by When did the USA become purely a culture of winning and losing? Once, we were a nation of sacred human beings — and now we are merely the personification of the victor and the vanquished: Winners and Losers.
Making such a stark contraction between the virtual and the revelatory is a dangerous consumption because winning and losing creates bright line barricades between two camps: One pompous and preening and chortling, the other desperate and wounded and vengeful.
Too often in America, we crave the simplification of divvying down human achievement instead of celebrating up our deep and gratifying, embedded, moral compassion — and in that repression of caring for the sake of a temporary label, we create an everlasting sense of doom that, in the next moment, we will be pressed into the wounded camp to limp along until the next perceived victory lifts our spirit back to the other side of the realm. In a two-option society, there can never be a third way out. We entrap ourselves in formidable, but unsupportable, notions of being.
When we live apart as Winners and Losers, we transparently create the manic experience of living an unsustainable life that congeals itself in a medical diagnosis of — “bipolar disorder” — and the child is encapsulated to poison the adult:
The number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003, researchers are due to report Tuesday in the most comprehensive study to look at the controversial diagnosis. And experts say the numbers have almost certainly risen further in the years since.
The magnitude of the increase in an illness that until recently was thought to emerge only in adulthood, is surprising to many experts, and it is likely to intensify a debate that has shaken the field of child psychiatry in recent years.
Mood swings.
Pinnacle highs.
Precipice lows.
Societal Bipolarism.
We are how we live — and when we divide each other into mountaintops and valleys — we should always expect the vicious ends to cleave us instead of accepting remedy in the warmth and comfort found in the hearth of the neutral middle mindedness.
If we hope to continue as a cogent society, we need to view each other as individuals first without any bipolar-winner-loser label; then we can begin to explore our common bones and discover the regenerative sinew that binds us together in the heart of human understanding.
That’s right, David! Frightening about the increase in bipolar disorder.
We need to change the way we define success in America. We can’t keep dividing by numbers.