We then covered some basic morality as it relates to taking actions and living with outcomes.
Then we did some digressive exposition on Alcoholism, Cultism, and Neighborhoods Gone Bad.
I freely admit that I remember the days when they used to call Maryland "the Land of Pleasant Living", and for some people in some places in Maryland, that may be the case to this very day. Much of Maryland was settled by people whose idea of living a worthwhile life amounted to having sweat on your brow all day every day, and every evening you had a full plate on your table and several full mugs of beer and everyone loved some song and some dance now and then. As hard as you worked, that's how hard you played. You might be a waterman on the Chesapeake working from before dawn to the last daylight, but you also had all of the fine seafood you could eat and nobody could seriously entertain the idea that you wouldn't be washing down your crabcakes with beer or chasing your oysters with a shot of grog. You might be an orchardman and all day every day was all about the trees, but in the evenings there would be cider and plenty of it. The bricklayers had wine with their bread and cheese and people who worked for a living vastly outnumbered the sort of inky wretches that sweated in offices ruining their eyesight poring over the scribblings of other inky wretches.
Yet somehow, in Montgomery County at least, the inky wretches came to dominate. And it's sad but true, most of the inky wretches discovered that they had the talent to read well -- and to write as well -- while poring over the pages of Scripture, trying to discover for ourselves whether or not that man on the pulpit was telling us what the Bible said, or just making it up as he went along.
I was fortunate, I guess, in that the pastor at the church in which I was raised was not just a man of the cloth, but a man of the book as well, and he read more than Scripture or Gospel, and when he was preaching the love of God for man, he wasn't preaching condemnation, but salvation; not preaching that the wages of sin is death, but that repentance and forgiveness are life.
Live and let live, I always say, and live in freedom, I say as well. My people are deeply entertwined with the history of the USA, and with the history of American liberty. For us, it wasn't enough to have Freedom, for that is merely the absence of living in Bondage. We fought for Liberty, so that "as it harms none, then do as you will", and not just for ourselves. From before the Revolutionary War, and in Bleeding Kansas, we fought the worthy fight, and it's a matter of history that the slaves of the Confederacy were freed at the points of the bayonets of the German-Americans and the other 'immigrants' of the Union. For all of our history as a family, we've been saying "be free" and backing our words with deeds.
Looking back into history, we just wanted to farm or keep a shop or do the books or make things. Yet always there were the taxmen and the priests that told people that they were going to burn in hell and to give our money to the Church and to give our money to the taxman as well, for it was by Divine Right that the princes ruled this world in which we were born to be serfs. And as the princes and their churches warred in the early 1700s, killing one third of all German-speaking people over the time of the Thirty Years War, somehow we stopped believing that it is good to be subjugated and bled in this life so that we may have a better life in the hereafter. And so we heard with great joy the invitation of one Mister William Penn, and later we heard of the Revolution and a Constitution and a place called America where the priests were not law nor did the law require us to listen to the priests. Over the course of about 130 years, we migrated, most of us from the Germanies but many came from places in the United Kingdom, seeking not merely freedom, but liberty.
And for most of our history in this great nation, we have not merely defended our freedom, we did our best to stay as far as possible from the taxmen, from the priests, from the inky wretches. Yet as much as we migrated here to get away from them, they migrated here to attempt to again oppress us.
Somehow my mother's ability to keep books combined with her Hessen indomitability and her government career led from administrative duties at a rural Public Health clinic in New Mexico to an executive-assistance position here in the Nation's Capital region, rising as high as the times and her sex had the opportunity to rise, and she spent the latter half of that career pushing the envelope and not-incidentally furthering the cause of the rights and opportunities of Federal women workers. Her daughters found similar careers, though one did far more field work than the other. As for me, despite my inclinations towards my father's family tradition of pioneers, hunters, and farmers and builders, somehow I have managed to wind up in my mother's calling. I have become an inky wretch, more or less, though I'm doing my writing with electrons and I'm working for myself rather than being yet another Federal drone or PR-firm wonk. I can only thank my lucky stars, and my Higher Power, that I have not had to become a cross between a Federal drone and a PR wonk. I have not had to be employed by Montgomery County government.
I have, however, had to come to understand something really quite sad.
In Maryland -- at least here in Montgomery -- the Liberty for which all of my ancestors fought so hard is vanishing. The taxman came, and came hard and with a vengeance.
And furthermore, so have the priests.
Make no mistake about it. Various courts at all levels of the judiciary have declared that Alcoholics Anonymous and comparable groups are either religions, or serve the same purpose by providing all or almost all of the same services and functions. Alcoholics Anonymous will directly tell you that they believe that it's not possible to control Alcoholism or related psychological problems without a spiritual conversion, without confession, without fellowship, etc etc.
Allow me to digress for a moment:
Science had once attacked entrenched authority, but the new scientific expert himself became an authority himself. His business was not to seek out what is true, but to pronounce on what is appropriate.
--Ehrmenreich and English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Expert's Advice to Women
Further:
Unlike medical diagnoses, psychiatry’s checklists of behaviors lack any scientific validity and are renowned for being unreliable. Psychiatrists even admit this:
- Loren R. Mosher, M.D., former APA member, stated in regards to the DSM‐IV, "...there are no external validating criteria for psychiatric diagnoses. There is neither a blood test nor specific anatomic lesions for any major psychiatric disorder."
- Allen J. Frances, professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center and Chair of the DSM‐IV Task Force, stated: "There could arguably not be a worse term than mental disorder to describe the conditions classified in DSM‐IV."
- Psychiatrist David Kaiser wrote, "...modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biologic cause of any single mental illness.... Patients [have] been diagnosed with 'chemical imbalance', despite the fact that no tests exists to support such a claim, and...there is no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like."
- Professor of Psychology Jeffrey A. Schaler stated, "Since there are no objective tests for 'mental illness', all kinds of socially unacceptable behaviors will be declared 'mental illnesses'. The bottom line is this: Behaviors cannot be diseases."
Alcoholism is, by all measures and standards, a disorder which could almost be called a disease. It is, in fact, an addiction, a chemical dependency. Withdrawal can potentially be fatal, if the addiction is particularly severe.
Yet it's important to sort out the behavioral and mindset problems of the alcoholic from the physical dependence, the addiction, to alcohol.
The United States -- as set down in the vision of our Founding Fathers in all of the many writings which led to Revolution and then to Constitution -- are comprised in a movement unique in human history.
This sums it up nicely:
I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal enmity against all tyranny over the minds of men.
--Thomas Jefferson
I personally rather enjoy my Samhain jaunts to the Jefferson Memorial, where I indulge my fondness for surrealism by celebrating our religious freedom with the Wiccans, as they celebrate their most somber holiday at the official State Temple to Deism. But I'm not there just for the surrealism, nor for the rumbling sound which may either be the nearby subway or perhaps it's Mr Jefferson spinning in his grave. I really enjoy reading his writings which are carved in stone for all posterity to read and to remember.
One might wonder, would Mr Jefferson include in his "eternal enmity" the scourge of Alcoholism, and/or would he include the Cult of Midtown AA?
I think I can say with total assurance that Mr Jefferson would have no tolerance whatsoever for the idea of any court sentencing people to compulsory attendance at the religious services of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Yet Mr Jefferson isn't here to defend the Constitution nor his own viewpoint.
And in the absence of Mr Jefferson and the rest of the Founding Fathers, a movement towards an establishment of Theocracy is growing again in the USA, and like a sneaking cancer, pernicious, it's worming its way into the workings of government and the fabric of society like a campus rapist worms his way into the bed of a drunken coed at a fraternity party.
The US Supreme Court (in 1975, O'Connorhas ruled that the protections of the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment apply to mentally ill persons who have not committed a crime. Even if hospitalization is indeed required, hospitalization must not restrain the individual's liberties more than is really needed. See also Vitek v. Jones, 445 U.S. 480 (1980), "[...] Involuntary commitment to a mental hospital is not within the range of conditions of confinement to which a prison sentence subjects an individual. While a conviction and sentence extinguish an individual's right to freedom from confinement for the term of his sentence, they do not authorize the State to classify him as mentally ill and to subject him to involuntary psychiatric treatment without affording him additional due process protections."
Yet, as an alternative to incarceration for even fairly minor offenses, courts increasingly offer "alternatives" which are either religion-based -- such as Alcoholic Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous -- or based on what is in many cases something approximating a "pseudo science", attempting to treat mental illnesses that didn't exist before the DSM-IV committee decided to publish their latest opus. The majority of the "practitioners" in these programs have no medical certification, and possibly most of them don't even have a college degree in a related field.
More to come?
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