Tag Archives: criminal justice system

Talking Raven Interview, Seattle 1993

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In 1993 I gave an inter­view to Antero Alli for his Seat­tle under­ground news jour­nal, Talk­ing Raven, Jour­nal of Imag­i­na­tive Trou­ble.  Antero, founder and direc­tor of ParaThe­atri­cal Research, is a poly­math, and has an uncanny knack for see­ing the things other peo­ple can’t (see Angel Tech: A Mod­ern Shaman’s Guide to Real­ity Selec­tion).  I highly rec­om­mend that you explore his writ­ing.

I made one good friend from this inter­view; and one solid enemy.  The ideas expressed herein I think are pretty good, but I’ve never met any­one will­ing to take them to the next step.  Insti­tu­tions tend to be institutional.

Inter­est­ing read, any­way, so I’ve included it.

This is the inter­view, as it was printed, word for word.

Inter­view­ing the Law BRUCE HANIFY Deputy Pros­e­cut­ing Attor­ney Yakima County, WA: Nar­cotics Divi­sion

Over the last sev­eral issues, TALKING RAVEN has fea­tured inter­views with knowl­edge­able experts and pro­fes­sion­als from respectable insti­tu­tions and gov­ern­ment agen­cies. I knew this “intox­i­ca­tion” issue would be incom­plete with­out talk­ing to a narc. Bruce Han­ify is not your aver­age nar­cotics offi­cer; his peers respect his work and prob­a­bly con­sider him a mav­er­ick in his field, which is pros­e­cu­tion. Mr. Han­ify is one of those guys you head off with in a court of law after you’ve been arrested for a ncarcotics-related crime in Yakima County, WA. To many out­siders, Yakima is a postcard-perfect pic­ture of whole­some North­west Amer­i­cana. (One of my favorite actors, Kyle MacLach­lan, hails from Yakima.) To Bruce Han­ify, his co-workers and supe­rior offi­cers Yakima is a major drug war con­duit with an inces­tu­ous under­belly of state wel­fare pro­grams. Han­ify was vaca­tion­ing on the Olympic Penin­sula when he agreed to meet me and chat about “intox­i­ca­tion.” Well over six foot and maybe 200 pounds, Han­ify, 38, has a fighter’s gait and some­times speaks tru da side uv hiz mout when mak­ing a point. His short com­bus­tive laugh, like a mis­fired shot­gun blast, occa­sion­ally pep­pers our con­ver­sa­tion. Hanify’s eyes are kind, I thought, from see­ing too much that wasn’t. Dur­ing an oth­er­wise pleas­ant meet­ing, I couldn’t help feel­ing under the influ­ence of a series of small, com­pletely irra­tional teenage para­noid flash­backs: “I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M TALKIN’ WITH A NARC, MAN!” — ANTERO ALLI

TALKING RAVEN: What do you do and long have you done it?

BRUCE HANIFY: Half of my work at this point is drug prac­tice which involves search and seizure and privacy-type issues and I’ve been work­ing for the Nar­cotics Divi­sion since 1990. The law enforce­ment empha­sis in Yakima, which I think is the same for most Wash­ing­ton coun­ties, is in the­ory to go out and get the deal­ers .… an art form in itself. But, in prac­tice, a lot of the peo­ple that get nailed are peo­ple who are guilty of sim­ple pos­ses­sion. In other words, the Class “C” felony, which means, in actual sen­tenc­ing, 20 to 30 days in jail for mostly cocaine and some heroin cases. Then, you’ve got the mis­de­meanor mar­i­juana offenses, which I per­son­ally do not deal with, but our office does. At least half of the drug cases filed in Yakima every year are cocaine cases; Yakima is known as a major con­duit for cocaine supply.

TR: Where does the Yakima cocaine come from and how does it get there?

BH: Sta­tis­ti­cally, the belief is that it comes mostly from Mex­ico through Cal­i­for­nia. It prob­a­bly comes via mostly ille­gal immi­grants run­ning it up to make a quick buck. It’s a lot like the pro­hi­bi­tion era in that respect; poor peo­ple look­ing for money.

TR: From your per­sonal expe­ri­ence, what are some of your ideas and the­o­ries about why the so-called “drug prob­lem” might never be solved?

BH: Let me explain that by shar­ing a per­spec­tive I have about mod­ern soci­ety. If you look at a soci­ety that is demo­c­ra­tic, like ours sup­pos­edly is, you look at where psy­chic energy is invested. This coun­try invests enor­mous sums of psy­chic energy in wel­fare or state-dependence, and also on drug and sub­stance depen­dence. You don’t real­ize this until you pros­e­cute and you see peo­ple com­ing in and get­ting the most atten­tion they’ve ever had in their lives while they’re being pros­e­cuted for a crime. The judge will ask them about their past and their his­tory. For the first time in their lives they’re asked about their per­sonal his­tory and it’s in the con­text of being pros­e­cuted. Most peo­ple don’t under­stand the enor­mity of this be we’ve devel­oped whole pop­u­la­tions, in terms of tens of mil­lions of peo­ple, who are depen­dent upon the state to define them and part of the fuel for that depen­dency is drug and alco­hol use.

TR: Speak more on this con­nec­tion between depen­dence on the state and drug addiction .…

BH: It doesn’t mean I’m right, but I’ve never met an alco­holic or drug addict who’s ever said, “Howdy, I’m sure glad I’m depen­dent on drugs.” When peo­ple describe their con­di­tion of depen­dence, they describe despair. When you look at the prin­ci­ple of despair and ask your­self, “Is the cure for despair pun­ish­ment and incar­cer­a­tion?” The naswer has to be no. But if you look at the actual things our soci­ety does, the answer has tra­di­tion­ally been more depen­dence, more wel­fare, more struc­tures in the school, and more incar­cer­a­tion itself. Prison especi­cally is a form of depen­dence. I’ve seen peo­ple who, for the first time in their lives, have fam­ily because they’re being pros­e­cuted; the judge is their fam­ily. The defense and the pros­e­cu­tor are their family.

TR: Let’s return to the so-called “drug problem.”

BH: We recently had prosecutor’s train­ing where cer­tain Supreme Court jus­tices, who shall remain unnamed, were invited to speak with sev­eral hun­dred pros­e­cu­tors. One of the nine Supreme Court jus­tices asked a table of us who work crim­i­nal appeals, “What do you think we should do about the drug wars? We’re spend­ing so much money on this; the court sys­tems are tied up by drug cases.” Now, this is a Supreme Court jus­tice [Note: It was Richard Guy of Spokane, with whom I had worked for a short time out of law school.], a real level-headed guy with­out a stand on the issue one way or another, want­ing us to tell him what to do. From my expe­ri­ence with police offi­cers going out on crime calls, I think about it from the angle of “What makes a human being give up his or her claim to inde­pen­dence and self-government in order to become overly depen­dent and invoke the machin­ery of the state to shape his or her life?” That’s a very inter­est­ing and very dan­ger­ous con­cept. What con­cerns me the most and what your read­ers can be cer­tain of is that peo­ple in gov­ern­ment at policy-making insti­tutes, under­stand that we have whole pop­u­la­tions depen­dent upon the invo­ca­tion of the state to shape and deter­mine the course of their daily lives.

TR: You men­tioned the prin­ci­ple of despair a lit­tle while ago. Wha are some of your thoughts about pos­si­ble cures and alle­vi­a­tions for despair?

BH: I have a real life story about that because of what I do to stay in shape. When peo­ple hear I do this, they won­der about me, so don’t get me wrong, but I work out in a box­ing club. Most of the peo­ple who work out there are typ­i­cally young men twelve t0 eigh­teen years old. Every­one of those young men thrives on some­one say­ing, “I believe in you. You’re a worth­while per­son and you have some­thing to work towards.” Young men need to be told that by an adult per­son who will help him get there through dis­ci­pline. We don’t really pro­vide that in our soci­ety. At the same time, we’re pre­tend­ing that a greater law enforce­ment mech­a­nism or greater wel­fare spend­ing will give these kids what they don’t have. So I think the prob­lem is spir­i­tual and moral in nature.

TR: Describe the most appalling encounter you’ve had dur­ing actual crime calls.

BH: Gen­er­ally speak­ing, when you see house­holds of ten or fif­teen kids under the age of eight who swear like sailors and hate author­ity fig­ures, with­out any psy­cho­log­i­cal frame­work to guide them. It’s deves­tat­ing. The adults they’re grow­ing up with are mostly drug-dependent. When these kids encounter demonic rage — the kind you see at mur­der scenes — within him­self or her­self, there’s absolutely no struc­ture in place to deal with it.

TR: What do you mean by “demonic rage” at mur­der scenes?

BH: Since I’ve been pros­e­cut­ing I’ve learned that less than 10% of the peo­ple we process through the sys­tem are truly crim­i­nal. A good 85% to 90% we process are welfare-dependent, drug-dependent peo­ple who don’t know how to direct their own lives. That small per­cent­age of peo­ple who are truly cruel, truly rapa­cious and truly mur­der­ous — when you see that, there’s a ter­ri­ble feel­ing aso­ci­ated with that which you learn to intuit. That intu­ition is a great asset to have when you’re on the streets. My the­ory about the energy of demonic rage is that some peo­ple, at var­i­ous points in their lives, become sus­cep­ti­ble to pos­ses­sion by the force. I don’t mean to sound reli­gious or any­thing, but if it pos­sesses them, I think it’s pretty much a per­ma­nent pos­ses­sion. I also think if you’re a 14 or 15 year old kid with­out much psy­cho­log­i­cal frame­work or dis­ci­pline who opens their psy­che to drugs, you can become sus­cep­ti­ble to that kind of possession.

TR: Let’s change the sub­ject. Here’s a more exotic ques­tion. Sev­eral kinds of opium poppy grow wild in the state of Wash­ing­ton, in people’s back­yards, and on hill­sides. Had any poppy cases yet?

BH: No; none. I don’t per­son­ally know where the plant is cat­e­go­rized, but I can tell you that in title 69.50 of the Revised Code of Wash­ing­ton, every sin­gle mind-altering sub­stance in the world is clas­si­fied as a Sched­ule I, II, III or IV drug; it’s prob­a­bly in there some­where. In terms of law enforce­ment, there hasn’t been a lot of atten­tion paid to it yet but when there is, leg­is­la­tion is sure to fol­low. That’s usu­ally the way it works.

TR: I want to talk more about despair. In my own life, I’ve man­aged to kick the habit of cynacism, but am still work­ing on despair which I’m look­ing at now as an addic­tion and as some­thing that feeds on itself. Once you enter a con­di­tion of despair, it might be a symp­tom or a prod­uct of overde­pen­dence elswhere, rob­bing your auton­omy and dimin­ish­ing your place in life. I’m think­ing that despair might be a nat­ural out­come of self-diminishment … Have you met or known any adults over­whelmed by despair who have kicked the habit?

BH: It’s inter­est­ing how you phrased that the way you did. You said the addic­tion to despair may be the prod­uct and out­come of some other addic­tion. As a pros­e­cu­tor I’ve noticed that our soci­ety, and maybe most West­ern soci­eties, preaches a doc­trine of Must Feel Good .… a dogma of self-esteem. You don’t dare feel any sort of depres­sion. As any cre­ative per­son knows, depres­sion is part of the process of cre­at­ing. I am sus­pi­cious that despair may be a symp­tom of our insti­tu­tional deter­mi­na­tion and insis­tence that peo­ple feel good all the time. I sus­pect the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies and doc­tors’ inter­est in Prozac is to make sure no one ever feels bad. In my own war­rior phi­los­o­phy I believe one of the engines of progress in a human being is feel­ing bad about some­thing. I write poetry, for exam­ple, as an out­let for what­ever that feel­ing is. When soci­ety and the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal peo­ple try and con­di­tion that out of you, the ques­tion then is where does the cre­ativ­ity go? What would be the nat­ural psy­chic response to that loss of cre­ativ­ity? It may be despair.

TR: Got any exam­ples of good luck sto­ries of peo­ple kick­ing the habit of despair?

BH: There are suc­cess sto­ries. I used to hear a lot of drug addicts and alco­holics say they hit the road to recov­ery in a “Blue Light Spe­cial.” That means until see­ing the flash­ing blue lights in their rearview mir­ror, they don’t even under­stand they have a prob­lem. As a pros­e­cu­tor, you see the need for state inter­ven­tion in many people’s lives to alert them to the fact that there is a prob­lem. Once they begin to work the force of that prob­lem, as you your­self have begun to work the force of trou­ble in TALKING RAVEN, I think you’re on the road to free­dom. I don’t think the free­dom comes in six months or two years. I think it comes in ten or fif­teen or twenty.

TR: The virtue of per­sis­tence.

BH: By virtue of under­stand­ing that soul engaged in life some­times feels bad and some­times looks but but that’s part of what being human is. Try­ing to drug it away or psy­chother­a­pize it away or State it away with some sort of huge wel­fare sys­tem is … bull­shit. (Blasts of com­bus­tive laugh­ter) Editor’s Note: Mr. Han­ify has been writ­ing quite a bit lately. We were pleased to pub­lish his provac­tive piece on wrestling demons, “COMMUNION”, some­where in this issue.

READ THE PROSECUTOR SERIES AT BRUCEHANIFY.COM

Define “Drug”: A Drug Warrior’s Thoughts on the 45-Year-Old War on Drugs

Bruce Han­ify 2011 All Rights Reserved

The Education of a Maverick Prosecutor, Part II: Isolation

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by Bruce Han­ify

The sin­ful­ness of crime might be described as an unjust appli­ca­tion of power, and the “cry of dis­tress” that fol­lows. A crime is a crime because it leaps the fence of per­sonal space and takes what hasn’t been earned.  This is true not just of those indi­vid­u­als soci­ety labels as “crim­i­nal”, but also of most politi­cians, quite a few mar­riages, and per­haps all employ­ment rela­tion­ships.  A per­sis­tent flaw in human nature is to try to scalp what hasn’t been earned, which is why we say that those who have evolved beyond such things have “char­ac­ter.”  They have mas­tered the arts of self-control.  It’s not until we are chal­lenged by pow­er­ful events — or per­haps even a pow­er­ful per­son — that we are forced to mea­sure our per­sonal use of power and begin to reckon whether our char­ac­ter is in proper work­ing order.

Peo­ple like to tell me, “You just see the world that way because of the work you do!” This is whistling past the grave­yard, a tal­is­man that keeps the bogey away, I’m sure, but it’s also a touch dehu­man­iz­ing. Think of it this way: peo­ple inside the med­ical field observe what folks do to their bod­ies. We inside the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem observe what folks do to their souls. The rea­son peo­ple can’t address that is sim­ple: they don’t want to. We lawyers remind peo­ple of the moral and spir­i­tual real­i­ties they don’t want to face. The more some­one hates lawyers, the less they want to talk about what’s real. It’s the law.

High Priests? A freshly minted lawyer, talk­ing to me my last sum­mer before law school, passed on some­thing I never for­got: “If noth­ing else, law school teaches you how to think.” Of course that is not true in many cases — I have known my share of dun­der­headed lawyers — but there is cer­tainly truth to it. The law school process, if prop­erly con­ducted, forces you to divorce your ego from from the facts, from prior assump­tions, from your cher­ished opin­ions. An unan­swered legal ques­tion doesn’t care if you’re Repub­li­can or Demo­c­rat, Bap­tist or Catholic. You learn to tan­gle with the mer­its of an idea, not hold your expec­ta­tions hostage to one out­come or another. The best lawyers are often iso­lated from the com­mon run of human­ity, because the com­mon run of human­ity asso­ciates truth with pas­sion.  Lawyers learn how to dis­man­tle pas­sion and exam­ine the mer­its of the idea.  Bill Clin­ton called it ‘com­part­men­tal­iz­ing.’  Bril­liant.  And very true.

I don’t know how many peo­ple truly appre­ci­ate what lawyers do. The truth is, our func­tions as lawyers are priestly.  Lawyers are con­di­tioned to keep con­fi­dences; forced to per­form duties in areas of fear and degra­da­tion that other peo­ple would flee; develop skills of problem-solving that defy ordi­nary under­stand­ing. My early years as a deputy pros­e­cu­tor were a hot house that forced me to grow in ways I would have oth­er­wise never under­stood. You learn to keep your cool under the most demand­ing cir­cum­stances.  Just the facts, ma’am.

One of the ear­li­est things you must accept as a pros­e­cu­tor is that there’s nobody to talk to. Lawyers talk to other lawyers about their cases; they talk to cops; they talk to peo­ple inside the sys­tem. But your friends and the peo­ple in your fam­ily have no idea what trial attor­neys actu­ally do — the stress, the uncer­tainty, the con­stant push­ing of self past the last default posi­tion you thought was the extreme — even if they think they do from watch­ing tv. And attor­neys tend to talk about their cases, not yours. Most of us don’t — actu­ally, can’t — talk about the mis­treat­ment we daily receive from mem­bers of the pub­lic.  We learn to joke about it.  We very sel­dom receive praise; and the crit­i­cisms are, by and large, cliches that are mocked behind closed doors.  The mock­ing masks a lot of pain, and that pain, over the long run, is what builds skill.

To be a lawyer means to be out­cast, more often than not.  The sum­mer before I went to law school I made an appoint­ment with a doctor’s office for a phys­i­cal, to com­ply with uni­ver­sity require­ments. In response to the nurse’s ques­tions, I inno­cently men­tioned that I was going to law school. She frowned, made a note, and left the exam­i­na­tion room. Next thing I know, I’m get­ting a cat scan. That was the start of my edu­ca­tion: the mere whis­per of the word lawyer changes the weather in a doctor’s office, and that was 30 years ago.

When you say “There are too many lawyers in this coun­try” you are describ­ing a symp­tom, not a cause.  The cor­rect diag­no­sis is, “There are too many peo­ple in this coun­try who are unwill­ing to hon­estly take respon­si­bil­ity for them­selves.”  Lawyers are forced to step into that space where peo­ple abdi­cate per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity.  That’s what lawyers do.

Many peo­ple dis­agree with this state­ment, but think it through: the more self-sufficient you are in your deci­sions, in your actions, the less exter­nal author­ity is required.

Reg­u­lar peo­ple have never spent a rest­less, sleep­less night, roil­ing in the sweat of their anx­i­ety, the night before a trial.  They do not know about the fever­ish dreams, the doubt, the mani­a­cal rep­e­ti­tions of ques­tions, and answers, that roll through the night.  I have walked into court know­ing that I owed money, or know­ing that a girl­friend was break­ing things off with me, or know­ing that some­one was angry with me, and had to give that case all that I had.  Do peo­ple really know what goes into try­ing a case?  A lot of really great artists would give up their dreams at that point, but the indomitable trial lawyer con­tin­ues to slog his way through enemy ter­ri­tory.  Win, lose or draw, he or she is among the tough­est breed of human being ever made.

And then there is the dam­age done to the fab­ric of one’s soul .… .

My first two weeks at the prosecutor’s office, I learned a les­son I never for­got. Uncer­tain what to do with myself one after­noon, I wan­dered into an office and casu­ally picked up a hand­ful of pho­tos, turned them over and dis­cov­ered they were autopsy pho­tos of a six-week old baby, burned with cig­a­rettes, and beaten, method­i­cally, by his mother and her boyfriend over the course of his short, nasty, brutish life. There were other pic­tures, other reports, as the weeks went by. There were busted eyes, swollen vagi­nas, pro­trud­ing bones, carrion-riddled bod­ies. Drugs. Insan­ity. Death. The lit­tle dead boy, bat­tered and burned, remains in my mind to this day. Note to self: don’t look at pic­tures.  To this day I expertly fil­ter out infor­ma­tion that doesn’t con­cern me.  I don’t watch law shows.

I had a tal­ent for crim­i­nal stuff. Can’t tell you why, exactly. I just did. The cops loved me. “Han­ify smiles when he gigs ‘em”, they joked. I was just a grunt, but I was a grunt with style. My abil­ity to inflict pain became razor sharp. I made it per­sonal. Like col­lect­ing scalps.

It didn’t occur to me that I might be get­ting sick. Sick? The whole world was sick, chump. Don’t tell me what’s sick. Sick is hav­ing some idea of the suf­fer­ing that goes on in this world and shov­ing it from your mind so that you don’t have to deal with it. That’s sick. Sick is know­ing your teen is fill­ing his mind with garbage and call­ing it “cul­ture.”  That’s sick.

Inside the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem, those anom­alous shapes and dif­fi­cul­ties get worked through a mas­sive fac­tory press that pro­duces still fur­ther anom­alies.  Uni­for­mity of result is never a part of the process, but wis­dom, even­tu­ally, is.

Books by Bruce Han­ify at Smash­words
Bruce Han­ify 2010 All Rights Reserved

The Education of a Maverick Prosecutor, Part VI: Compassion

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by Bruce Han­ify  Things changed for me as a result of being put into “the bucket” — the Invol­un­tary Treat­ment Act (“ITA”) hear­ings at the Memo­r­ial psy­chi­atric unit in Yakima.  Each of us pros­e­cu­tors in that rota­tion were there for a month at a time, twice a year.  With two “men­tal” hear­ings every week, that meant you were at the hos­pi­tal by 8 a.m. eight times a month.  Dur­ing that time I became famil­iar with the face of men­tal ill­ness.  How that affected me I could not have foreseen.

It grad­u­ally dawned on me that many decent human beings are trapped in some sort of rep­e­ti­tious chem­istry pat­tern from which they can’t escape.  I’ve heard crim­i­nal defen­dants say, “Your Honor! This isn’t me!”  And from my con­di­tion­ing, and my own prej­u­dice, I assumed they were mak­ing excuses.  My rota­tion through the ITA hear­ings taught me oth­er­wise.  What I finally saw was that there is this kind of sta­tic, or white noise, that oper­ates like an Atten­tion Deficit Dis­or­der in many peo­ple.  It’s like they can’t get their lit­tle mar­ble to roll down the same track every day.  Peo­ple who don’t overeat assume peo­ple who do are weak; peo­ple who per­form sim­i­lar func­tions every day assume those who can’t are moral fee­blings.  The fact is, depres­sion, overeat­ing and, in many cases, crim­i­nal con­duct, are func­tions of brain chemistry. But we don’t dis­cuss brain chem­istry. We thump peo­ple. Then we won­der why they don’t get fixed.

The dra­matic exam­ples are per­haps less instruc­tive.  I saw a lit­tle fel­low so far out of con­trol that it took three big lugs to throw him to the floor and strap him to a board.  Two days later, after the meds kicked in, he was a lucid and very intel­li­gent — and very charm­ing — fel­low.  His mother was a long-time edu­ca­tor, a Ph.D.  There was no short­age of intel­li­gence in that fam­ily!  What I learned from sev­eral of the psy­chi­a­trists was that fre­quently very intel­li­gent peo­ple are also not very sta­ble men­tally.  It goes with the turf.  Sev­eral psy­chi­a­trists have told me, for exam­ple, that you can’t have bi-polar dis­or­der unless you have a fairly impres­sive IQ.  One psy­chi­a­trist put it bluntly: “Stu­pid peo­ple don’t go bipolar.”

But the truly trou­bling cases are those folks who wan­der in and out of society’s insti­tu­tions with ghostly anonymity.  Their lives never gel.  They live with fear and anx­i­ety and con­flict, all of which com­pound one another over the years, a thick layer of scar tis­sue that suf­fo­cates the life from them.  After God knows how many tours through jails and men­tal hos­pi­tals, their self-image is shat­tered; and no mat­ter how much peo­ple put on the face of com­pas­sion, deep down these folks know them­selves as rejects.  They don’t really believe any­one is there to help them; they’ve stopped believ­ing any­one can.

It is truly aston­ish­ing how many peo­ple in the men­tal health pro­fes­sions don’t seem to have any gen­uine insight into suf­fer­ing.  The sys­tem is loaded with psy­chol­o­gists who believe they’re per­form­ing heal­ing func­tions when they say things like ‘cog­ni­tive’ or ‘behav­ioral’ while adopt­ing the most intel­lec­tual expres­sion they can muster.   It takes a rough and tum­ble Irish-American like myself to see it.  I some­times joked, “The Irish are born bipo­lar.”  Those of us who have felt the sting of lonely anguish have a gen­uine con­nec­tion with those who cry out, “Your Honor! This isn’t me!”  The prob­lem is, see­ing that and doing some­thing about it are two very dif­fer­ent things.

Bureau­cra­cies are not geared to address that very human side of things, which is a bit ironic when you think of it.  If gov­ern­ment funds can’t sus­tain an effec­tive heal­ing sys­tem for the men­tally ill, what would?  That’s a legit­i­mate ques­tion, to which there is no ready answer.  Most Amer­i­cans lazily assume that once the gov­ern­ment has spent money, the prob­lem is solved.  When you and I slough off our cre­ative, problem-solving pow­ers to an abstrac­tion, we really haven’t done any­thing except evade the issue.  I would describe that iner­tia as typ­i­cal of how we gov­ern our­selves in Amer­ica.  Cre­ativ­ity is local; gov­ern­ment is abstract.  Want to solve prob­lems?  Get in there and go to work.

A reader asked the other day, “Do you really believe that we have lawyers because peo­ple won’t accept respon­si­bil­ity?”  She then observed that when peo­ple try to argue their own cases in court, they are shut out.  This posi­tion has two prob­lems.  First, it assumes that ordi­nary peo­ple typ­i­cally make ratio­nal argu­ments, which isn’t true.  Peo­ple make emo­tional, not ratio­nal, argu­ments.  If it were oth­er­wise, this coun­try would be a very dif­fer­ent place.  The sec­ond prob­lem is that she missed my point. If your life can only be resolved in the court­room, you are not tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity for it.

As a result of my tour through the men­tal health sys­tem, I con­cluded that we are bar­bar­ians when it comes to address­ing human suf­fer­ing.  We really don’t know what we’re doing.

And no, I don’t have an imme­di­ate answer.  One thing I do know is, Amer­i­can soci­ety would be wealth­ier and more peace­ful if peo­ple were encour­aged to pull their own weight with­out resort­ing to blame, whether penal blame, polit­i­cal blame, or any other kind of blame.  Blame doesn’t heal.  Respon­si­bil­ity does.

How to do that?  Do you have any ideas?

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