Dead Souls

As disasters accumulate around us, a war that won’t end as long as we supply the bullets for it, collapse of the few laws that seemed to mean we believe in justice such as affirmative action, failure to protest (even in the case of the disastrous decision to fund, with billions of dollars of taxpayer money allocated to Los Alamos to double its production of the pits that trigger nuclear bombs), the march towards a confrontation, deadly to all, with Russia—which has already cost that country fifty thousand dead in Ukraine—I find it instructive that the only voice calling for organized protest comes from the archbishop of the Roman Catholic church here in Santa Fe.

This is a voice confined to an audience of have-nots, always the bedrock of the Roman Catholic Church, which rarely contains the voices of the rich white men who propel what is a new arms race with a destination that will destroy the earth.

At the same time, privileged young white men in this country are busily destroying themselves, using inherited money to drug and drink themselves into early graves.

We don’t recognize that lives with no spiritual focus or discipline, no matter how privileged, lead to self-destruction. I know this from many experiences with my extraordinarily privileged birth family.

“Man cannot live by bread alone”—a lesson we have never been willing to learn during decades of “Bread and Circuses.”

As we struggle mightily as mothers to find solutions—which institutions will our sick offspring accept?—trying to ignore the fact that when we finally choose one he will accept, he will leave within a few hours or days to resume his “old life,” clinging to a faith that it is other people, especially mothers, never devoted enough, never self-sacrificing enough, who have caused this misery. Money means we can choose the most expensive of these bloodsucking institutions, shown in many studies to have no effect, but since they flourish in country club-like settings, we will choose them over the jails and lock-down hospitals that might at least for a while prevent these boys—actually grown men—from killing themselves, or go to court to have them committed. How furious they would be!

What happened to the energy and hope that created the Women’s Movement? The urge to reform capitalism that was a part of the 1960s? Everything dwindled away.

We never took these boys to church because they didn’t want to get up on Sunday mornings.

We never insisted on some kind of community work to justify the vast sums of money they inherited and consider only their due.

We never insisted that they stay in college after it became “no more fun.”

We never found a way to prohibit selling drugs and alcohol to children.

And now that the fear of litigation has meant that psychiatrists are sometimes unwilling to deliver an unwelcome diagnosis, like schizophrenia, rather than the bland and meaningless bipolar, dual diagnosis or depression, those whose suicide attempts have landed them in emergency rooms will soon be released to continue the march to destruction.

I sometimes wonder if we shouldn’t allow them to march on since it is inevitable, in spite of millions of dollars and years of agonizing efforts to find a solution for those who blame us for everything.

Are they of any use to the rest of the world?

These are not young men who will not inconvenience themselves to protest the coming war, or fight back against our insane enthusiasm for AI—a form of intelligence that can never enlighten since it does not issue from human brains, human systems of values (if there are still those, somewhere) or the suffering of the millions all over the world who will never benefit from this madness, never break our mad addiction to Amazon whose only asset is convenience and the haste with which some worthless trinket can be dropped at our doors, never work to raise the national minimum wage to a living wage (we don’t care about the workers who water our green lawns, serve up our coffee with ingratiating smiles, or teach our children), never insist that our children or grandchildren work summer jobs or volunteer, and countenance destructive behavior on all levels because “kids just want to have fun…”

I’m wondering if I can continue to worship at my beautiful Episcopal Church, silent in the face of doom, because I love the music, the well-trained choir, the gold embroidered vestments, the handsome, tall white-haired men ( a specialty of this denomination) and trek across town to the poor people’s Catholic church with its emasculated prayer book, dumbed-down hymns and volunteer choir.

At least in my church, I’m forced to listen to the Biblical lessons, including the “shocking” (to tender ears) story of Abraham, willing to sacrifice his beloved son since that is what God wants.

Instead we sacrifice ourselves and our world.

The outcome will be disaster.

In Politics Los Alamos women's movement Episcopal Church