America The Weird, America The Hateful

From time to time, I stop to ponder where this amazing, weird country of ours is as a culture, trying to connect some of the dots as it were, and then I shoot off my mouth about it. I promise this will eventually connect with mental health issues. Let's start with the weird.

I simply cannot wrap my small mind around revelations that Illinois' Governor was trying to sell to the highest bidder his right to nominate Obama's Senate replacement. Not only is that criminal, it's utterly bizarre and delusional. The Guv I don't feel like naming also wanted to force the Tribune company into firing editorial writers who criticized him and also wanted to withhold state funding from a children's hospital where an official had refused to make a donation (to what I'm not sure). I'm glad this creep was busted because what he was trying to get in exchange for a Senate nomination of whomever was either a job running HHS, an ambassadorship and corporate board jobs for his wife.

Can you imagine if this goon had ended up running HHS? Can you imagine the deals he would've cut with Big Pharma? Can you imagine who he'd put in charge of the FDA? The mind boggles.

I sure hope this scandal is limited to him and his chief of staff, but you never know.

Speaking of President-Elect Obama, did you catch that he was grilled by Tom Brokaw on "Meet The Press" the other day over his closet smoking habit? Yes, the soon-to-be most powerful man on Earth was forced to answer questions about whether he'd smoke in the White House (he said he'd obey Hillary Clinton's ban on smoking there. I think he should do whatever he wants and if he wants I'll buy him a box of cigars). That's how extreme the smoker hating thing has gotten in America. The economy is in total meltdown, we are involved in two wars, there's bailouts for crooks on Wall Street, there's much hate percolating in our culture on all manner of subjects, and that's what Brokaw carves out time to ask him about? Wow, that's weird.

But there is all sorts of weird hate in America these days. Out here in Washington State, you may have heard that an atheist group put up a sign in our state capitol in Olympia as a response to a Christian manger display. Last week, Bill O'Reilly and others on Fox News went off on Gov. Christine Gregoire for allowing the atheist display and denounced my state as being as nutty as California (admittedly, this state can be pretty weird). Gregoire had little choice but to allow the display or the atheists would've taken her to court and would've wound up with the display permitted by a judge, so it's not fair to bang on her.

Nonetheless, I do partly understand why the O'Reilly's of America are teed off. The language on the atheist sign was quite extreme, calling religion a myth and superstition that "hardens hearts and enslaves minds." I'm as about as lapsed Catholic as you can get and have long been open to atheist views, but that phrase alone is filled with such contempt and hate for religion that it even bugs me. I'm not sure it's worthy of all the contempt and hatred it's generated in return--it is a sign, one that will be up for perhaps three weeks, after all--but, yeah, I actually sort of understand what Christians are mad about. Is it too much to ask atheists to be classy about their contempt for religion and maybe choose their words a bit more carefully?

Meanwhile, religious folks could probably stand to chill out on gay marriage. I'm a lukewarm supporter of gay marriage, and I don't get what bugs the right about gay marriage so much. Neither do I think it's the most burning issue before our nation--it's the economy, stupid!--but ever since Prop 8 passed in California on election day, there has been an epic backlash against the Mormon Church, Mormons and churches in general and I simply don't get that either. The backlash is completely hateful and, I think, out of proportion to Prop 8, which will either be overturned in the courts or by yet another initiative. In my dear old homeland, there are gay activists openly harassing people who supported Prop 8 and I've read of one case where a woman was harassed at her job at a cafe, her employer was picketed and customers were hassled. Now, that's hate and it's pretty excessive. I'm not sure that there's a chill pill big enough for that level of excess--going into peoples' workplaces over a vote you didn't like? Really?--but I'm sure Big Pharma would like to sell one.

And, if you want some more obsessive hate, can you top the people who are still kicking Gov. Sarah Palin around one month after the election? Look, Palin wasn't qualified to be Vice-President, but she lost, the election is over and folks should really move onto something else. And yet Palin is so hated that people simply will not let it go. I've simply never seen anything quite like it before. That hate is just weird. I don't understand it because it seems so irrational and disconnected from anything she's done as Alaska Governor or said on the campaign trail.

Is this how we are doing things in America now? Carving to pieces people we don't like even when they present zero threat to ourselves and our families? Kicking them in the teeth when they have no power at all because they represent something someone doesn't like? Whatever happened to healthy, spirited debates and people agreeing to disagree and going their separate ways and so on? Maybe, I'm a bit of a weirdo moderate on these sorts of things because my orbit of friends runs from atheist, lefty, dope-smoking, gay hippies all the way to conservative, God-fearing right-wing gun nuts. Strangely, I get along with all of them.

All of which brings me right back to the mental health world. I write some very tough stuff on this site about psychiatrists, medications, research and so on, but at the end of the day I don't hate psychiatrists and medical research (I am skeptical of both however) and if someone wants to go take medication X and claim it saved their lives, then I'd not do a single thing to stop them. I'm actually fairly moderate on these issues, but sometimes I get judged as an extremist simply by dint of the fact that I am deeply skeptical in a field where too many people like to look at emperors wearing no clothes and call them fashion plates.

But there's one man out there on the 'Net who simply cannot get past his hatred for me. I won't name him, but I'm sure many of you who read this site remember a man of many faces (there's your hint) commenting here and taking issue with almost everything I wrote and starting odd fights with other commenters. Earlier this year, several readers alerted me to this person and denounced him as someone who adopted strange identities on the 'Net and hassled women and basically told me that I should cut him off from commenting on my site. I wrote to this person asking about the veracity of these claims and he denied them, so I decided to give him a chance and respect his views and so on. Eventually, he lashed out at me in a personal manner and I banned him from this site.

Well, guess what? Old what's-his-name-the-obsessed-depression-activist is still reading this site and is now going around to other sites and leaving comments attacking me and suggesting that other bloggers lash out at me, too, and using anonymizing software. This is like two months after I banned him from commenting on this site, but such is this man's hate for me that yesterday he apparently read my post on the smoker haters coming after me, and then went to another mental health site and left a comment asking that that blogger denounce me for smoking. That person didn't approve his comment, but instead shared them with me. Simply jaw dropping, people. The kind of hate where you scratch your head and go, "Why's this dude so obsessed with me? What can I do about it?"

I certainly don't know what to do to stop it, but I do actually feel pity for this man.