Tag Archives: slide show

Cautionary

Cautionary: (adj) serving as a warning.

The word “cautionary” usually travels with a tale but often does not have the brains to fill a head. Most of the things I have been warned about in my life have proven to be false, or at the very least, exaggerated.

When I was twelve years old, a sociologist came to our school to discuss race. Actually, her function was to explain to our dull but fertile
 minds why it was important for the races not to mix.

It was a slide show.

So we observed that when a black person and a white person get together and create children, the results are uncertain and often catastrophic. She provided pictures of children with splotchy skin, tumors and obviously suffering in some sort of miserable configuration.

She was so official–so well-studied. She explained that “it was just not good for the children.”

There are two comical things about this story. First, we lived in a community where the nearest black person was 25 miles away. And secondly, everything this well-educated and maybe even well-intentioned woman told us was bullshit.

Yet if you had been there to hear the cautionary tale, you would have been totally convinced you should avoid all contact with “Negroids”. (I believe that’s the word she used.)

When is a cautionary tale really of value?

When it asks us to mind our own P’s and Q’s instead of trying to change the ABC’s of life.

 

 

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Amphetamine

dictionary with letter A

Amphetamine: (n) a synthetic, mood-altering, addictive drug, used illegally as a stimulant and legally to treat ADD in children and narcolepsy in adults.

Thirty seconds to explain what it does and thirty seconds to scare the crap out of you over the side effects.

That is the construction of the normal commercial on television advertising a new drug.

We need to get away from the concept that drugs are miracles.

Perhaps they are miracles in the sense of describing the Grand Canyon if you’re only viewing it from a safe distance or in some sort of slide show.

But if you’re standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and leaping head-first into the abyss, it loses some of the glow of its “miraculous.” Then it just becomes a bunch of rocks smashing your brains.

Here’s my truth: use as few drugs as possible.

For me, this became fairly complicated when I was diagnosed with diabetes. They recommend you try to keep your blood sugar down through diet and medication. But with this particular condition, the doctors began to introduce other peripheral possibilities which they decided to pre-medicate by giving me additional drugs, which, separate from their helpful tendencies, are basically poison.

Just as ministers want to make you a sinner and politicians want to put you into a voting block, physicians feel useful when they discover ailments in you.

I don’t hold it against them. It’s their profession. After all, in the process of being paranoid, even crazy people avoid obstacles and difficulties.

But drugs are nothing to mess with–especially amphetamines. It is beyond comprehension that we pump our children full of chemicals to get them to be attentive when it used to be handled in the schoolyard at recess by somebody throwing a ball at your head and saying, “Wake up, Billy!”

It’s not that I recommend the crude treatment of children to one another. But I am not convinced that rattling the human body with deadly potions is a better alternative.

I am not an individual who places great faith in holistic medicine.

I am not against prescribing cures for those who are hurting.

It’s just that I think the truly mature human being needs to step back from any diagnosis, and before popping a pill of purpose, ask if there is any other way.

Because when drugs get done with human beings, they mostly addict us and hurt us.

Therefore, we should only welcome them temporarily … and cautiously.

 

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