AMERICA, IT’S TIME FOR YOUR MEDS

Student (a “normal”-looking 16-17-year-old): “I can’t study today, Miss. I didn’t take

my medication”.
Teacher (flusters a bit, then gives in): “Uh, OK, you’d better sit this class out, I
guess.”
This kind of scene is a common occurrence these days, according to a recent
Washington Post article by high school teacher Nancy Schnog. Ms. Schnog works,
incidentally, not in a crime-ravaged inner-city ghetto but in the ultra-upscale suburb
of Potomac, home to many of the capital’s top lawyers and politicians. As a
pragmatic and reality-based professional, she avoids an emotional response to the
situation, preferring to sound out child guidance and medical experts before
developing an ad hoc study strategies program for her charges – so I’ll take the
liberty of providing the sense of outrage which is missing from her article.

The stress-inducing conditions that lead so many teenagers to be medicated turn out essentially to be the many
“pressures on their lives” and “brain-unfriendly lifestyles structured by adults”. In short, welcome to the modern
world: unfriendly indeed not only to brains but also to hearts and spirits. Yet to medicate oneself or one’s family
in response is to eliminate any chance of a natural and spontaneous response – including rejection, indignation
and a desire for change (is it any surprise that the movers and shakers of this world don’t encourage their
offspring to rebel against it?) Adolescence is a time of conflict and dissonance anyway, whether we grow up in
Potomac or in Anacostia (99% poor, 99% black, 9 miles away), in Zurich or in Nairobi; it’s the frontal impact of
our childhood dream-world with the reality that actually surrounds us, the painful acknowledgement of our own
and our parents’ limitations, and of the gap we suddenly can’t pretend away between who we’d like to be and
who we really are. How we deal with this gap is both a measure of who we are and a marker for the people we’re
going to become as adults – and medicating the problem away is an outstandingly bad start to the process of
growing up, denying the pain and the challenge rather than responding to it.

And while we’re on the subject of denying reality, the news has been full
recently of stories about the rise of the Tea Party Right and its new icons
such as Christine O’Donnell, Republican candidate for Joe Biden’s former
Senate seat in Delaware. Like her putative role-model Sarah Palin, this
champion of fiscal probity and straight talking is trailing some troublesome
baggage (in O’Donnell’s case, some $60K in unpaid tax bills and college
tuition fees) – but to her followers those are merely the signs that she’s
suffered like them, with them and for them. Anyway, since most of the Tea
Partiers believe that President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim determined to
turn the USA into another North Korea, the evidence threshold for them is
clearly very low – it’s about who’s speaking, not the data they amass to support their case.

Here, by way of a bit of data, is a chart depicting America’s

headlong rush towards Socialism over the past 30 years.
Interestingly similarly-shaped charts would show the decline of the
nation’s transport and communications infrastructure, and of its
advantage in secondary and higher education – both areas where
the USA once led the world but is now trailing many European and
Asian nations. All this bears witness to the New Right’s success in
siphoning money away from public-benefit expenditure and into the
pockets of the ultra-rich, while deregulating business to the further
benefit of that top 1% (or, even more, the top 0.1%). That’s why, of
course, right behind and firmly underpinning the supposedly
spontaneous and “just plain folks” Tea Party we have massively corporate-backed interest groups such as Dick
Armey’s Freedom Works and the Koch Brothers’ various front organizations, not to mention Fox News Corp.

The denial of reality that’s involved here is reminiscent not of adolescence but of a much earlier stage of
development, namely toddlerhood, where the dissonance between the world we desire and the one we
experience is simply too great to be borne and we opt for the former – until our parents drag us kicking and
screaming back to theirs. Bill Clinton has several times warned of the corporate hand in the Tea Party glove, and
of course President Obama (a parental figure if ever there was one) speaks repeatedly of the need for massive
investment in infrastructure and education. But what use do toddlers have for bridges and trains, schools and
universities? – they just want to be told that the candy jar is full, or if it all too obviously isn’t full, a nice simple
story about who stole the candy. And provided that story comes from a trusted source like Sarah or Glenn, it
doesn’t need to have the smallest element of truth in it, or of evidence to support it.

You see, that’s the great thing about toddlers: they may be darned stubborn at times, but they’re quickly and
easily turned by a determined adult. They’re not seeking their own way in
the world – they’re nowhere near ready yet – just flustered and unhappy and
looking to be comforted. Young children don’t even need to be beta-blocked
out of their painful encounters with reality – although there is an increasing
tendency to do that as well, as the pharmaceutical industry seeks new
business opportunities in hitherto under-medicated sectors of the population,
by diagnosing them with “ADHD” and other recently “discovered” conditions.

(There are apparently even multiple varieties of ADHD, each one with its
own recommended pharmaceutical nightstick, according to this jokey little
chart put together by a Dr. Daniel Amen (sic), whose diagnoses are given
authority by the claim that they’re based on brain scans. You can read all
about it for free online – “ADHD Comes in Different Types” – in an article
filled with ads for 1-800 drug ordering services.) Neuroscience plus medication: the remedy for any ill that might
afflict us – including, why not, ballooning deficits and crumbling infrastructure? Sucking one’s thumb and looking
sulky is so 20th-century.

It sometimes seems that much of the USA is afflicted with a debased form of the belief propagated by the book &
movie “The Secret” (itself, as Marcus Anthony – http://22cplus.blogspot.com – has usefully and cogently pointed
out, a distorted and debased version of the Law of Attraction). The idea – very toddler-like – is that I only have to
want and believe hard enough for reality to become whatever I want it to be: secretive right-wing billionaires
become defenders of the common people, official birth certificates become Photoshop fake-ups and vice versa,
and, above all, everything that’s going wrong is the fault of the bad guys (liberals, immigrants, foreigners etc.)
And if ever a glimpse of reality should still appear through the cracks; well, there are always the meds.

The main problem with denying reality or medicating it away isn’t moral but practical – why shouldn’t we all float
away on a pink cloud of pharmaceutical and Fox News oblivion if there were no consequences? But there are
serious consequences: it weakens one’s ability to overcome difficult circumstances, and makes one vulnerable
to manipulation by anyone with a likely story and an ulterior motive. Toddlers don’t look behind the scenes to see
who’s pulling the strings; they take the puppets as real and autonomous agents. An unhappy, confused and
easily manipulated populace with no real agenda in search of comfort and/or vengeance are easy meat for the
powerful corporate interests who aren’t confused, know exactly what they want, and have a very precise
agenda.

And in this fairy story the wolf not only eats Grandma but convinces Little Red Riding-Hood that she is Grandma
– complete with a spoonful of medication to help settle the little girl’s doubts. America, you’d better wake up; the
beast’s appetite is far from sated yet.