. Around the year 2000, there was a survey or a study of some kind and the impression was that doctors don’t seem to address pain “enough”, and that people have suffered unnecessarily. So they introduced this pain scale, as no less than the “5^th vital sign”, where in medical interactions, after the blood pressure, heart rate, breathing rate, and temperature were taken, the nurse or assistant would ask, on a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your pain? Ten is the worst pain you’ve ever had, and 1 is the mildest.This led to a flood of narcotics into modern medicine, most notably the slow release form of the big doper, oxycodone, as “Oxycontin” (“OC’s”). Casual prescribing of these medications was enabled if not encouraged, and soon they were everywhere. For many a bad decision maker, is was the beginning of the end of their life. Literally.

Everyone in Kentucky likes to go to Florida. In the 2000’s they were going there in buses down I-75, shopping at the “pill mills”, and bringing their loot back to what eventually became a whole lot of mouths to feed them to. The mills sprung up here, too, under deceptive names, with many Rx’s signed by foreign names. A scattering of more “legit” practitioners helped fuel the monster as well, just trying to help people feel better.

Soon people were taking them to start their day. Pop one of these and I’m cleaning the house and mowing the grass, and I’m the soccer mom I want to be. Then once tolerance develops and you need more and more, and more often, and God-forbid there’s an interruption of the supply (doctor’s out of town, lost the medicine or someone stole it, etc.), the withdrawal syndrome starts. All hell soon is breaking loose. So guess what, they come to see me. And they will lie and fake any number of painful conditions to get a shot of something that will pull them back from the hell of the end of this ride of narcotic-driven feel-good. Ideally they’d like a prescription of some as well, you know, until my doctor gets back.

Thieving, not seen in any other drug phenomenon, is universal among narcotic addicts. If they have a criminal record, it is almost always from stealing and bad checks than anything involving the drug itself, like possession. So they can’t get a regular job, which makes everything worse. Famously, they steal from their mother and other loved ones, or swipe something to pawn it. The real thief is the narcotics, which leads to the saying that they “steal your soul”. It’s what narcotic addicts spend the rest of their life trying to find. I wonder if any of them ever do. It is all so sad.

The next step in the disaster was “House Bill 1”, passed by the state legislature in 2012. I was so glad to see it. The pill mills were closed, the heavy peddlers hounded into oblivion, and the rules for use spelled out, and the attitude of the prescribers was that the ride was over. But just like the Iraq war, you can win a quick battle but are you ready for what comes next? We weren’t. We still aren’t. They all turned to heroin. So the slide from popping the odd percocet or vicodin, on eventually to the “perc 30’s” (the basic is but 5 mg), to the graduation of crushing and snorting OC’s. And now it dries up, and you’re injecting heroin. A race to the bottom if ever there was one.

So hence the final ingredient in this catastrophe, and yes it is a catastrophe, is the 48 year-old war on drugs, America’s great prohibition experiment created by the Nixon-era “Drug Enforcement Agency Act of 1971”. Just like with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, an underground network sprung up essentially over night, and now this many years later it has made it out to the furtherest hamlets of society. When the pain pills dried up, these bus-stop networks had the infrastructure to supply a certain long-acting opiate that would do the job, the one they called “this new heroin”. It could be sniffed even, to get enough of a high to “not hurt all day”. For just 10 bucks! What a deal! This is called being “strung out”. But for most, soon enough they were getting out the needle, just like the bum in the alleyway. This desperate state of affairs brings a little icing to the cake: hepatitis C. We’ll be staring down a huge medical bill rescuing all these livers when 80% of them progress to cirrhosis 20 or so years from now. And I mean they ALL have it. treatment is now available. But still.

I worked for a while down at The Bourbon Community Hospital in Paris, where they have a rehab unit, and patients come through the ER for a medical screening before admission there, and I would see them. I asked all of them, what happened? And they were so glad to tell their story, like a war veteran might. For most, it was a story that was a very long one, ten years and more of over-amping this crucial pathway of mental health and function.

They shake out about like this. Maybe a third or more had a legitimate illness or injury, and were prescribed them over months of recovery. “My doctor kept prescribing them”. After a time it was too late. A startling number were teenagers.

Another large batch, at least half, were broken hearts (incest, abuse, severe neglect), where a pain syndrome is often the maladaptation of adulthood, as “pain prone behavior”. Headaches and backaches, bulging discs, and the absurdities like fibromyalgia, these are all mental illnesses manifest as pain syndromes, and when the narcotic alleviates this problem, then IT has become the problem.

Another cohort had simple mental illness, and the bad wirings of their nervous system fell prey to the “happiness” of narcosis. Before long they were “done”, generally by a well-meaning prescriber. Accessing the medical system is, for many such “poor” citizens, a power trip and esteem builder. Few have ever paid a bill. Toss them a narcotic, and you have added the sinker to the hook and line.

Others started abusing them in high school or shortly thereafter, where they became available from the home, or by someone who was getting them by feigning illness and then distributing them. Such “recreational” starts are unusual though. And there’s no “gateway drug” to narcotic oblivion.

And not everyone has the same weakness to them. I have said that “normal” people don’t like the narcotic effect, as if their euphoria pathway is quite alright without the overstimulation narcotics cause. But unfortunately the epidemic is a sort of “thinning of the herd”, where if your mind is not “happy” enough in its own skin and you fall victim to this, your genes may not make it to the next generation. Like a selection pressure fully created by The Modern Age in Modern America. And guess what, there are a lot more broken hearts out there than anyone wants to know, generally paying for the sins of dear old mom and pop somehow.

It seems to me there are a lot of options available for people who really see the life-threatening struggle it is, but they’re such zombies already, can they ever see the light again, or gather themselves for this great struggle to recover the self? I tell them they need to re-construct their personality, so broken by this class of medications. Like a head trauma patient learning to walk again. Get work, pick up a hobby, learn a musical instrument, go to church, get in shape, and take that long look in the mirror, and try to find a you worth being. For many they’re looking up at the top of a hard box. Many.

As a syndrome that is seen in all socio-economic levels of the population, they all act like twin children of the same mother. Their excuses, their lies, their disastrous decisions, their thieving, it’s part of the syndrome. It takes me usually a minute or so to know if they’ve got the syndrome, and I look at them and I wonder, what would you have been like if not for this? Before we sent you to hell on a road paved with good intentions. Before the pain scale and House Bill 1 and the war on drugs, and before Modern Age America chewed you up and spit you out. Probably just a regular old salt of the earth pillar of society, and we could have used a better you. Won’t happen now.

If you change the get-up just a little it’s grey, it’s blues. It’s dungarees and caps and lots of other fancy lids, for sure. And while all “soldiers”, they almost all have higher-ups, and some a lot of “higher-ups” that they gotta be reporting to, and that gives them comfort. A control that’s needed, to contain the thing. A soldier must have that gene where they can just “go off”, and you know, kill a guy or whatever. Drop a bomb. Fire cannon. POW! Soldier man come rockin’. But the higherup has to give me the go-ahead. And an A-OK.

Fascinating mass-migrations have been commonplace on this planet, but with this species, it always looks the same: an “army” of some kind, with generals and strategies and arms and armaments, and don’t forget, soldiers. If it weren’t for the battles themselves, the foxhole guys, the dudes manning the guns, how far do you think the leadership would get during offensives? Not far. Yet, despite the inherent risks, there has never been a shortage of such “help”.

To “sign on” to the effort, there are a few bare essentials: demean the enemy so as to eliminate the problematic psychology of killing and murder, believe your cause is “just”, and then demonstrate the immense guts needed to hurt and maim your fellow man. But that’s all so easy, apparently. Just, follow the directions, and instructions, like a good soldier.

The all-time low of such behavior, the SS of Hitler’s Germany, was a club of dudes in the 1920s-30s, and then they armed themselves (the “waffen” SS). Then once assimilated into that God-forsaken fold, they took to things like war and genocide. Though they didn’t start out ostensibly to become this, they were what soldiers always are starting out: club rats. Identifying with each other, getting caught up in the whatever, fanned by the moments, and then soldiers in a war somewhere. Pow, pow. Drink, drink.

Whatever the syndrome is, there is little doubt that it involves an ability to turn on some type of “on-switch”, one that the trainers of such mad mobs know well. If you can get dudes to brave live bullets to try to blow up a pillbox a football field away, you can get them to do anything. And obviously, it ain’t the pay scale. It’s a different allure. Of being a helper, of doing tough jobs. And certainly, of joining this mob.

Consider the power in being the foot soldier in any battle. Yeah, you’re the grunt, but you’re packing a piece, often a very good one. There’s other things in your kit too, and there’s all of you together. And while there’s risk to this perverse excitement, all deference to “the boss”, the chiefs as it were, is tempered by the simple, undeniable observation that both have: where would He be without us grunts?

But the “soldier syndrome” (willingness to do the hard work as a “part” of a big something) is by no means limited to soldiers of militias. Throughout cultures this pattern is persistent. Leaders like CEOs and even coaches are in the same positions as are defense department higher-ups. They can run the company, but it’s not like the company or he could get much done without the workers. Because without them loading trucks on the docks, of “stuff” made by their cohorts, any “war” to make commerce would be lost, of course. It just so happens they live in a smaller house.

Same deal. Despite lower “pay”, and benefits packages, and with the nature of the day-to-day routine drastically different, this same paradigm is in place. A doctor might tell a nurse what to “do”, but couldn’t do this himself in most circumstances. The QB on the team, and for that matter the coaches, wouldn’t be considered very successful if not for, say, offensive linemen doing their thing out there. And while QBs are a rare find, there are an awful lot of big dudes offering their services “in the trenches” who have no hope of throwing a good spiral. But they’ll be happy to bang heads with those multimillionaires trying their level best to level your best…player. And… live in a slightly smaller house.

Policeman. Soldier syndrome or not? Follows direction, believes deeply in the cause, owns total control of situations. Can shoot if need be, sanctioned and authorized. Boss can’t do without him. Like essentially all soldiers, he can “go off” and become dangerous. And like a soldier, he expects “the man” to have his back. It’s all so simple really, and indeed this is the essential and defining feature of this syndrome, like so many “syndromes”: pretty simple really.

Not surprisingly, see the other very important survival instinct: A severe sense of self, and that what goes with it: serve and preserve the self, and in “serving” in whatever army, with the cause being just and all that, a dignification of the identity. Very natural indeed. Not real complex of behavior, but very natural.

So what’s the point?   In all walks of life, especially in business where “employees” make all efforts work, generals, like bosses and CEOs, must somehow use and utilize their services appropriately, or else everyone involved is screwed. In modern America, the plight of the soldier in these “battles”, where there are no live munitions or bombs bursting, is under assault. From the outsourcing of their “replaceable” skills, to the skinnying of their work packages, the stagnation of their pay, the assault on their values and freedoms (soldiers might want to catch a smoke in a bowling alley, say), and the clash and crashes of their cultures where impossible amounts of money are spent, awarded, and squandered, tells him again if not again that all his hard labor and commitment has somehow gone, dare we say it, unappreciated.

It is dangerous for us as a people and as a society to ignore their needs, to drain their energies. They are the ones carrying out the orders, and filling the orders, and no doubt in their own homes they’re probably giving out a lot of their own orders, and it is these dependents on their dad or mom who are our present and future. Politicians and other moneymen may feel the need and feel the nudge to operate the machine at other levels, hoping on a trickle down that eventually improves the standard of living in a foxhole of the world somewhere. Their record of achieving goodness for these worker bees and drones of our country can’t help but be spotty at times. Bet the lower rungs will feel it and give pause, so often concluding that “He” just doesn’t care about “Me”. Next thing you know there’s a million or two of them screaming for better. And if these soldiers and their mob lose faith, generals and colonels will soon begin to fear “the frag”. (“Frag”, short for fragmentation device, or hand grenade, is the term used when a soldier blows up a commanding officer with one, an expression of deep disagreement with duties given. Born in the Viet Nam era, hundreds of commanding officers were killed by their troops in this way to avoid a fatal operation to “take a hill”).

In any country, soldiers are the workers, the serfs, the help. The generals are the politicians. The frags are elections (usually, but not always). The bullets are bucks. And recessions are lost battles. In all cases, a look in the rear-view will show the warnings of a bad operation unfolding. Only rarely is the outcome so bad that revolution takes place. But if deficit spending, erosion of civil rights, empowerment of unproductivity, encroachment of Big Brotherhood, soiling of ecosystems, and re-derangement of values are simple examples, maltreatment of the soldier is always the result, and an “army” in disarray the real worry. If you don’t take care of him, guess what’s rolling into your tent next.

And you see it again and again, such that now you can call it its own phenomenon, the purely American character destruction called “Americanization”. The inspiration for this essay is a patron saint, and a social martyr of a sort, and a woman I’d never seen or heard of until she was Americanized, Paula Deen. For this phenomenon, all the key features are there in this particular case, a creature of beauty for pitiful America to behold, and then de-hold.

Dorky, clumsy, and socially awkward is often the profile that allows salt of the earth folk to achieve almost unreal success in The American Way. Through being so purely productive as to in fact embody what we want and need out of everyone, which is simply to be productive, that elevator goes all the way to the top. Ms. Deen, now there, perhaps did not know there was a target on her back. All she needed to do was find a stairway, and there are plenty of people there to push her down it.

Her offense was classic. Unwittingly and absolutely without malice, for people like her (rich and successful) all it takes is exactly one ramble or gaffe in one of America’s charlatanized strugglers (minority, identity challenged, victim, loser), and the avalanche is swift, immediate, overwhelming, and ruinous.

Let’s meet the team. Now again, you have to be significant enough for the industries to profit on your destruction, like, an empire of sorts. Someone or something who has made millions and gained notoriety. But the team is formidable, and they play together so well. First it’s the advertisers. Now that there is the big fall, they risk being dragged down with it. So they, and their dollars, are the first out your window, and their abandoning of you is a winning strategy for them, as they divorce themselves from whatever egregiosity you have been culturally indicted for. So there goes the revenue. Then there is the media, and I would never be one to criticize them or what they do. But they are generally simple people who know, and learned in school, that the pen is mightier than the sword. And God-forbid it’s a slow news period, because you are now the news, Ms. Deen. The twists, true and not, add implication to what you have allegedly done or said. And since media was created to not only report that the world is going to hell in a breadbasket, you are now their affirmation, er, re-affirmation.

Meet next the legal team. Their ability to whack you with a legal interpretation will now re-direct that money of yours into their pocket. When the constitution outlawed torture, in later invented tort-your. Little, people, they, with their hand on the choker.

Next, meet the self-minded pseudo sufferers. The Terri Schiavo syndrome. They need so badly to be hurt and heard from, they will now feel your victim’s pain, and as the bottomless pit that it is, there will be no climbing down from this tree. They just might carry a sign outside for months or years. Until even pop stars are singing and crying along. It’s good for their business too. All American squad, all for you.

Hope you’re enjoying the punch, now that you’ve become the punch line. Most of us would never have known this woman, and have forgotten her already. But still, we were party in attendance of a terrible and profoundly unfair fall that is merely a snapshot of what we’ve become: pitiful gawkers. So eternally frightened by a sky said to be falling, so desensitized to the evil and disasters of our mist, now vicariously absorbing energy for the technical knockout of the favorite, winner of so many bouts.

If pockets are deep, hands can’t stay out of them. The hands of capitalism. There is money in tearing down, or at least into, any successful American venture. The slightest slipup, and the response is automatic. Sticks and stones still break bones, but it used to be that words would never hurt you. It’s just the modern industry of communication and media, and sales of products that support them. And since we’re all in sales, Americanization needs only to sell you on the idea that missteps by successful compatriots be gaudy enough for the gawky, but potentially gruesome enough for the North American favorite, shock and awesome. And now a word from our sponsors.

How about a few more examples. Remember Jimmy The Greek? Ubiquitous guy, unique feel for winners of sport, says one off the cuff remark and became almost instantly Americanized. He was Greek American back when ethnicity was real and cool, and then never more American. And never seen again.

Joe Paterno. Could he have stopped a crime by destroying his close friend? What percentage of people would? But when the hammer fell, the retributionists stopped just short of digging the old man up and cutting his balls off. Gaining the moral high ground on a legend of society can only be done through proper ministration of capitalism, the American way. The shoot off the pedestal way. The great fall of an icon for everyone’s apparent benefit way.

Entertainers become Americanized on regular occasion. Slip up and out of line, and industry after industry will be happy to chime in. Talk shows now have a topic for today, and tomorrow they’ll need another one. Unless the sky really does fall, which is still a rare event. And now with social media, loud farts are viral in minutes, whether they smell or not. And while the Twitterverse cannot usually wax olfactorily, Americans have a good sense of imagination for these short-lived events, long as they have the right dynamic otherwise, which is embarrassment and exposure.

The NFL has become Americanized. Remember, unless you have success and money, there is no need for this predatory behavior of the pitiful. Breast cancer awareness, during a football game? I thought that’s when we weren’t to be reminded of the awful realities of life. Are you really having these guys wear pink? What will be your fee if they decide not to, public tears? A chemo strike? Domestic violence is the now the league’s issue? That noise you hear is nothing more than the sound of money changing pockets.

In my career I have witnessed an awful Americanization of the medical profession, to its great detriment. Health “care” became immensely successful for all the right reasons: it began with “care” by the people who really cared, like religious institutions and nuns and all that. It attracted the best minds of society, because that’s what it takes to do the job at all. It was based in science, and its value in dollars cannot be argued with, given the fact that well-being of loved ones is at stake.

But you cannot count the entities trying to suck life out of the thing. Start with lawyers, and Gasp!. Criminal Americanization, nothing less. Regulators and accreditors: the idiocy of nuance, making the job harder just for the hell of it, and to justify their job description. Insurance and money people. A hefty scoop right off the top, driven by the fear of maybe. And very large buildings to count all the money. Carrying these burdens is part and parcel of an American way that, more than anything, affords to do so. On the backs of that guy in the mirror. And more and more, that gal. Feel me bruh?

Actions used to speak louder than words, before there is so much money in words. Now the word is the action, the slight nudge that tips that first domino. And then it’s over we go, clappity clap on to the next one, where a greater fall and more of a thud will again thrill us with this simple, distant, world-away stumble on their way to and fro, the American way.