Who's Sad in America?

Question is: Who's NOT Sad in America?

So quickly the blog has shifted. Our sadness is tidal. So quickly, the levees can’t withstand our dwindling faith in the system, any system - and now we’re standing on the roofs of our houses looking to the government like “what’s next?!”

Or maybe I am a sucker for a hyperbolic metaphor?

In any event, the Fateful Hand of Being Crapped On is not very choosey these days.














When silver-spooned descendent of French royalty and fund manager René-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet takes a boxcutter to his wrists in his comfy New York office and positions himself strategically so that he bleeds out directly into a trash can, what have we missed? After dismissing the janitors early that night, to keep from making even more of a mess of innocent people’s lives, he's worried about the carpet cleaners and placing undue stress on even more people?

If I’m a rich guy with homes, businesses, estates, families and friends in both France and New York, and I still feel hopeless when I realize I’ve been duped, what’s really missing? What’s really making me want to kill myself?

It’s not the economy. Only. It’s not the angry clients that he’s indebted to. Only. It’s something more systemic. It’s something so seemingly unanswerable that a 60-something year old, white-collared French man sees the rough-edged end of a boxcutter as his best way out.

What could be so horrible that 60 years does not provide enough perspective?

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There’s more self-deaded in America.

NPR and CNN got the press release over the wires this week that our soldiers are popping themselves off at a quicker clip. And that’s the reported ones. That’s not accounting for the countless men, boys, women, daughters that perhaps devise a more honorable Killed In Action scenario for ending their lives. Instead of inflicting their spouses and parents with a relentless horror stuck in their brains, they leave them with an Arlington burial and medal.

In 2008, 128 soldiers are reported to have taken their lives. This amount is higher than that of the whole of civilian America. Army’s score: 20.2 suicided per 100,000. Civilian America: 19.5 suicided per 100,000. I’m no mathematician – but I’m thinking the Army’s looking at some faster-moving percentages than us regular folks looking down the barrel of a gun off-the-clock.

So The Army, a.k.a. The Government is introducing some suicide prevention tactics. Because we Americans don’t conduct suicide missions. We Americans are not terrorists. No no, that’s the other guys. No no, we keep our suicides personal, not ideological. No no, seriously. That's the other guys.

Battlemind. It’s called Battlemind - the program that’s the prescription to save its soldiers from themselves in response to low recruitment numbers.

How about this? GetOuttaThere. That’s another program I’ve heard of that might stop the hemorrhaging of good men being pushed too far.

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Then there’s always someone being born to fill the hole of another loss. At the same time, someone’s putting a gun to their head or swallowing Drano, someone else in America is quietly financing the cloning their previous dog.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Go ahead, judge them. We’re all judging them. The only one not judging them is Leona Helmsley because she’s hoping the millionaire dog that survived her will sign off on having her cloned so that she can come back and continue being a bitch.

When Al Roker asks why she sold her jewelry to clone a dog at the price tag of $150K, Nina Otto so articulately states with glassy-eyed conviction, “Ummm, you know, I can always have jewelry. I actually can always have jewelry if I wanted it. I wanted him, if it was going to be … to be part of something … that I gave to make him happen.”

Ah. I see now. … no, no, no, I don’t.

While she's stroking her furry petri-dish fantasy of love and devotion, this guy and his wife get laid off from his tech job with Kaiser Permenente in Southern California –



- so all the family has to die.







His two sets of twins, a daughter and a wife. And himself.

Sure, he was probably a little psychologically exhausted to begin with. Who isn't? Maybe life had always been hard for this man.


“Is there no hope for a widow’s son?” said the fatherless son in his suicide note. All those children were not enough to pad the gap between father and son. He fell in and took everyone with him.

Kaiser Permenente should not be implicated. Poor Kaiser Permenente – they’re just trying to break records delivering ethically implicated births to full term. They’re just trying to be a health care organization in America. “Don’t blame the economy [for familicide],” says forensic psychologist Louis Schlesinger, professor of forensic psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Poor Kaiser Permenente - just providing healthcare to good hard-working families. (just not jobs)

Meanwhile, Kaiser Permenante holds a press conference about the single mother who gave birth to a much-maligned EIGHT MORE BABIES after a prior litter of 6.




How deep is the hole in her heart that she has to feed it with infertility drugs and death-defying pregnancies? And with no mention of a father or husband or lover, no less. How desperate is Kaiser Permenente’s board of trustees to steal ahead in the race to control nature to take on this single mother’s request for more more more more more more? How did any doctor look this woman in the face and let her lay down on the table and pump her full of too many children that, I DON'T KNOW, she may be too emotionally needy to raise? Did any doctor consult with his own set of ethics and personal empathy? ANY?

While this woman breeds like spiders with anti-divine intervention, Kaiser Permenente’s doctors and nurses pose for the perfunctory self-congratulatory press photos. (The hospital presumably took this themselves to hand out to the press – there’s no photographer listed.)



So while a dog is cloned and a herd of children circles up, a soldier, a father and a financier find themselves at the end of their rope.

What’s that phrase – when God closes a door, he opens a window?

Yeh, a window to jump out of.

Keep your ears open and your empathy electric. If you’re worried about things this year, there’s someone around you that’s already bought the farm and has convinced him or herself that no one’s going to miss them when they’re gone.

Keep your empathy electric. We need you awake. This is not a M. Night Shyamalan script we're in.

This is a trend. Killing yourself has become the new black.

And there’s nothing standing in its way besides our yet-to-be-found ability to cling to each other – all 750,000 of us standing in line at the Unemployment Office.

"Hi, I'm from Starbucks."
"Citibank, here."
"Lehman Bros., yo."
"Over here, AIG and Starbucks - yeh, I lost them both at the same time."
"Ford."
"Hey, yo, I'm here from a Long Island City dealership, c'mere, man, shake my hand!"
"Yo, I was laid off from a small business you never heard of."
"Red Lobster - my boss just got all nervous for no reason and got rid of 6 of us today. We were freaking slammed yesterday and now today, he lost it. I'm a cook."

How much worse does it have to get until we realize that each of us are alone, yes, and so therefore, we are not?

How much worse does it have to get, President Obama? You keep warning us that the darkest is coming before we get our dawn.

What’s it going to take before someone starts telling us to come out of our houses of terror and take the hand of someone else?

What’s it going to take?

What’s it going to take to spread the wealth? Are we really going to call it socialism if it saves our lives? If it brings us together for a little stop gap on the livelihood hemorrhaging? This is not Che, this isn't Red Square, this isn't Stalin, Kant, Nietzche or even Nader. This is your neighborhood crumbling.

Mark my words: Change will come in the spring. That’s when all the guns come out. People get a little Vitamin D under their belts and hopelessness gets a little energy and the shootings will start. Remember that, right now, we’re only in the Winter of Our Discontent.

12:18 pm, 2.26.93: The Truck Bombing at the World Trade Center
12:07 pm, 4.19.93: The ATF Siege on the Branch Dividian Compound in Waco, Texas
9:02 am, 4.19.95: The Truck Bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City
11:19 am, 4.20.99: The Columbine Shootings in Littleton, Colorado
7:15 am, 4.16.07: Virginia Tech massacre

These were people who are operating at a Loss, Barely Getting By in the Emotional Red, Sucking Whatever Love They Could Off the Familial Lack, Down with the Not-In-My-BackYard Lack of Resource. These are people like the cloning couple and the breeding mother and the killing father.

It’s not about the economy, that’s right. But it is about our own internal resource of well-being that is just not there for us to lean on right now.

And it ain’t over till the Fat Cats stop feeding. And we all get off the roofs of our houses and start swimming.

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Who's Sad in America ...

... When All You Have is YouTube to Witness You?

Click on the above Who's Sad in America to see what I'm talking about.

I'm watching my clock to see how long it takes for parents to sue YouTube for this.


"He posted a suicide note, where he said he had hurt other people and hated himself for being a failure."

Who's going to sue the radius of people that let this man slip so far off the radar?

And why is an Australian website reporting on it? Who heard this story first - Fox News or Australia?

19-year-old Abraham K Biggs commits suicide live on webcam

Shame on us - for throwing yet another 19 year old man away. Shame on us ...

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Who's Sad in India?

CHAYYA LAL was.

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IS.















There’s a strangelet dying to be discovered.

There’s a girl in India dying not to see it.

There are scientists holding their breaths, crossing their fingers, assuring their families that in 50 days, they’ll still be here, feet firmly planted on the ground.

And there are bankers in New York and London contemplating the gravity of their actions, their choices, their workaday assumptions.

This is a black hole that we’re already in. Chayya felt it a little more than the rest of us did/do. Some people just feel drawn to a black hole’s gravity more than the rest of us. Some people find the Possibility of Things teeming with such horror that it’s easier to swallow poison.

There’s a lot of Possibility in the air these days – an election year, an Iran, and Iraq War, Russia’s restless, the oil, the air, the texting, the texting, the texting …

And a few coincidental days after that Collider got bumping, the US financial markets started falling apart. We can’t see that happening, but we hear about it. Most of us have no idea how it’s going to affect us, but nor did we understand how the blips and bleeps of the digital world of information would change us either. Nothing you can see, but you know you’re different.

A symptom of what’s shaking underground in Geneva? The smell of a Tower of Babel Society?

There’s dark matter out there/in here/sitting next to you and yet …

We Americans feel stronger now. So far away from the 9/11 attacks, even now, with our losing our homes and pricey tomatoes and gallons of milk poking holes in our savings, we still feel stronger. We see the Lehman employees hitting the road with their bankers boxes full of cubicle contents and personal effects and we think, “Eh, they have a savings, they’re loaded. They don’t affect my rent … all their monolopolizing Excel spreadsheets – nope, nothing to do with me.”

And the scientists with their particle-smashing machines and a new generation of black hole believers…

Nothing to do with me.

But there’s me … and there’s Chayya Lal. There’s some future we’re sensing here. And it’s terrible … terrible in the old Latin way.

And there’s this guy looking down from his Lehman office.






This office that was bought for $650 million after the World Trade Center office went down in less than an hour. This office that gave its employees a feeling of surety … without the ‘S.E.C.’

And as these people crowd down below looking up at him -
















New Yorkers look up when the Terrible starts raining down. They know that his life’s collapse today will be the fallout that they’ll feel for days to come. Remotely, directly, laterally. Not sure how, not sure when, but their eyes are cursed with a certain particle-smashing knowledge that Things ARE NOT Okay.

I leaned over the shoulder of a young guy reading the newspaper on the morning train, and I saw this small article on an Indian girl who took control of her chaos before it spread beyond control. I leaned over the shoulder of a guy I’ll never see again and felt a girl’s fear 28 hours away from me. I couldn’t look away.

And all I felt was chaos.

Maybe she didn’t want to feel it happen – the world colliding, the world smashing. Was too smart or too weak to watch the universe expand in its complex ways and to be a part of it.

Maybe I’m too dumb, too overeducated, too isolated and too weak, too spiritually limited, too terrestrially contained, too voyeuristically driven, too LITTLE to off myself too. Maybe I’m just too stunned standing in the light of all of the dilemmas of world of + and -. Maybe I’m just lazy and scared and full of fear and I’m scared of dying at my own hand. Maybe I want to give that baton to the Laws of Physics and Averages.

But I’m sad she’s gone. Particle-smashing is not so scary if you’re just willing to fall apart a little. But maybe if she fell apart, she’d fall into a black hole of never landing and she’d see you or me clinging to the walls and say, “Oh, shit! Really?”

I don’t know. Maybe her family was neglecting her and her choices as a teenage girl sucked ass. Maybe someone took advantage of her. Maybe her secrets… maybe she’s full of holes herself and that was just enough.

But what happens to her body – where do her particles go, once her soul has left? Is she a more manageable form of matter now? In two crowded countries, suicide’s becoming the population control.

These self-killed people – they’re still here, somewhere, somehow. Not haunting, but pulsing on the wind, living in the water, beatboxing from the morgue. Just changing the form of matter. Never leaving. Never not staying. I refuse to think people just die (with the exception of my own father). I refuse to think that people are garbage and just thrown away, their impact ceasing. That garbage is in a landfill turning into something else. A methane stroking your skin in the fall breeze.

Think twice about Chayya and particle smashing and your shot friends and your hung sisters. The planet is recycling us, not letting us go, sloughing off bits of ourselves into its own shower. We’re never clean. Never new. Forget it.

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Where is Chayya Lal now?

Has she become part of the deepening black hole of the rest of us remaining?

Was she alone, in her fear?

Is she still afraid? Is she right here? Now?

What she feared about the end of the world, she took control of. In Science’s poetic way to control its world, there is the possibility that what collapses us, recreates us.



:recreate
:recreate
:recreate
:recreate

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… … … She can’t be just gone.

And her sadness and fears are not over. She just passed them on to me.

:re-mecreate
:re-mecreate
:re-chayyacreate
:re-chayyacreate

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"Listen to the depressed people who have a feeling something’s bad in the air because often it is. The idea that we repress our unhappiness rather than listen to it is just as dysfunctional psychically as it is physically. If your leg is broken, the pain is there for a reason. You don’t just take morphine, you reset the leg. …

To be conscious at this point in human history is to be sad. "

~ Marianne Williamson

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