New York City – When it comes to health care reform, the U.S. reminds me of a relative I had who suffered paranoid delusions, likely due to brain tumours. Trying to help her led to accusations that I was trying to harm her.[rssbreak]
True, she didn’t call me, as Barack Obama’s critics have labelled him, a “socialist,” but only because that was a compliment in our family.
The fact that a Sarah Palin-?invented delusion about Obama supporting “death panels” – supposedly to decide if the infirm should be treated – may be a significant factor in killing real reform is enough to make any sane person crazy.
But those protesters at the town halls and the recent million-?lunatic march (about 60,000) on Washington, DC, aren’t really afraid of death panels. They’re afraid of death itself.
The problem arises from the fact that many Fox Network-?type Americans do not die but are or will be Raptured up. They are for death panels, or, rather, for one particular death panel: the one overseen by Jesus Christ. God, unlike Democrats, has a precise plan for their health.
Then there’s America’s reckless unilateralism and massive debt, both of which suggest that the nation is suffering from delusions of untouchability. And don’t forget the cult of celebrity, where the famous rarely show signs of aging, and those who do do so inhumanly, like Michael Jackson. Mostly celebs simply vanish as if Raptured up, while those of us who actually age, get wrinkled, gain weight and lose hair are left behind.
This is somewhat true in most First World countries. As Walter Benjamin observed, the development of the modern hospital not only made death a more sanitary event, but also sanitized our minds with respect to death. It seems we mistook this progress for a kind of magic that made death itself vanish, until our own illness or that of a loved one forces us to think about it.
I know a little about how this works from personal experience. The sick relative I mentioned at the beginning of this piece was my mother. A few years after she died, I attended a support group for bereaved young adults (and later was so inspired by the process that I went on to become a facilitator).
The sense in my group was that death was a wholly unreal event and we weren’t prepared to handle grief. Even the word “handle” comes to mean we “deal” with difficult experiences instead of actually experiencing them.
Add to this culture’s general avoidance of grief America’s cult of unnatural beauty, its fanatical religious climate and rampant individualism, and you can see some of what is psychologically behind the wilful ignorance in the health care debate.
Still, I feel some sympathy for the death-?panel protesters. I believe in their hearts they know the only real death panel consists of nature and time, both of which are completely indifferent to their hysteria.
Carl Jung might say that death or fear of death is America’s “shadow,” and that instead of acknowledging its own mortality, that fear is projected onto “the other,” in this case a black man, transformed in his opponents’ psyches into a Conradesque archetype rising out of the Heart of Darkness, come to kill the old and sick.
Clearly, America, you need therapy. Unfortunately, under your current health care system, its cost won’t be covered, since psychosis is considered a pre-?existing condition.
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