Who Formed the Criteria for Sanity?
Since the beginning of time we have shut out the people we really should have been listening to. The unhinged. Those with screws loose. The people who have lost somehow their barriers between real and imagined. People who have not forgotten how to see.
We shut them out and then we spend the rest of our lives straining to understand. Looking for a logical explanation.
We shouldn't go to church. We should go to psych wards once a week and find out once and for all that before they were drugged and shocked and locked away, these people in glass bubbles talking to themselves really were trying to say something.
Maybe not a whole lot of what they spout off is valid, but some of it might be.
Paranoia and incoherence are sometimes justified, is my point.
They sound like gibbering idiots to the closed mind, but anyone who is completely ready to take in reality is well on their way to being a gibbering idiot themselves.
If we were all like them, there would be no serious problems.
"How terrible to go through life just thinking about water contaminants and life after death!" My mother once exclaimed tearfully, and wrapped her arms around me.
"No," I thought to myself, "How terrible to live amongst war and pedophiles and terrorism and people with awful intentions for you, and to not even see it."
How terrible for everyone, to be blind to the bubbles in the water jug forming in beautiful chaos.
How terrible to not have a dead tree on top of your plasma screen TV, or your latest-model computer, or on the dash of your Subaru.
How terrible to wake up in the morning and need the proof of your consumption to make you feel alive in the least.
How terrible to desire anything more than a blanket and a window to pass your time with.
I hope that I am never so old, or poisoned, or abused to notice the shape my cigarette folds into in the ashtray. Or to relish in the beauty of unpleasant emotions. Or to dream while I'm awake.
And if I have to be crazy to hold onto that, then I'll be crazy, won't I?
Stumble It!
3 comments:
I think Shakespeare may have had it right in his works: "The mad" see the world in a way the rest of us don't. Yet, their POV is marginalized.
Great post.
If we weren't blind to pedophiles, war, terrorism, and those with evil intentions, we wouldn't be able to live, in my opinion.
The insane man never thinks he crazy.
"Since the beginning of time we have shut out . . . [t]he people who have lost somehow their barriers between real and imagined."
Really? I sat in auditoriums full of people who were listening to them preach, and giving political speeches and nodding and yelling in agreement.
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