[align=center]Nothing to fear but the media itself[/align]
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http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/colum...ia_itself_.asp
Common Sense

by John Maxwell
Sunday, April 22, 2007


[align=justify]It is one of the most famous maxims in the English language: 'There is nothing to fear but fear itself'. It was said seven decades ago by President Franklin D Roosevelt, the man who effectively reinvented the United States of America and made it the most admired nation in the world.[/align]
[align=justify]Things have changed[/align]
[align=justify]Nothing has changed so much perhaps, as the American vision of itself.
Today American self-confidence is at its nadir, inspired by a government which sees itself surrounded by enemies, infiltrated by traitors and aggressively inconsiderate of anyone and anything that does not conform to its increasingly paranoid ideology. 'America' today is driven by fear. Fear sells.[/align]
[align=justify]On television Americans are taught to fear a myriad of newly discovered diseases as well as aging, ugliness, fat, osteoporosis, strangers, migrant workers and new ideas. The drug companies are perhaps the best exemplars of this tendency. Money is to be made by selling panaceas for exotic new diseases like 'acid reflux' and 'restless leg syndrome', the cures for which are often worse than the diseases themselves. One does not expect that a side effect of a stomach soother might be 'death' or that pain killers might precipitate heart attacks.[/align]
[align=justify]In a culture in which it is smart to be fearful, anxiety itself soon becomes a major motive force in the society, determining whether one will go to the park or the opera or stay at home battling demons on the Playstations and the interactive web.
Fear of course, is a major inhibitor of initiative. One does not dare if daring is likely to be beset by numberless, nameless threats, each more debilitating than the last.[/align]
[align=justify]So, I was saddened, but not surprised, to hear that more than 50 people were paralysed into inaction by one lunatic with two handguns, and that this madman was allowed to stalk a university suite of classrooms, killing nearly three dozen people and wounding nearly 20 more.[/align]
[align=justify]There were examples of courage. The Romanian born holocaust survivor who blocked a classroom door with his body so his students could escape. There were one or two others who dared, but most of the rest seemed to wait, paralysed, for their executioner. These were mostly young people, in the prime of life and with everything to live for.[/align]
[align=justify]Nobody thought to try to mob the man, or to ambush him. If your chances of dying are nearly 100 per cent, what do you have to lose by direct action, by throwing a desk or your own body at your attacker? Trying to disrupt the script would seem to be the most advantageous course, if you are thinking not only of your survival but of the survival of others.[/align]
[align=justify]In the aftermath of the slaughter at Virginia Tech University, the media have been filled with the anguish of survivors, with interviews with parents and friends and most of all, since Wednesday, with the ravings of the killer, Cho Seung-Hui.
CNN for one has replayed certain clips of this deranged young man incessantly, sometimes 10 times in an hour.[/align]
[align=justify]The video clips were among material mailed by Cho to the NBC newsroom, between his first two murders and his second rampage which ended with him killing himself and leaving 32 others dead.
According to spokesmen for the media, the decisions to broadcast Cho's madness were not taken lightly. Of course not; there was too much audience share at stake, too much money. As an editor for most of my life, my decision would have been to have reported on the package and its contents, making sure that my report would not have exacerbated the suffering of the families of the victims and of the society as a whole.[/align]
[align=justify]Broadcasting Cho's crazy rants adds nothing to the story, nothing to the public interest. All it could do was to shock and frighten, to terrorise and to drive fear into the community as a whole. The fact that Cho was a Korean and obvious 'outsider' was not, I believe, incidental to the decision. It is in the same class of outrage as the doctored picture of O J Simpson used on the cover of Time magazine 12 years ago.[/align]
[align=justify]The American media will defend to the bottom line, their decision to broadcast the crazy rants of Mr Cho. What the media have not done is to try to find out why he behaved as he did, whether there is something in the culture of the United States which provokes mentally ill people to take such violent action against their fellows, whether access to firearms should not be limited.[/align]
[align=justify]Monsters among us?[/align]
[align=justify]If one pays attention only to the media it is easy to believe that the world and particularly the United States, is roamed by regiments of monsters in human form. There may well be monsters, but the facts suggest that people like Cho are not supernatural creations, but perfectly natural.[/align]
[align=justify]A recent (2005) study - The National Co-Morbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R) - has found that in the United States, mental illness begins early, usually by age 14, and that untreated mental disorders can lead to more severe illness, more difficult to treat. Half of all mentally ill people are diagnosable by age 14, and three quarters of them by age 24. As the study points out, mental disorders are the chronic diseases of the young.
Unlike heart disease or most cancers, young people with mental disorders suffer disability when they are in the prime of their lives when they should normally be most productive.[/align]
[align=justify]"The pattern appears to be that the earlier in life the disorder begins, the slower an individual is to seek therapy, and the more persistent the illness," said Dr Kessler, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. "It's unfortunate that those who most need treatment are the least likely to get it."(NIMH press release).[/align]
[align=justify]In the case of Cho, several people recognised that there was something seriously wrong with him. Both happen to be black women: Nikki Giovanni, professor of Poetry at VaTech, and Lucinda Roy, professor and department head, to whom Giovanni referred Cho. Roy took Cho as her own student and tutored him on his own for a whole semester. She reported her suspicions to the university and to the police, but nothing happened.
In a study published this year, it was found that the children of immigrants tended to have a higher risk of mental disorders than their parents, suggesting that the risk is cultural rather than genetic.[/align]
[align=justify]While foreign born Asians have a 15% lifetime prevalence of mental ill-health, their children have a nearly 25% prevalence.
What is necessary is that a civilised society must be its brother's keepers, and as such must look out for the lost sheep. This Lucinda Roy and Nikki Giovanni did. Cho was also reported to the police by his classmates, because he was stalking women. He was never prosecuted because the women declined to bring charges. But it seems to me, the police needed to organise help for this young man, because although they could not prosecute, there was something definitely wrong which, untreated, might give them larger problems later.[/align]
[align=justify]As it happened, Cho did come before a court and was ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation, but there was no follow-up and he was able to sign out of the psychiatric facility within days.
One of the reasons for this is that there simply are not enough qualified mental health workers in the US, and this is because the budget for mental health services has been cut by half over the last 20 years.[/align]
[align=justify]This is an alarming fact when it is realised that in any given year one in four Americans (26.2%), 18 years or over suffers from a diagnosable mental disorder. That means that if you live in the US, you are at any moment in your life, liable to be in the presence of someone who is mentally ill if you happen to be in the company of three or more people. At any given moment, more than 55 million Americans are suffering from a mental disorder, some severe, some mild.[/align]
[align=justify]The burden of mental illness is huge around the world. The NIMH says "Data developed by the massive Global Burden of Disease study conducted by the World Health Organisation, the World Bank, and Harvard University, reveal that mental illness, including suicide, accounts for over 15 per cent of the burden of disease in established market economies, such as the United States. This is more than the disease burden caused by all cancers". (my emphasis).[/align]
[align=justify]Unfortunately, while the money available for treatment is being rapidly reduced, the pressure and stresses of modern life job insecurity, economic dependence, the fear of losing homes and other anxieties, are increasing.
At the same time there is a continuing stigma attached to the idea of mental illness, ancient superstitions and ignorance still persist.[/align]
[align=justify]One (black) victim of Cho's survived to give his opinion that Cho was possessed by the devil. Our civilised societies are apparently not civilised enough to recognise the humanity of our neighbours, to understand that their best interest is also our best interest.
In Jamaica, desperately ill people are let loose on the streets to be vilely abused, to be beaten, stoned, raped and set on fire by other lost elements of our society.[/align]
[align=justify]While altruism appears to be built into the human psyche, it also seems that part of our primitive 'lizard' brain, needs to be subdued and civilised, to be educated and socialised to understand that 'mad' people are no different from the rest of us, that physically handicapped people are indeed human and that all of us deserve the same rights and the same treatment.[/align]
[align=justify]In societies that treat the disadvantaged as less than human, can anyone wonder that the disadvantaged have their own pecking order?
That the treatment they receive from on high is passed on, with interest, down to those to whom they consider themselves superior?[/align]
[align=justify]Human rights, again[/align]
[align=justify]I must confess my amazement this week to read in the Gleaner the following headline: 'Leave 'gays' alone!'
Church, human rights groups, politicians call for end to beatings.
I was surprised because in the present hysterical atmosphere, I found it amazing that any politician or religious leader could be found with the courage to defend the human rights of all people, including homosexuals.[/align]
[align=justify]According to the Gleaner, Bishop Herro Blair said: "While the act [sic] is illegal and immoral, Jamaicans must abstain from mob violence and should instead seek to build a culture of tolerance for such individuals."[/align]
[align=justify]Bishop Blair's ignorance is typical of politicians and most other Jamaicans, including the former prime minister and some of his ministers. According to them, they did not intend to "decriminalise homosexuality". Homosexuality is not criminal. It cannot be 'decriminalised'. It is not illegal to be homosexual.
What is criminal is behaviour on which homophobes are fixated: buggery. What most people do not realise is that buggery is sex neutral and that under our laws; buggery of male OR female is illegal.[/align]
[align=justify]It apparently does no good to point out that human sexual relations are not limited to specific sexual acts but encompass whole dimensions of behaviour which may or may not even be physical.
Our fundamentalist preachers are, apparently however, totally fixated on homosexual buggery which they regard as the greatest threat to the human race.
En passant, they seem to ignore the hundreds of thousands of children who are beaten, raped, burned and mutilated in the cause of 'discipline'.[/align]
[align=justify]The persecution of homosexuals is more important to them than the welfare of children or women, the protection of the economic welfare of the poor or any other consideration. It will therefore come as a considerable insult to them to be informed that all the latest scientific research shows that not only are women's brains different from men's but that homosexuals' brains are also formed differently.[/align]
[align=justify]That, of course, means that homosexuality is not a lifestyle, any more than being male or female is.
In a recent story in the New York Times researchers point out that the male and female versions of the human brain are formed differently and operate in distinct patterns, despite the heavy influence of culture. The male brain is sexually oriented toward women as an object of desire. The most direct evidence comes from cases, some of them
circumcision accidents, in which boy babies have lost their penises and been reared as female. Despite every social inducement to the opposite, they grow up desiring women as partners, not men.[/align]
[align=justify]"If you can't make a male attracted to other males by cutting off his penis, how strong could any psychosocial effect be?" said J Michael Bailey, an expert on sexual orientation at Northwestern University. "Presumably the masculinisation of the brain shapes some neural circuit that makes women desirable. If so, this circuitry is wired differently in gay men.[/align]
[align=justify]In experiments in which subjects are shown photographs of desirable men or women, straight men are aroused by women, gay men by men".
But, I am afraid, as in the case of Cho Seung-Hui, reason and logic and simple humanity do not operate here.[/align]
[align=justify]Copyright (c) John Maxwell
mailto:jankunnu@gmail.com[/align]