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Otherlander's Journal
One enters the West Ward as though it is the death house. (Apologies to Carl Solomon, who I love madly.) Agitation at confinement is met with further confinement. Crying, a healthy human response that lets bad chemicals escape the body through the eye ducts, is punished. One is told to calm down, but the pain is never acknowledged, the justification for one's emotions is never recognized, sympathy is never offered. An autistic boy of seven, restless and sensory-overloaded, breaks down and cries, curled on the floor, kicking the air. He is dragged away by a red-haired thug. One of the kicks connects with the thug's leg. The thug responds by banging the boy's head against the wall. At this point I put my body between the boy and the thug. For this I was quickly locked in isolation. And I swear to you I heard disappointment dripping from the thug's voice when the nurse told him that this act of civil disobedience did not, in fact, require me to be sedated (again). In the west ward one is held captive, a process directly opposed to healing. But if one wishes to leave, one must pretend to be healed by captivity. One is trained for hypocrisy. One is trained in the suppression of emotions, which is bad for the mind and body. Essentially, one is trained for neurosis and heart attacks. I wrote this essay on several paper towls with a stolen red crayon, stolen because all writing implements are contraband. Gone are the days when people would openly declare that madmen should be locked away indefinitely and punished for their condition. Now a veneer of treatment has been applied. But the system still operates on an essentially punitive basis, and most of its patients can sense this intuitively. Morality is perverted. One is conditioned to judge right and wrong not by one's own sense of good and bad but rather by the level of reward or punishment that authority responds with. There is little solidarity between the patients of the west ward. No one wants to risk being locked in isolation for standing up for one of their fellow patients, so they remain silent as authority makes its unjust decisions. The most one will ever do is whisper the semi-helpful warning, "Don't let them see you doing that." I was looked at as crazy or stupid for being the only one repeatedly putting myself upon the wheels and gears of the machinery. The west ward deals with its captives solely in clinical terms, never in human ones. And when it is done with them it sends them out with nothing but some irrelevant formalities, without a word of objection to the status quo, with nothing changed, back into the world that drove them to the ward in the first place. The ones in the West Ward are the lucky ones. Here are some of the not-so-lucky ones:  Naomi Ginsberg  Christian Palko ( AKA Cage ) We have a long, long battle ahead of us.
They are, and all it does is destroy their desire to learn. The first few years aren't so bad: nursery school, pre-k, and kindergarten aren't really that structured. Kids are naturally curious about things, they ask questions, they look at things and ask what they are and how they work and if they have a good teacher, the teacher answers their questions, and encourage the kids to ask more questions. Then, once "real" school starts, education becomes drills, schedules, and pretty much everything that's poisonous to the natural want to know things. What child- hell, what person- is going to have a positive attitude toward learning when "learning" means not being able to go outside for seven hours and getting in trouble for doing anything that it's human nature to do? (Namely, talking, laughing, looking at new things, or just not sitting in a chair without moving.) Not to mention, as the years go on, the knowledge gained becomes less and less likely to be useful. Learning to read and write is definitely useful. Learning about the water cycle probably is. Learning how to take the second derivative of an equation rarely is. Not that I'm saying that education should just be about gaining life and career skills. If schools, rather than training people to operate as cogs in a machine, were used as gathering places where children could interact and be exposed to different fields of knowledge, obviously not everything a student showed interest in would be a practical skill, and that's a good thing. If, for example, someone wants to be a chef when they're a kid, and winds up being a nurse when they're an adult, it's wonderful if they've also gotten the chance to learn about history, poetry, or martial arts. An open structure of education can be seen in freeschools, but they're usually private schools that only people who are relatively well-off can afford. This kind of defeats the purpose, I think, because upper-middle-class suburban kids are the ones who are the best compensated for their cooperation with the standard mind-numbing educational system. The kids with less money are the ones who see less of a point in cooperating with the machine and being a cog in a wheel: "I see my parents following all the rules, and what has it gotten them? Hardly anything!" They're the ones who would benefit most from the freeschools, and they are the ones least able to get into them. Rant over. Brief summary: Forcing children to learn things sucks. But there is some Spanish that people should probably learn: Viva la Escuela Moderna.
and you still make that much sense? That's amazing!
But yeah, it's kind of weird, we tell ourselves this lie that we're something other than beings evolved to self-perpetuate, to fight for good territory, eat, fuck, and protect the offspring. And then we're shocked when it turns out that we behave in natural ways instead of being god-like beings. And we say, "Such horrible behavior! There must be something wrong with the human race!" It's not uniquely human. It's just animal. Like us.
It seems that it would be better if we could accept that that's what we are, instead of expecting that we'll somehow become better than all the other animals.
But it does kind of seem like we have a weird system set up that's unlike that of any other species. If you're a wolf, and you're going to act entirely out of self-interest, you're going to look out for your pack, because you need them to help you hunt for food and protect your offspring. Humans who only act out of self-interest wind up doing things like stealing from each other and running factories where people get paid crap and replaced by robots.
And here we are
And people can't do anything but yell at each other.
Because there's death everywhere, and hate, so much hate that we are playing the dead against one another.
Dead here dead there dead everywhere as reasons to yell at each other because we think different and only the dead are the same,
because there are killers everywhere, and so the dead are coming in from campuses and streets from America from Baghdad from Tikrit from Virginia Tech the names and numbers of
the dead are coming in
who in life did not know each other did not have anything against one another,
yet people stand throwing the names of the dead like weapons at one another as if the dead were enemies
I only watch.
more dead again.
So I guess I understand what people here are doing. It must feel better to scream without end than to watch the names of the dead come in.
***Everyone please ignore this thread. I know I already posted it, but I need to repost it with smaller versions of the photographs so it won't mess up my journal.*** An empty place:   A long path:  
There's a lot of anger at Cindy Sheehan for getting in the Democrats' faces about Iraq. But if she didn't say it, who would? The invasion has been a disaster from the start. And there wasn't a lot of resistance to it. I know: the Democrats were in the minority. 9/11 was still fresh in everyone's minds. They were lied to by the president. They didn't have the power to stop it. BUT NOW THEY DO.
There's far more of a opposition to the war now, among the American people and the Democrats in Washington. There are signs of progress, timetables being proposed. And if we're going to be realistic, we have to work with them, not against them.
But as important as it is for the Democrats to do what they're doing, there must also be those who refuse to negotiate. Who shout their rage at every injustice and refuse to budge one single inch. They keep the more pragmatic among us from forgetting what we stand for. They remind the powerful that if they don't deal with us, they'll have to deal with them.
When every day means more deaths, when justice is denied every minute of every hour, patience is no virtue, my friends. Patience is a crime. And I, for one, agree with Cindy. You want to call that unrealistic? Fine, then. It's still a voice that must be heard, a voice as irrational as hope itself.
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