Politics is defined as the art or science of influencing government policy. I’ve always been surprised by the term ‘science’ in relationship to politics but political science is defined as ‘the social science discipline that deals with the systems of government and the analysis of political activity and behaviour. ‘ A scientific study did show that voting was influenced by sunny versus rainy days. That’s good science.
All aspects of psychology, marketing and logic and rhetoric go into the ‘power game’ of ‘politics’. Indeed war was considered the last act of diplomacy. So politics might include nuking the enemy when all else fails. It’s not a particularly ‘ethical’ or ‘moral’ field if one views history. Politics has been part of the social behaviour of cannibals and the Amish. Nazis and Tibetans have politics.
I’d hazard to say that Meditation, the reflection on God or oneness or breath, alone, by oneself, is perhaps the exact opposite of politics.
Monasteries have major political disputes once two monks get together in a cell. Lovers are fine until the government of bed enters the equation as in ‘whose going to make the bed.'
I’ve had moments of mental illness when I’ve become involved in politics personally. I vote. I contribute money to political parties. But rarely have I actually got involved in ‘governance.’ I’ve been a ship’s captain and keeping a crew from mutinying when they are frightened has taken all my moral reserve. Marriage has had me thinking ‘all’s fair in love and war’.
To this end I appreciate the irony and difficulty involved in herding cats and humans.
Lovely studies like the “experiments’ show that most people will devolve quickly to murderous behaviour despite all their pollyanna high minded spiels of peace and good will.
All around the world there are clear and evident examples of the masses of people and large groups acting poorly given half a chance. What’s actually miraculously quite abnormal is to see people acting well. Those who think it is our ‘nature’ to be love children are to my mind, the most mentally ill, delusional, and likeliest to project their murderous rage on their neighbour. (They’re commonly attracted to the left wing which generally lacks standards so celebrates inclusivity and later gets into difficulty justifying pedophiles in their midst).
Our closest animal neighbour is the chimpanzee and ask the peaceful rhesus monkey how it likes living beside these fellows when they have a hankering for monkey brain. Even the peace and love bonobos who share equal DNA with chimps and man aren't loathe to kill other primates in a political way. So, for the mentally ill among us, killing is a ‘natural’ human trait.
However in the war research of “On Killing”, by Lt Col Dave Grossman, he has noted that collections of humans range from very good killers to not very good killers. Robert Hare the forensic psychologist has specifically looked at psychopaths and sociopaths. My favourite Sgte Major described his own killing propensity as “I don’t like killing other humans but there are wolves and I’m like a sheep dog. The wolves want to kill the sheep and I want to protect the sheep. Killing wolves follows from that."
We are living in a time when the sheep baaas and blatting have loud speakers called media and internet. The mentally ill deny their capacity for killing but are noted to enjoy the benefits of having killers among them. Presidents and Prime Ministers who are associated with the most violent of all, the ruling elites, (the billionaires, the tyrants, the democratic leaders, UN leaders, etc) all would disarm their populations while reserving the right to be surrounded by gun toting secret service and secret armies. Rarely are these men and women armed themselves so that they can maintain the lie. It’s always best that others don’t know your riches. Weapons have always been like gold. Bankers love to have lots of folk with major weapons protecting them.
So I did my time when younger, serving as secretary, vice presidents, and presidents and leaders in various organization. All my life I’ve been a member of churches and community organizations ‘volunteering’, but not particularly enjoying it.
The nature of my work is people in conflict. I’ve trained extensively in the politics of groups and family and individuals psychopathology. I’ve watched corruption permeate unions and administrations. I’ve had my life threatened and my family threatened when I’ve been effective in curtailing abuse.
Most activists are irrelevant. They are predominantly distractions. When the rubber hits the road, money is defended by weapons. Those who threaten wealth will be threatened. I tell political folk if you aren’t being ridiculed, threatened and demonized and called ‘mentally ill’ then most likely you are helping and enabling the very people you claim to be against.
The thing that all political scientists will tell you is that politics is complex. Science is ‘multi factorial’. I loved to play chess. It was the fundamental game to teach leaders politics and war. There are moves within moves.
I got distracted by politics this fall. Normally I’m trying to keep my head down. Canada is a terrifying country when you question authority. It may be the least terrifying country to question authority in or it may be the most deceitful. I belonged to a group called the “psychiatrists against the political abuse of psychiatry’. When one questions the killer elite (that 1-2% of society that hold power by force) one is imprisoned in a jail or an asylum. In Canada as opposed to China, Russia, Saudi Arabia or Argentina, political dissidents are rarely killed. They are usually ‘discredited’, and lastly put in jail or asylum. I was for a time a member of Physicans Against Nuclear War, Human Rights Association and the Canadian Civil Liberties. I have been frankly humbled and terrified by state power and frankly quite ashamed of my own cowardice and how little I tolerate pain and how easily truth can be discarded by the authorities who actually will tell you “we make the truth’.
Since my own “close encounter’ I have worked with torture victims and refugees from countries where the authorities are more heavy handed than here. I know most Canadians don’t know what they’re talking about. I have friends who ‘whisper’ still despite being in Canada for 20 years. It’s something I’ve yet to learn. That’s what’s so different about Canada.
So I’ve really avoided ‘politics’. Friends who knew me for causing student rebellions and overturning university magazines with acid tongued satire and political writing haven’t recognized me in recent years. I’m a coward. That’s the difference. I’m no longer innocent and I certainly don’t want to be a fool. There’s no ‘one bad man’. Modern times are a cowboy show. There’s not ‘good guys and bad guys’. It’s all a bit grey. The war of words is covered by the ‘fog of war’ just like the real war zone is. The evil is a ‘nest of men and women’ who are paranoids.
I stopped believing in the left or the right having any true distinction because the ‘elite’ will use whichever political system gives it the most control. I’ve actually begun to think they’re ready to shaft religion too for the ultimate power of ‘one world order’.
My main dialogue is with God. While I know God works through people and all of that I personally believe my focus needs to be on the transcendent. I belong to an organization that discourages even ‘righteous anger’ . But having decided a law degree would only help me with increased materialistic wealth, as the courts today are solely about money, and they’ve become a legal theocracy above all else, I thought I’d study for a master of divinity. I had done a ll the ecumenical studies in Christianity and extensive comparative religious studies and world religion studies. I was arguing more with God and yet having faith in God’s love. I worried about arguing with my parents because they’d just send me to my room. When I was married my wife would always win arguments with bedroom violence, the siege techniques of the headaches. It became obvious that no matter how ‘right’ I was others were more prone to covert aggression and less interested in the truth.
I loved books, like Brothers Karamazov, King Lear, the Gospel, The Torah, the Bhagat va Gita, the Koran, Thus Sayest Zarusthra, Franny and Zoe, Yogananda, Of Human Bondage, William James, Das Kapita, For years I’d study chemistry in the day and read the great tombs of literature in the evening. My wife at the time was a party girl and found my interest in book stores and intellectuals rather offensive. She liked light hearted chatter with agreeing girlfriends and family and avoided dialogue having come I’d later learn from a violent home where alcohol and fists ruled.
I have known always that homicide or suicide don’t win an ‘argument’. The person who does either ‘loses the debate’, simply because I don’t believe in death. I also believe if I wanted to be a killer I could be a better killer than anyone I’ve met. Which is why I became a doctor because it’s much harder to revive someone than it is to destroy them. My colleagues are still working on a cure for radiation poisoning. I’ve become adept at healing PTSD and really did a lot for people with head injury when no one else found these groups ‘sexy’ or ‘lucrative’. I’m less interested now that i know more colleagues who are superior clinicians in Neuropsychiatry and some of the great military psychiatrists are finally getting their due for their research in PTSD. There’s an irony that head injury research had to wait funding not for all the soldiers but for the hockey players and football players to appear to have concerns.
But personally my argument is with God.
My brother developed cancer this spring. He’s a young man. I was with my mom and dad when they were growing old and dying. My brother’s cancer is to my mind a product of the stress he’s faced being a good man in this country of Canada. He’s the best man I know. He was my big brother and protected me from bullies. We went to boy scouts together. We canoed. We hiked, We hunted. My dad and he and I and a dog were a ‘unit’ in the woods together. Fishing mom would come along in the boat but hunting it was just us three with my brother watching over me. Later he’d join the Billy Graham Movement, a really high minded man who was a leading academic and great sports man. He’s still playing hockey. He has been married all his life it seems to a beautiful brilliant woman and the two have had the most incredible brilliant sons all really smart fine people, engineer, geologist, psychologist. They’re hilarious and help out and work together. They’re a Canadian style Salvador Dali Rockwell Family painting in a Group of Seven backdrop. .
I believe my brother’s cancer is a product of the stress its’ become for good people to be good and do good work in Canada today.” It wears one down.
I’m in Vancouver where there’s a criminal every block. The principle economy was drug dealing. There’s gangs and killings and it’s all packaged for tourists like some pretty place where everyone is ‘pretty’. Yet the principal housing market has been dominated by offshore money which we hear by and by has come from factories run by killing workers or by communist gang theft or simple off shore graft.
My brother and I were in boy scouts. I loved the movie “The Last Boy Scout”.
As a family we recently watched Star Wars together. Notice these themes that appeal to the ‘underdogs’.
Politically I got pissed off after my brother got cancer. I have watched health care funding in Canada plummet and our hospitals become dominated by whack jobs. We have 20 times the administration of Germany with its equivalent if not superior medical care. Every doctor including myself lives in fear of political interference. We are told by lawyers to avoid drawing attention to ourselves. We are literally told to do the least for patients. Our political apparatchiks tell us the patient is the ‘customer’. I am punished for doing more never for doing less.
So then some wanker calls me a “Climate Change Denier”. This moron calls me ‘psychotic’ because that’s what ‘denial’ is. He says I’m not a scientist because I’m tired of pseudoscientists from the Silent Spring book, to the Ozone layer, then Methane Layer, Global Freezing, to Global Warming, to now Climate Change Fraud demanding money from real science for this attempt at making the UN a one world order and Agenda 21 the halcyon call for the killer elite of tyrant countries at the UN where freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of science are literally outlawed. In all these racist sexist UN countries there are scientists like Gallileo rotting in jails. The Saudis and the Thais arrest anyone who questions the divinity of the king. The Saudis behead them.
Now our government has given a few billion dollars to the UN wankers and the Climate Change Cult has spent a trillion and a half on bogus ‘save the planet’ bs, meanwhile I’ve watched medicine cure AIDS, erase epidemics, counter schizophrenia. It’s been a miracle after miracle working in the world of real science. We’ve put people on the moon and are sending people to Mars soon. We have lazer surgery and have extended life expectancy and cured countless baby deforming disease in the womb. We, the real scientists, are daily faced with government restrictions because the politicos want committee meeting after committee meeting to discus their coffee breaks. All the while I guess I see my brother having a curable disease, a mere cancer and I’m wanting all that bogus waste of money in the Climate Change Cult budget going where it needs to go, the cure of cancer.
So I went ballistic when Justin Trudeau won and took a 380 friend multi million victory party to Paris and gave billions of dollars to the UN tyrants and killers for their bogus pseudoscience scam Climate Change.
Meanwhile I work each day with heroin and cocaine addicts whose pushers are driving ferrari’s and the police are unable to catch them because of the corruption in our legal system that allows drug dealers and their rich political friends to get around the law. Meanwhile I live in fear like every other Canadian that I will make any mistake because I know that the police will have a swat team on me and the Revenue Canada will freeze my accounts and send in a mob of consulting accountants if I make even the tiniest mistake,Meanwhile criminals and drug dealers and lying climate change cultists and fat cats galore get away with rank evil.
I don’t do well with politics any more. I have a flashing ‘suicide/homicide sign in my head and begin thinking of gassing myself and setting myself on fire because the sheer stupidity and corruption of the system sickens me. Meanwhile I share on face books because I keep thinking I can wake up cabbages.
But we’re all really happy slaves. Well fed.
One is mentally ill to question authority in Canada. One is perhaps even more mentally ill if one doesn’t at some time question God. Atheists might do well to question themselves.
Now the Muslim Migrants en mass are coming and I’m flash backing to the sheer terror I lived in during the IRA bombings in London and I know Justin Trudeau doesn’t care. The elite are protected. They live here in West Vancouver. They don’t live in Kitsilano or Richmond, or even Shaughnassey. They certainly don’t live in the Downtown Eastside.
They have lear jets and howitzers and helicopters and private armies and if they get cancer they go to Swiss Clinics and Mayo and thankfully there is ‘trickle down science’ and we learn from the cures that they get for their cancer.
My brother is getting great care and the cutting edge in cancer treatment. My parents had great medical care. Our family has had really good medical care. And I’m just afraid. My Prime Minister is offering us marijuana and physician assisted suicide. I’m past retirement age but like all north americans we’re being told that we can’t afford to retire. I don’t want to retire. I just thought I’d have this trade and be able to practice this trade called ‘medicine’ wherever I went.It’s like a carpenter but now there’s a baurocratic tollgate for every action i take. there’s a tax on using the outhouse.
So I’m frustrated. I think the government is throwing money away on cronyism and not addressing the real issues. So I got involved in politics. I became a ‘critic’. I’m spiritually supposed to be celebrating the positive and ignoring the negative. I just can’t see any positive. It’s my perspective.
I don’t like being a critic. I like to sing Kumbaya and have group hugs and put my head in the sand like an ostrich. I like to meditate. I like to be a hermit. I’m happiest alone in Canada’s north with a trailer a truck and a rifle and a dog. I occasionally like others for brief periods.
I like helping people, healing, know my chemistry and pharmacology but mostly like to watch ‘relationship therapy’ in action. As my lawyer friend said, I saw you become a doctor and thought that if you can get through school so could I. Now I watch addicts and alcoholics stop drinking and drugging figuring if a loser like me can get through life without smoking cigarettes or smoking dope or getting drunk or shooting up, maybe they can. I have far more pleasure and joy than the average person. i’m blessed beyond any desert I have. I’m grateful for the impossible mercy of the universe. I’m in love with life at times. I’m thankful to be human. I know so much depends on perspective. I see the effects of my patients depression and mania on the same situation. I know these things.
But I don’t like politics. I don’t like playing the critic even if I know it’s a game. I don’t think I’d like killing the enemy but I’d be a damn good sheep dog.
Right now we’re in a war of words. We’re losing. So much we took for granted like ‘freedom of speech’ is gone. We have massive propaganda and marketing budgets keeping us collectively stupid. There is a conspiracy. It’s call the Elite or the state and you. I knew Reagan was an actor so I didn’t mind if he was a puppet at times. He was a believable puppet. Justin Trudeau is a high school acting student. He’s just not believable. His insincerity is so transparent. I have to give him credit he’s trying. I would rather celebrate the good guys but frankly I don’t see any yet on the other side. it’s not that our Prime Minister is so bad but it’s that ‘this is the best we as Canada can produce’, a high school teacher with a winning name and a cupcake body and Justin Bieber smile. This is all we as Canadians can put forth.
I want a Winston Churchill even knowing I’d probably have been a critic of him or an Ataturk or a Jefferson.
I really must get back to talking with God. I truly believe he’s the one that’s the primary producer , director and writer of life so there must be something I’m not getting and it’s fundamentally in my relationship with God and not anything to do with cancer or Justin Trudeau or Migrant Muslims.
I’m aging and coming to terms with my death and looking back on my life and thinking that all those ‘ideals’ I believe in and fought for, and sacrificed for, like ‘freedom’ ,are evaporating. We know, too, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” I think of that each day as I see the food lines and shelters and tent cities increasing in Canada. There’s a great image in Dr. Zhivago when the smart money man looks out on the street at the starving people outside the restaurant. I like Douglas Adam’s ‘Restaurant at the End of the Universe’ image best.
Maybe I fear I will be a prisoner of death. I’ve known always that homicide or suicide can free me from life. I say ‘homicide’ and mean, I could ‘hop on a plane’ tonight, fly to the front, whichever one, and join someone killing terrorists and no doubt get myself killed. I could walk out today and be a missionary doctor in Africa and die in the weekly persecution of Christians. I am ‘free’ in this life.
But death. I think I’m afraid of it because I fear there will be no ‘freedom’ there. So the encroaching totalitarianism in Canada makes me face the fact that God has given me death around the corner and I’m not ready for it. I realize I’m in this stream of life and I literally can not swim back against the rising pressure of history, biography and science.. My brother is no longer ‘free’ because he has a cancer, like a parasite, attached to him. I know he wants with all his life to be free of this rebel within, this disease that goes against everything he believes in.
I’m sorry I’ve been angry with politics and government and all the media nonsense. I’m sorry I’ve argued with friends and strangers on Facebook. My argument is with god. I know this. I have faith but still that doesn’t mean I have to go quietly. My meditation these days is more a 'nails on glass' scream. I’m past the point of ‘om’. I’m not ready to say ‘amen’ either.
Showing posts with label killing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label killing. Show all posts
Saturday, January 16, 2016
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
Journal, Sept. 1, 2015
I would like to wake up like my dog. Gilbert is always bright eyed and bushy tailed. He wakes happy and excited. Licks my face. Walks all over my chest, squirms and cuddles me. Then eventually brings me a yellow tennis ball because he knows that will be the first thing I want to do when I wake up. Sometimes he just drops it into my face in case I want to chew on it before I throw it for him to fetch.
I wake up more grudgingly. I had great dreams last night. There's a world I often find myself in, in my dreams, this alternate reality. I return to it often. It's not the toilet where there's shit everywhere and no where to shit or stand. That's a bad dream. I didn't have that dream. No this other place is water, boats, people, dogs. I'm often rounding a peninsula in a sailboat, anchoring in a sheltered cove. It's sunny and blue sky and the sea is calm. I'm walking with a dog near the shore. Lots of meetings with friends and family. Sometimes there's old people and coffee tables. It's what I imagine heaven as. I didn't really want to leave those dreams this morning.
If I showed up in someone else's office and described my feelings, they'd say I was 'dysthymic'. Probably a little seasonal affective disorder, the technical explanation. End of summer, beginning of fall. I find my mood fluctuated with the sunshine. Then there's that Canadian thing of fall and winter where the summer is leaving and it's like losing a loved friend you don't see enough of. This summer seemed to rush by. I feel like I've hardly had a summer. So much work and stress and anxiety and burdens. They're not even mine but I've carried them.
Just yesterday, on the last day of August I said to a colleague, 'Freud took his holidays in August. August used to be the slowest month. Everyone cancelled. Peoples problems were less. There seemed to be more optimism. What happened?" He agreed. This August was different. Troubling. Less carefree. The pace was steady at his office too. No change in the density and traffic and flow. None of the lulls. That's what it was for me. The emotional sound of nails scraping on a chalk board or frozen pane of glass just seemed continuous all year round. My patients circumstances, often financially burdened, didn't change. Even as they learned new ways of coping the stresses they were under increased.
We're aging too. Not only are the celebrities of our youth and adult hood dying but friends and mentors. Grieving is a reason for feeling blue.
Taxes were a trial this year. The office move was costly and unsettling. An expanding company growing wealthy with increasing staff and marketting success displaces the lawyers and doctors working in their little office. The big guy has more clout. Our leases come up. They're not renewed. One can't blame a big corporation wanting to collect from just one tenant rather than a dozen. But moves are unsettling. I'm aging and fear I'm seeing change as loss more than as opportunity.
Aging is all about loss and handling loss gracefully.
I didn't ride my motorcycle or take out my boat as much as other years. The challenge and work of it all seemed unattractive. I chose to run on weekends instead, thankful for the repair of injuries and the returning athletic capability. It's hard though. Everything hurts. I hurt when I walk to the washroom each morning. All the traumatic arthritis of distant crashes and near death remind me with the first stiff and painful steps of the morning.
When I talk with friends I feel more and more like I'm reviewing the conversations I loathed when my father and mother shared. I tell her I've got back pain tying my shoes. She says her vagina itches.
Only older people 'share' such intimacies freely. Harry tells me about his hemorrhoids. We discuss infirmities. All the medical words I learned as a young doctor my friends are now using to describe their own symptons. I try to remain in denial. Denial is my first and favourite go to place.
Aging and the thought of dying are contemporary discussions. I am morally against physician assisted suicide but I know that suicide is never far from my mind. Homicide isn't that far away either. Thankfully the Darwin Awards allow me to laugh about all the stupid people. The older I get the more people seem stupid. And truthfully they are. Their inexperience and ignorance coupled with their arrogance is flagrantly thrust in your face. The worst are those with some power.
Daily someone tells me about grandstanding clerk or low level government worker cutting off the heads of others to make themselves look taller.
I find myself back biting, back stabbing. I speak negatively about individuals and institutions and immediately regret it. My long deceased aunt who was the executive assistant to the Canadian ambassador in Washington during WWII never said a negative thing against others. At her funeral it was what we all talked about. No one could remember this lovely Christian woman saying anything negative about anyone. She used to say "if you don't have anything good to say about someone it's best you say nothing." She was silent at times. We remember that. But I love that she was so positive and refined. I would be like her.
I have resentments. I have fears. I find myself often with one foot in the past and one foot in the future, resenting something in the past or worrying about something in the future, shitting and pissing on my day because I can't get my head in the same room as my ass is. I'm constantly bringing my mind back to the present. The present is all I truly have and it's called a present because that's where God is. Yet I'm a sinner. To sin means 'to miss the mark'. It comes from the days of archery when the intention of the archer was to hit the bullseye but for a variety of reasons including his attitude he missed. I'm trying to focus on God and the present and practice the presence of God but all too often I'm distracted by news I listen to with the misinformation and disinformation of the media.
I find myself wanting to enlighten everyone to the lies that I hear. The talk of the economy is put at a propaganda level of communication. There's 'techniques' of misinformation and disinformation that Hitler and later Stalin first ingeniously developped. Then the marketting companies advanced them so that every add campaign now incorporates these fallacies and cognitive distortions. I listen to the source and hear the 'hustle' or the 'ad campaign' then later in the day hear otherwise intelligent folk parrotting the fashion of the month. I'm momentarily crazed. I feel like the human in the alien attack 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers."
But what does it matter? Stupidity is being nurtured. Collectively we're being herded. Someone is pulling the strings. Or is it just as it is.
I struggle to avoid thinking or discussing matters that are 'above my pay grade'. It would be so easy to be paranoid, knowing one is right, relishing the warm cuddly feeling of victimship and being paranoid. Even Freud said 'sometimes the paranoids are write'.
But I'm a psychiatrist. I'm trained to 'tolerate the tension of opposites'. Like the chess player I am I play either side with equal skill. I see the Glass Bead Game for what it is. Just light and shade. I remember Leonard Cohen's song, There's a war between the rich and the poor, a war between the man and a woman.....there's a war between the odd and the even."
It's the dualism. It's Martin Buber's I and Thou. My questions and concerns are always a dialogue with God. We're forever playing hide and seek. I'm facing death and life is just another state of discussion with death. Everything is relationship. I'm just trying to find the laughter and the love. The "L" words. Sex is a metaphor for our relationship with life. Everythign is bipolar, waves and particles, everything in motion. Finitude is an illusion but infinity and finite are just faces of a coin.
Unfortunately the more intelligent one is the more risk there is for depression. As a great older Christian psychiatrist told me , bitter people are a dime a dozen. "You don't want to be a bitter old man. That's common.'
My friend talks about the obese ladies, first gaining weight then wearing runners and expandable pants. "They've let themselves go," she says.
Addictions are a way of living with one central fear of death and invalidity. The existential questions are now poignant for me. I read Kierkegaard, Camus, and Doystoyevski as a kid, appreciating the art and enjoying the story. Today I wonder if the hundred babies I delivered were good. Or were half terrorists. My friends children are drug addicts and drug dealers. I look back on a life of healing but wonder how many of those I healed went on to be criminals and murderers. I took comfort in my indiscriminate love yet today I question the daily work of rescue and seeing every single person as a child of god and treating them as if they were a family member. I prided myself in believing I was being a good person treating the devil and the saint equally. I took an oath 'do no harm' and now with 'physician assisted suicide' being promoted by the Supreme Court of Canada, I'm looking back wondering if all those suicidal people I spent hours, days, weeks and years convincing that life was worth holding on to, well maybe I was wrong. I could have worked less, made more money, had an easier life, just killing people. I know the abortionists have a hell of a good life killing babies. I still have nightmares about the dead baby I delivered. I still have nightmares about the boy who suicided on my watch. If I was a killer at worst I'd have to think about the ones who lived.
The abortionists haven't always got away with their killing. I heard the deformed courageous woman who didn't die when she was aborted. She lived and told her story. "J'acuse" comes back to mind. The great French story of justice.
But my friend says there's no 'justice in the courts'. The courts are there solely to protect the rich and maintain the status quo. The reformer is the enemy of anyone who benefits from the status quo. So the whole the beaurocratic system and all the outward appearances of the government system especially the courts are there to maintain the position of the rich and powerful. They now have a term 'social justice' and it's even more disengenuous. Deconstructionism and constructionism. Right is wrong. Black is white. I read between the lines and educated beyond my intelligence see what's really being said. The government and courts are as 'fixed' as soccer and Vegas.
But of course it's all above my paygrade.
If I knew what I know today, would I do what I've done with my life. Well, I wouldn't have married. I told my wife that her idea that marriage was for a couple and that marriage didn't need kids meant that marriages might as well be gay. I'd married for the sake of family and the women overnight said 'my body my own.' My baby was killed aborted. I married and raised some women who were only little girls and we played at love and kept each other close covering each others back for a decade at a time. But the children were killed and I couldn't even save the life of my own child. The Supreme Court killed my baby as much as anyone. The Prime Minister and Queen killed my baby. And now as I age I'm growing more and more alone. Like millions of other men who daily must struggle to avoid being bitter.
Another man says his son stole all his money and left him to die. Her daughter is using the grand children to maintain her drug habit. Her children get her the money from social services she uses to maintain her addiction. Obviously if one wants to be bitter, one can chose having children or not having children as the excuse for having a bad mood.
My bad mood is explained as much by anything but I wonder if life wouldn't have been better if I had devoted myself to learning killing instead of healing, Hundreds of my patients begged me let them die. I struggled through depression after depression. I helped women get through morning sickness and waddling days, and aches and pains then labour and delivery only to find that the courts and the beaurocrats are going to judge me in my senility on my 'popularity'. I took over from a doctor who the patients still sing the praises of down here in the Down Town Eastside. He's famous today and I see that he maximized the methadone and opiates he could give, maximized the benzodiazepines he gave and didn't ever really address their addictions, didn't recommend abstinence but just gave them more and more drugs until they died or he left and said he was sorry he couldn't give them more illusion and pain relief.
I expect families will thank me for killing their relatives. So many of my patients over the years have suffered caregiver burden. I have defended my patients over and over again from relatives who were wanting them dead or committed. I have fought to protect my patients assets and over and over again begged and cajoled to get them housing and treatment and hospitalization. I now think if I'd just become a lawyer I could have written a law and told the physicians to kill the patients. I'm still struggling with a judge who condemned me for advocating for my patient and the doctors who supported him. It doesn't matter that years latter my lawyers 'won' and the doctor's role as 'advocate' was upheld. I know this judge as a lawyer had a conflict of interest. All over the lawyers are looking to be in every aspect of our affairs insisting only they can represent everyone. So now we each of us daily need a lawyer who is a beurocratic body guard. My rich colleagues have them on retainers and some go into the hospitals with their lawyer at their side.
I think of physician assisted suicide as I consider these profound changes in society and the devolution of Canada as I know it. I've read the horror stories of Holland's experience with legalized marijuana, their banning BC Bud, their 180 degree turn around after 20 years of that failed experiment. I've also read how their 'physician assisted suicide' started out kindly then became a variation on Hitler's gas chambers with widespread killing of the aging mentally ill because killing is always cheaper. The addicts are given places to shoot up because their doctors don't believe in them as humans. They've given up hope. It's palliative care because we'd rather spend money on court rooms and elections and massive government waste and corruption than on authentic health care.
But what do I know. My opinion about what is right and wrong is just one man's views. The whole of the democratic process suggests that each individual's opinion is equal to another. So today more and more individuals on the planes I fly on think their opinion is as good as the pilots. M ore and more people comes into my office after a cursery look at internet and tell me what I'm supposed to do as a doctor. Everyone is an overnight expert with a google and it doesn't matter that the research says that all the computer health care programs have a 50 to 80% error range. It's sexy.
A few of us old doctors at the back of the lecture hall listened to a couple of cute your female academic doctors give a presentation on 'Physician burn out". They called their talk 'compassion fatigue'. We joked, "when was the first time you diagnosed yourself as burnt out."
My first year after residency. When I left the university and was on my own in real medical practice.", one answer.
"I stopped counting after my 19th nervous breakdown", the other grey haired world reknowned clinician said.
I said, I've not had a drink or drug in 16 years so I don't know if I'm just being a 'dry drunk - "rest irritable and discontent' or I'm experiencing "burn out".
"Remember that survey a few years back where every doctor said they'd have more compassion if they got the annual $50,000 in back pay they thought they deserved but had been diverted to excessive administration whose role seemed sorely to interfere with medical and nursing care."
Yes I do.
I don't see anyone lining up to work with ex criminals, drug dealers, addicts and the dangerously insane but you notice how people who've never got their hands dirty are the quickest to be critics.
We began talking when the lecture was on, pulled our selves to gether and listened to the pollyanna stuff about getting exercise and getting enough sleep taking more time to keep up with the literature and all this 'sweet recommendations' we usually hear from the College, the day before or after they come up with some recommendation that multiplies every physicians workloads a hundred fold or the government refuses to pay for the increasing aging patient practice. It's so easy to tell others to do the work.
"I've been hoping for war, " I said after that lecture ended and the three of us continued to talk. "I ask God for forgiveness but it seems it's the only way that the 'dead weight' is winnowed out of the fat cat systems. Germany has a better health care system and 1/20 the administration. "
The things breaks down into a poor me and shared expressions of self pity.
"I can 't afford to pay for me kids university and the alimony his mother demands."
And three old doctors all obviously suffering burn out have an ad hock group therapy session and go off laughing in the end.
The rich and poor, the doers and the takers, the lovers and the haters have always been around. 12 step programs broke down the source of fear and resentment to 'financial insecurity, concerns about ambition, concerns about status, concerns about face and friends, and family." Mental health is defined as the ability to love, work and play,.
There's infinite amount of work for doctors and never enough time in the day. Our love lives collectively suck and increasingly no one has the time or resources for play. Doctors can't afford to buy a house in Vancouver on their income. But then no one can, except those who inheritted or the criminals.
Bitch bitch bitch.
We have gratitude lists to change our attitudes. I have to give my head a shake minute by minute. I thank God for the light and darkness, the happiness and sadness, sickness and health, the good and the bad. It's only in the contrast can I appreciate the good. I am thankful for this life. It's had it's ups and downs. I know there are drugs to make everything bland. The addicts I see are bubble boys and bubble girls. They are living their lives in illusions wrapped in the candy floss of their drug of choice, missing out on 99% of the spectrum of living. I remember when I drank wine, smoked a joint or smoked a cigarette. Even these are their own valium type experiences. Living life on life's terms is walking a high wire. It's 'raw". It's the same with being intelligent. It would be so much easier to be stupid and believe in the 'group think' 1984 reality.
It's like the desire to take the other pills colour in the movie Matrix. Just live in the Solyent Green world.
Time to get on with reality. Ironically until they insist I kill people, they have made it law that I pimp for the abortionist, it's not enough that I say I don't do abortions, I required by law to make their killer richer. I expect the same will happen shortly when I say I'm too old to start killing patients for profit and they're say it's not enough for me to say I don't do it but that I must phone the killers and make appointments for my patients. I wonder if I should go back through my lists of people I convinced not to kill themselves over the last three decades, speak to each of the hundred individually and encourage them to reconsider our decision. I really think the lawyers in the supreme court should have taken lessons in boundaries and profession and stuck to 'lawyer assisted suicide' rather than telling physicians to kill their patients. At least in Saudi Arabia they have a public executioner. Given the way they've been botching up their killing in the court and jail side of the ugly business they probably want 'physician' assisted suicide because they know only physicians seem to know how to get things done. Which is why every restriction is place on us and the system hates and is terrified of us and other scientists.
I have to get back to making gratitude lists. This is always a me and God, I and it or I and thou thing. The complexity reduces to me and the other. I'm obviously not in a loving carefree mood. If I surrendered and accepted God is in charge and all loving then I'd feel better.
It's all above my pay grade. As my friend says we're all 'slaves'. Best to be grateful to be an 'inhouse nigger'. He laughs at me calling me a 'wage slaves'. He bought parking lots and made a lot of money. The parking lot prices outside the hospitals and clinics are always the best source of revenue.
I lack some gene that makes him think like that. Still I love his humor. God has a real sense of humor. When you can get your head around that then finally you stop taking yourself so seriously. I have to remember that.
I wake up more grudgingly. I had great dreams last night. There's a world I often find myself in, in my dreams, this alternate reality. I return to it often. It's not the toilet where there's shit everywhere and no where to shit or stand. That's a bad dream. I didn't have that dream. No this other place is water, boats, people, dogs. I'm often rounding a peninsula in a sailboat, anchoring in a sheltered cove. It's sunny and blue sky and the sea is calm. I'm walking with a dog near the shore. Lots of meetings with friends and family. Sometimes there's old people and coffee tables. It's what I imagine heaven as. I didn't really want to leave those dreams this morning.
If I showed up in someone else's office and described my feelings, they'd say I was 'dysthymic'. Probably a little seasonal affective disorder, the technical explanation. End of summer, beginning of fall. I find my mood fluctuated with the sunshine. Then there's that Canadian thing of fall and winter where the summer is leaving and it's like losing a loved friend you don't see enough of. This summer seemed to rush by. I feel like I've hardly had a summer. So much work and stress and anxiety and burdens. They're not even mine but I've carried them.
Just yesterday, on the last day of August I said to a colleague, 'Freud took his holidays in August. August used to be the slowest month. Everyone cancelled. Peoples problems were less. There seemed to be more optimism. What happened?" He agreed. This August was different. Troubling. Less carefree. The pace was steady at his office too. No change in the density and traffic and flow. None of the lulls. That's what it was for me. The emotional sound of nails scraping on a chalk board or frozen pane of glass just seemed continuous all year round. My patients circumstances, often financially burdened, didn't change. Even as they learned new ways of coping the stresses they were under increased.
We're aging too. Not only are the celebrities of our youth and adult hood dying but friends and mentors. Grieving is a reason for feeling blue.
Taxes were a trial this year. The office move was costly and unsettling. An expanding company growing wealthy with increasing staff and marketting success displaces the lawyers and doctors working in their little office. The big guy has more clout. Our leases come up. They're not renewed. One can't blame a big corporation wanting to collect from just one tenant rather than a dozen. But moves are unsettling. I'm aging and fear I'm seeing change as loss more than as opportunity.
Aging is all about loss and handling loss gracefully.
I didn't ride my motorcycle or take out my boat as much as other years. The challenge and work of it all seemed unattractive. I chose to run on weekends instead, thankful for the repair of injuries and the returning athletic capability. It's hard though. Everything hurts. I hurt when I walk to the washroom each morning. All the traumatic arthritis of distant crashes and near death remind me with the first stiff and painful steps of the morning.
When I talk with friends I feel more and more like I'm reviewing the conversations I loathed when my father and mother shared. I tell her I've got back pain tying my shoes. She says her vagina itches.
Only older people 'share' such intimacies freely. Harry tells me about his hemorrhoids. We discuss infirmities. All the medical words I learned as a young doctor my friends are now using to describe their own symptons. I try to remain in denial. Denial is my first and favourite go to place.
Aging and the thought of dying are contemporary discussions. I am morally against physician assisted suicide but I know that suicide is never far from my mind. Homicide isn't that far away either. Thankfully the Darwin Awards allow me to laugh about all the stupid people. The older I get the more people seem stupid. And truthfully they are. Their inexperience and ignorance coupled with their arrogance is flagrantly thrust in your face. The worst are those with some power.
Daily someone tells me about grandstanding clerk or low level government worker cutting off the heads of others to make themselves look taller.
I find myself back biting, back stabbing. I speak negatively about individuals and institutions and immediately regret it. My long deceased aunt who was the executive assistant to the Canadian ambassador in Washington during WWII never said a negative thing against others. At her funeral it was what we all talked about. No one could remember this lovely Christian woman saying anything negative about anyone. She used to say "if you don't have anything good to say about someone it's best you say nothing." She was silent at times. We remember that. But I love that she was so positive and refined. I would be like her.
I have resentments. I have fears. I find myself often with one foot in the past and one foot in the future, resenting something in the past or worrying about something in the future, shitting and pissing on my day because I can't get my head in the same room as my ass is. I'm constantly bringing my mind back to the present. The present is all I truly have and it's called a present because that's where God is. Yet I'm a sinner. To sin means 'to miss the mark'. It comes from the days of archery when the intention of the archer was to hit the bullseye but for a variety of reasons including his attitude he missed. I'm trying to focus on God and the present and practice the presence of God but all too often I'm distracted by news I listen to with the misinformation and disinformation of the media.
I find myself wanting to enlighten everyone to the lies that I hear. The talk of the economy is put at a propaganda level of communication. There's 'techniques' of misinformation and disinformation that Hitler and later Stalin first ingeniously developped. Then the marketting companies advanced them so that every add campaign now incorporates these fallacies and cognitive distortions. I listen to the source and hear the 'hustle' or the 'ad campaign' then later in the day hear otherwise intelligent folk parrotting the fashion of the month. I'm momentarily crazed. I feel like the human in the alien attack 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers."
But what does it matter? Stupidity is being nurtured. Collectively we're being herded. Someone is pulling the strings. Or is it just as it is.
I struggle to avoid thinking or discussing matters that are 'above my pay grade'. It would be so easy to be paranoid, knowing one is right, relishing the warm cuddly feeling of victimship and being paranoid. Even Freud said 'sometimes the paranoids are write'.
But I'm a psychiatrist. I'm trained to 'tolerate the tension of opposites'. Like the chess player I am I play either side with equal skill. I see the Glass Bead Game for what it is. Just light and shade. I remember Leonard Cohen's song, There's a war between the rich and the poor, a war between the man and a woman.....there's a war between the odd and the even."
It's the dualism. It's Martin Buber's I and Thou. My questions and concerns are always a dialogue with God. We're forever playing hide and seek. I'm facing death and life is just another state of discussion with death. Everything is relationship. I'm just trying to find the laughter and the love. The "L" words. Sex is a metaphor for our relationship with life. Everythign is bipolar, waves and particles, everything in motion. Finitude is an illusion but infinity and finite are just faces of a coin.
Unfortunately the more intelligent one is the more risk there is for depression. As a great older Christian psychiatrist told me , bitter people are a dime a dozen. "You don't want to be a bitter old man. That's common.'
My friend talks about the obese ladies, first gaining weight then wearing runners and expandable pants. "They've let themselves go," she says.
Addictions are a way of living with one central fear of death and invalidity. The existential questions are now poignant for me. I read Kierkegaard, Camus, and Doystoyevski as a kid, appreciating the art and enjoying the story. Today I wonder if the hundred babies I delivered were good. Or were half terrorists. My friends children are drug addicts and drug dealers. I look back on a life of healing but wonder how many of those I healed went on to be criminals and murderers. I took comfort in my indiscriminate love yet today I question the daily work of rescue and seeing every single person as a child of god and treating them as if they were a family member. I prided myself in believing I was being a good person treating the devil and the saint equally. I took an oath 'do no harm' and now with 'physician assisted suicide' being promoted by the Supreme Court of Canada, I'm looking back wondering if all those suicidal people I spent hours, days, weeks and years convincing that life was worth holding on to, well maybe I was wrong. I could have worked less, made more money, had an easier life, just killing people. I know the abortionists have a hell of a good life killing babies. I still have nightmares about the dead baby I delivered. I still have nightmares about the boy who suicided on my watch. If I was a killer at worst I'd have to think about the ones who lived.
The abortionists haven't always got away with their killing. I heard the deformed courageous woman who didn't die when she was aborted. She lived and told her story. "J'acuse" comes back to mind. The great French story of justice.
But my friend says there's no 'justice in the courts'. The courts are there solely to protect the rich and maintain the status quo. The reformer is the enemy of anyone who benefits from the status quo. So the whole the beaurocratic system and all the outward appearances of the government system especially the courts are there to maintain the position of the rich and powerful. They now have a term 'social justice' and it's even more disengenuous. Deconstructionism and constructionism. Right is wrong. Black is white. I read between the lines and educated beyond my intelligence see what's really being said. The government and courts are as 'fixed' as soccer and Vegas.
But of course it's all above my paygrade.
If I knew what I know today, would I do what I've done with my life. Well, I wouldn't have married. I told my wife that her idea that marriage was for a couple and that marriage didn't need kids meant that marriages might as well be gay. I'd married for the sake of family and the women overnight said 'my body my own.' My baby was killed aborted. I married and raised some women who were only little girls and we played at love and kept each other close covering each others back for a decade at a time. But the children were killed and I couldn't even save the life of my own child. The Supreme Court killed my baby as much as anyone. The Prime Minister and Queen killed my baby. And now as I age I'm growing more and more alone. Like millions of other men who daily must struggle to avoid being bitter.
Another man says his son stole all his money and left him to die. Her daughter is using the grand children to maintain her drug habit. Her children get her the money from social services she uses to maintain her addiction. Obviously if one wants to be bitter, one can chose having children or not having children as the excuse for having a bad mood.
My bad mood is explained as much by anything but I wonder if life wouldn't have been better if I had devoted myself to learning killing instead of healing, Hundreds of my patients begged me let them die. I struggled through depression after depression. I helped women get through morning sickness and waddling days, and aches and pains then labour and delivery only to find that the courts and the beaurocrats are going to judge me in my senility on my 'popularity'. I took over from a doctor who the patients still sing the praises of down here in the Down Town Eastside. He's famous today and I see that he maximized the methadone and opiates he could give, maximized the benzodiazepines he gave and didn't ever really address their addictions, didn't recommend abstinence but just gave them more and more drugs until they died or he left and said he was sorry he couldn't give them more illusion and pain relief.
I expect families will thank me for killing their relatives. So many of my patients over the years have suffered caregiver burden. I have defended my patients over and over again from relatives who were wanting them dead or committed. I have fought to protect my patients assets and over and over again begged and cajoled to get them housing and treatment and hospitalization. I now think if I'd just become a lawyer I could have written a law and told the physicians to kill the patients. I'm still struggling with a judge who condemned me for advocating for my patient and the doctors who supported him. It doesn't matter that years latter my lawyers 'won' and the doctor's role as 'advocate' was upheld. I know this judge as a lawyer had a conflict of interest. All over the lawyers are looking to be in every aspect of our affairs insisting only they can represent everyone. So now we each of us daily need a lawyer who is a beurocratic body guard. My rich colleagues have them on retainers and some go into the hospitals with their lawyer at their side.
I think of physician assisted suicide as I consider these profound changes in society and the devolution of Canada as I know it. I've read the horror stories of Holland's experience with legalized marijuana, their banning BC Bud, their 180 degree turn around after 20 years of that failed experiment. I've also read how their 'physician assisted suicide' started out kindly then became a variation on Hitler's gas chambers with widespread killing of the aging mentally ill because killing is always cheaper. The addicts are given places to shoot up because their doctors don't believe in them as humans. They've given up hope. It's palliative care because we'd rather spend money on court rooms and elections and massive government waste and corruption than on authentic health care.
But what do I know. My opinion about what is right and wrong is just one man's views. The whole of the democratic process suggests that each individual's opinion is equal to another. So today more and more individuals on the planes I fly on think their opinion is as good as the pilots. M ore and more people comes into my office after a cursery look at internet and tell me what I'm supposed to do as a doctor. Everyone is an overnight expert with a google and it doesn't matter that the research says that all the computer health care programs have a 50 to 80% error range. It's sexy.
A few of us old doctors at the back of the lecture hall listened to a couple of cute your female academic doctors give a presentation on 'Physician burn out". They called their talk 'compassion fatigue'. We joked, "when was the first time you diagnosed yourself as burnt out."
My first year after residency. When I left the university and was on my own in real medical practice.", one answer.
"I stopped counting after my 19th nervous breakdown", the other grey haired world reknowned clinician said.
I said, I've not had a drink or drug in 16 years so I don't know if I'm just being a 'dry drunk - "rest irritable and discontent' or I'm experiencing "burn out".
"Remember that survey a few years back where every doctor said they'd have more compassion if they got the annual $50,000 in back pay they thought they deserved but had been diverted to excessive administration whose role seemed sorely to interfere with medical and nursing care."
Yes I do.
I don't see anyone lining up to work with ex criminals, drug dealers, addicts and the dangerously insane but you notice how people who've never got their hands dirty are the quickest to be critics.
We began talking when the lecture was on, pulled our selves to gether and listened to the pollyanna stuff about getting exercise and getting enough sleep taking more time to keep up with the literature and all this 'sweet recommendations' we usually hear from the College, the day before or after they come up with some recommendation that multiplies every physicians workloads a hundred fold or the government refuses to pay for the increasing aging patient practice. It's so easy to tell others to do the work.
"I've been hoping for war, " I said after that lecture ended and the three of us continued to talk. "I ask God for forgiveness but it seems it's the only way that the 'dead weight' is winnowed out of the fat cat systems. Germany has a better health care system and 1/20 the administration. "
The things breaks down into a poor me and shared expressions of self pity.
"I can 't afford to pay for me kids university and the alimony his mother demands."
And three old doctors all obviously suffering burn out have an ad hock group therapy session and go off laughing in the end.
The rich and poor, the doers and the takers, the lovers and the haters have always been around. 12 step programs broke down the source of fear and resentment to 'financial insecurity, concerns about ambition, concerns about status, concerns about face and friends, and family." Mental health is defined as the ability to love, work and play,.
There's infinite amount of work for doctors and never enough time in the day. Our love lives collectively suck and increasingly no one has the time or resources for play. Doctors can't afford to buy a house in Vancouver on their income. But then no one can, except those who inheritted or the criminals.
Bitch bitch bitch.
We have gratitude lists to change our attitudes. I have to give my head a shake minute by minute. I thank God for the light and darkness, the happiness and sadness, sickness and health, the good and the bad. It's only in the contrast can I appreciate the good. I am thankful for this life. It's had it's ups and downs. I know there are drugs to make everything bland. The addicts I see are bubble boys and bubble girls. They are living their lives in illusions wrapped in the candy floss of their drug of choice, missing out on 99% of the spectrum of living. I remember when I drank wine, smoked a joint or smoked a cigarette. Even these are their own valium type experiences. Living life on life's terms is walking a high wire. It's 'raw". It's the same with being intelligent. It would be so much easier to be stupid and believe in the 'group think' 1984 reality.
It's like the desire to take the other pills colour in the movie Matrix. Just live in the Solyent Green world.
Time to get on with reality. Ironically until they insist I kill people, they have made it law that I pimp for the abortionist, it's not enough that I say I don't do abortions, I required by law to make their killer richer. I expect the same will happen shortly when I say I'm too old to start killing patients for profit and they're say it's not enough for me to say I don't do it but that I must phone the killers and make appointments for my patients. I wonder if I should go back through my lists of people I convinced not to kill themselves over the last three decades, speak to each of the hundred individually and encourage them to reconsider our decision. I really think the lawyers in the supreme court should have taken lessons in boundaries and profession and stuck to 'lawyer assisted suicide' rather than telling physicians to kill their patients. At least in Saudi Arabia they have a public executioner. Given the way they've been botching up their killing in the court and jail side of the ugly business they probably want 'physician' assisted suicide because they know only physicians seem to know how to get things done. Which is why every restriction is place on us and the system hates and is terrified of us and other scientists.
I have to get back to making gratitude lists. This is always a me and God, I and it or I and thou thing. The complexity reduces to me and the other. I'm obviously not in a loving carefree mood. If I surrendered and accepted God is in charge and all loving then I'd feel better.
It's all above my pay grade. As my friend says we're all 'slaves'. Best to be grateful to be an 'inhouse nigger'. He laughs at me calling me a 'wage slaves'. He bought parking lots and made a lot of money. The parking lot prices outside the hospitals and clinics are always the best source of revenue.
I lack some gene that makes him think like that. Still I love his humor. God has a real sense of humor. When you can get your head around that then finally you stop taking yourself so seriously. I have to remember that.
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