The Not-So-Golden Years: Lobotomizing the Post-War Woman

While looking through one of the Photoplasty contests on Cracked.com, 29 Insane Pastimes That Prove History Was Terrifying, I happened upon an especially disturbing entry about the use of the lobotomy procedure to essentially create the perfect – or at least, the more obedient – housewife or child.  Aghast at the idea that this happened as recently as the early1950s, I did some research on the history of the lobotomy procedure as well as its use on women.

Source: annetaintor.com

The History of the Lobotomy

The procedure itself was relatively unprecise.  Psychiatrist Walter Freeman , the man that popularized and performed the procedure for all ailments from headaches to Schizophrenia, said that the procedure consisted of sticking an icepick in the patient’s eye and ‘wiggling it’ around, blindly cutting parts of the frontal lobe in order to make an otherwise unrulypatient more docile.

Furthermore, the procedure itself in no way required the consent of the patient.

Only the consent of a close relative such as a spouse, and the doctor that would be performing the surgery, work actually needed.  This is especially terrifying to me considering Freeman had a no-anesthesia policy, and instead opted to use electroshock therapy to knock the patient unconscious before operating.

Between the late 1930s and the late 1950s, around 18,000 patients had lobotomies performed on them.  Many of them were patients who were admitted to mental asylums, and the lobotomies had been carried out less for their sake than for the peace of mind of the institution workers themselves.

Subjecting patients to such a horrendous surgery for thesake of those around them set a terrifying precedent that carried into households around the U.S.  Children, women, and the mentally retarded were often targeted by their own family members to undergo the surgery, which was professed to cure all mental and behavioral disorders, including those which were not disorders at all.

One man - Howard Dully -  who was later interviewed by the National Public Radio (NPR) had been the youngest patient to be lobotomized at the age of twelve, for no other reason than because his stepmother had forced it upon him.  She took him to doctor after doctor – convinced that the slightly absent-minded boy was "savage" – only to be told repeatedly that he was perfectly normal.

That didn’t stop her from forcing him to be lobotomized, nor did it stop Freeman from performing the operation.

The fact that Dr. Freeman performed this incredibly intrusive, extremely dangerous surgery (his particular method was immediately banned after one of his patients had a brain hemorrhage and died) with little to no regard for his patients’ psychiatric record or glaring lack thereof points to one terrifying conclusion with regards to the high proportion of women who were lobotomized around this time.

Changing Gender Roles

In addition to the 1940s and 1950s being a time of great popularity for the Freeman’s lobotomy surgery, it was also a time of great social change: WWII had finally ended, the role of women had changed significantly, and more importantly, a couple decades earlier they white women were given the right to vote.  As men came back in droves from the war, they found that many jobs once occupied by men alone had been taken up by women.  More importantly however, many women were content to remain working, and fought to retain their positions while men expected them to relinquish them to returning soldiers.  This phenomenon was encapsulated best in the movie The Best Years of Our Lives, where one of the characters is left by his wife – a woman working at a nightclub and living on her own – and who later finds love with a ‘better’ woman, one concerned with being a caretaker, and taking a supportive role for the man in her life.

Given this backlash to the new role of women in American society, it is worrisome that during this time many of those lobotomized – to make them more docile, and manageable for their family or for their caretakers (like a pet or an infant) – were women.

Coincidence or...?

Was the use of lobotomies part of some unconscious, frantic social desire to correct women's behavior, which at the time was so subversive to traditional values?  It is difficult to give a concrete answer to such a controversial question, especially given that around the same time period, mental asylums were critically overcrowded and the medical community was desperate for a solution.  

However, given that as a sort of institutionalized counter-protest, many governmental policies taxed more of women's income than a man's (legitimizing this action by stating that a woman's income is likely a secondary family income anyways), and given the medical community's track record for performing procedures against a female patient's will in order to further some political or societal goal - even today - make the use of lobotomies for the same purpose seem not so far-fetched after all.

"The Primal Goddess"

Happy Halloween!!!

Pictured: Louise Williams dressed as "The Primal Goddess"

 Halloween/Samhain 2013

We the People: The 4th Branch

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rockbeyondbelief/

I believe that there is a fourth branch of government, and I believe the inaction of this branch is exactly why the U.S. has fallen from greatness.  There is the Executive.  There is the Legislative.  There is the Judicial.

And there is us, The People.

We have shirked our responsibilities as citizens of this great Democratic state.  We have allowed ourselves to be distracted away from the actions of our government toward other nations, and toward ourselves.  We have allowed ourselves to become complacent - and therefore complicit - in the gradual erosion of our rights.

Our amber waves of grain, our majestic mountains and natural wonders are being exploited by the very companies that lobbied our government to give them equal status as us, those who suffer their mistakes through our taxes and through our lives (see: DeepWater Horizon oil disaster by B.P.).  The rights won through the blood, sweat, and tears of our historically oppressed citizens - our women, our minorities, our immigrants, our homosexuals, our intellectuals, our union workers, our... - are being forgone in exchange for re-election monies and for a brief boost of egos.

Our districts are constantly gerrymandered - not to reflect the actually demographics of our communities, but so that elected leaders who have proven themselves ineffective and corrupt can win another round...

If we are to expect a better government, better politicians, better corporations, and a better future, we must first expect and force ourselves to become better.  We must find the time to know who our representatives and senators are, who we've elected onto our city councils.  We must find the time to care what riders are being put onto bills that must pass, and be wary of those political actors who seek to corrupt the system for our own benefit.

We must raise ourselves to our own expectations, and make ourselves in the image of our ideal.
We must take back the power, the rights, and the duties bestowed upon us, and strive for solidarity with fellow Americans; only then can we truly call ourselves 'The 4th Branch', the American People.

The Wrong Reaction

Source: http://www.doubleblind.org/

     It took only a moment to realize that there was a man watching me from behind the mirror.  They’d dragged me into this sitting room, pleasant as it was, to watch me.  I wouldn’t have been surprised if the officer who had been sent to collect me wasn’t behind the mirror as well, with all of the doctors and such who would be examining me.

Shit.

     I looked around the room, taking in the sickeningly sweet pink wallpaper, the floral upholstery of all the furniture, the water cooler that dripped every so often, the bubbling coffee machine that seemed peculiar in the deathly quiet place.  It wasn’t at all what I’d first expected to see in a mental asylum, but then again, I suppose they would have had to make some place pleasant enough for visiting families to sit while they waited for their insane relatives to be led to them from the facilities behind the big white doors.

     The police had bust into my house after I made the mistake of telling a good friend of mine about some dreams I have had lately, dreams in which I had died.  I confided in her that at one time in my life, a long time ago when I was still basically a child, I had been pseudo-suicidal, constantly thinking about how I might do it, how I might hurt myself or put myself into some inescapable danger – just to say it wasn’t actually my doing.

     But never actually doing it.  Never actually wanting to do it!  Never even considering the effects, beyond a bemused longing to know that perhaps those people around me, my parents, my siblings, my friends, would be at the very least touched by my untimely passing.

     Anyways, I had told her that I often thought of death, that at a moment’s notice, a slip of my hand as I made the turn on the interchange of a freeway, an accidental acceleration into perpendicular traffic while at a stoplight, overdosing on medication due to a misreading of the directions—

     There were so many different ways it could happen, I had told her.  We are so bloody fragile, I had said, that it is in fact a wonder we are even alive.  A wonder that our flight landed safely as we came back from the Bahamas, a wonder that I come back in one piece from my university campus every day, a wonder that – in spite of the fact that we have become so far removed from how humans are supposed to live – that we don’t just throw up our hands, give up, and jump off the nearest skyscraper just so we don’t have to keep breathing in the smog we’ve forgotten how to see every day.

     It is a curious thing, I had told her over a slice of pizza and some shitty beer.  It is fascinating that we are at once so fragile and so strong.  So easy it is for us to change our future with just a click of the wrong button, due to our own mistake or someone else’s.  Or purposefully, to make the choice not to let go of the wheel and let gravity and projectile motion take you where it may.

I suppose she took my existential musings the wrong way.

     Perhaps I’d read her wrong, and thought she would be alright with morbid philosophical thought.  Maybe there really was something wrong with me, that made me so fascinated by our mortality and the one-track mind of an animal who – even seeing the grim reaper closing in with his glittering scythe – would expend the last of its energy to live on, to grasp to the very thing it destroys every day with its advances in poisoned food, its tendency to shy away from proper medical care, and acting against its own interest to preserve its ‘status’.

     Maybe having drunken conversations about existentialism and mortality with people whose mind goes into a paranoid frenzy at the mention of the word ‘suicide’…

     That would explain why I have been sitting in the empty lobby of a rather quiet, pink-loving mental asylum waiting for the man behind the proverbial curtain to reveal himself and explain why I would be sitting in a cell under constant watch for the next two days.

The Hyper-Partisan Problem: Congress Plays A Broken Record

Since I've begun nurturing a growing interest in domestic and international politics, one glaring problem I have seen rear its ugly head time and time again is the way the U.S. Congress chooses to deal with two issues:

The Debt Ceiling & the renewing of the Federal Budget for the new fiscal year.

Last year, the problem got so bad that Congress actually held itself hostage at one point, pushing back their deadline to continue their hyper-partisan bickering until at one point they created a plan that everyone in both the House and the Senate loathed as a way to force some kind of bipartisan deal -- a plan which by the way, didn't work.

Now, here we are again, listening to the same old song from Congress.

This time, the Republican-majority in the House of Representatives has approved a bill allowing for the renewing of the federal budget IF the provision allowing for the complete de-funding of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare)  is allowed through as well, a provision which the Democratic-controlled Senate has already vowed to strike down.

With time running short -- Congress only has until Monday night to approve a new federal budget so that a partial government shutdown might be averted -- it seems that once again the polarized U.S. Congress has figuratively kidnapped the immediate future of the American People, using the threat of a government shutdown as leverage to obtain what one side or the other wants (or does not want).

In addition to this, the looming threat of a credit default by the U.S. in October, should Congress not approve a measure to raise the Debt Ceiling, has also been warped as a tool to force the de-funding of the Affordable Care Act.

Whether one agrees with the Affordable Care Act or not, it must be recognized that this kind of mindless bickering, this perverted use of power by the U.S. Congress to try to force one group to do the bidding of another in an despotic, futile attempt to display dominance is the exact reason why the U.S. has lost its standing in the world as a political and economic beacon of power and stability.

The career politicians in Congress who have become so detached from "Main Street" America have allowed their ideological interests to bypass the practical, compromising, and compassionate processes with which a Democracy should be run.

In summation, if they can't do their job correctly, then maybe its time -- really time -- for the American populace to get their own acts together and elect people who can.

Rote Memorization: The Deterioration of the U.S. Citizen

Few would argue with the idea that the purpose of a public education system in any country is not only to create more skilled, successful workers, but to shape the average citizen; especially in democratic states, the type of citizen desired by a country has an important place in the direction such a state will turn to, since the political process works best when the average participant is informed and politically active.

However, with the implementation of standardized tests in the last few decades as the chief pathway of testing the knowledge of a student, critical thinking as a skill as deteriorated in our society, with a select few students chosen early on to participate in "honors", "advanced placement", and "accelerated" classes, and the remainder pressed into classes where rote memorization was supreme.


Rote Memorization


Now, rote memorization - or memorization by repetition - has its place.  When it comes to knowing base facts, learning to memorize quickly and efficiently comes in handy, especially given the incentives for the skill: standardized multiple-choice tests such as the high school exit exam make it easy for students to pass classes, because no deep understanding of the subjects being taught is required.  As long as one knows how to memorize dates, basic equations, and whatever statements their teacher told them they needed to know, they will pass.

The problem is, when the incentives for "learning" are so skewed to quickly memorizing facts for a test (which are almost always immediately forgotten afterward).  Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, except that often teachers in elementary and secondary schools don't take the next step and form classroom activities in such a way as to facilitate critical thinking, to take the definitions and equations memorized, and press deeper into the subjects.

The preparation is solely for taking tests, not for truly learning and understanding material.  This is made worse by the tying of teachers' compensation to the number of students which pass these tests.  So, the incentive for learning pushes both students and teachers to cram large amounts of information by memorization in a short period of time leading up to a test, allowing for higher number to pass the test (by which all involved are judged).



Missing Link: The Critical Thinker

So what happens when the wide majority of a democratic state has not been trained to excel in critical thinking?  When the average outcome of the educational system is a person who has had their curiosity or even slight interest in the things going on around them quashed?  Who can't stand math, would rather watch "Reality" T.V.  than read the news?

What happens when the average citizen in a Democratic state can't be bothered to pay attention to politics and the activities of their government, because it doesn't provide the same level of "entertainment" (read: distraction) as a cartoon or music video?

I'll leave you to think about it, but if one takes the time to look up from FaceBook every now in then, the answer isn't far off at all, especially for the U.S. citizen.

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Breaking out of the Produce Contamination Craze

 I have written a bit before on the unfortunate frequency of various diseases being contracted all over the U.S. as a result of poor handling of produce sometime between the sowing and the shipping of whatever fruit or vegetable is cause for suspicion.

Presently, the specific produce causing a "stomach bug" that has affected almost 300 people in Wisconsin, Illinois, Texas, Nebraska, and a few other states is not yet known.  But it just makes me want to stress even more the benefits of growing one's own food, if only to supplement the food one might buy from their local grocery store.

Right now, my family veggie garden has a few squash plants, a young watermelon plant, some corn stalks and sunflowers, two eggplant...plants, a thriving zucchini plant and two tomato plants, which have just begun to fruit regularly as we head into late summer.

Small eggplant from our garden

Gorgeous Zucchini Blossom :)

 The beauty of it all is that the plants are relatively self-sufficient, needing to be watered only once a day in most cases, except when its pretty hot (it can get to be around 100 F or higher here in SoCal).  Not only that, but all of these plants take up relatively little room in our backyard, leaving much of our backyard open for frolicking and play.

The best part, however, about having this little vegetable garden, is knowing exactly where my produce came from, how it was raised, what kind of chemicals (NONE) were used on it, etc., a knowledge which is seems to have been rendered a luxury to us Americans lately; ignorance of such facts here can unfortunately spell disaster for one's health, as we have seen time and time and time again.





What am I saying?  Go out back, find a small plot of soil, and go plant some tomatoes or squash!

Trust me, you and your health will be happy you did. :)

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http://news.yahoo.com/stomach-bug-linked-produce-sickens-285-people-11-132017385.html

The Myth of Race in the U.S.

This is my first post for the video branch of my blog, and I hope you like it!  Here, I talk about the origins of race, its place in U.S. life and culture, and the implications of a society that inherently uses race as a tool to maintain divisiveness within its populace, in order to keep attention away from its fundamental issues and possible solutions.

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A Good Day for American Freedoms

Just a brief update on the effect of Senator Wendy Davis's filibuster of S.B. 5, a sweeping anti-abortion bill which would have closed twenty of the twenty-five abortion clinics currently open in Texas and limited abortions to those before 20 weeks, NO exceptions.

Also, WOOOO! The Defense of Marriage Act, or Prop 8 in California, has been struck down!  A great step towards true equality in America. :)

Anyways, after almost 13 hours of non-stop standing and talking, without the ability to eat, drink, or lean on anything, Sen. Wendy Davis was finally silenced because of a ruling stating she had gone off topic in speaking about Sonograms (which...considering Texas's law that a woman must have a sonogram - to see and "listen to a description of the fetus and its heartbeat" - before she can have an abortion... seems pretty on-topic to me)...(I think that's a rather keen example of institutional psychological abuse by a state government against a group of its people, but I suppose that is for another post...).

However, some of her fellow Senators and supporters came to her aid in the final moments, constantly stalling the vote with parliamentary inquiries into the validity of the order of the meeting, and with several points-of-interest brought up as well.

In the end, the Senate attempted to bring the bill to a vote, but - being after the deadline (after which, the convening special session could no longer function, effectively killing the bill), the vote was invalid and SB 5, dead.

What are your views on the subject?  Are you pro-choice? Pro-life? Why?

Regardless of how you view the topic that they debated, it was nonetheless a refreshing sight, to see an elected official truly putting the will of her constituents before her own agenda.
Thank you, Sen. Wendy Davis, and thank you Sen. Garcia, for refusing to be silent about women's rights and women's health!

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Gun Rights ...and Why I Am For Them

While on my way to school this morning, I found myself listening to NPR during a conversation about the Gun Control/Gun Rights debate currently gripping Washington D.C.

Now, my own views on guns for civilian use can be summed up in the word: meh.  I have never felt any particular need to own a gun, and I've never understood very clearly the need that others felt to own them either, though I do understand that they would want them for protection against some shadowy figure that Gun Rights advocates never really seemed to give a name to.

I understand very clearly that Gun Control advocates want to limit the procuring of guns by civilians for safety reasons, to combat the rampant gun violence in the U.S., which from what I understand is higher than it is in any other advanced industrial nation.

The conundrum here is that Gun Rights advocates want to retain the open gun markets for the exact same reasons, to promote the safety of the American public; it should be quite obvious to anyone who pays even an ounce of attention to this debate, that no one really knows how to combat gun violence... mainly because until very recently gun violence research was prohibited.

But I digress.

I was on my way to school this morning.
     As I listened to this conversation on NPR, one statement jumped out at me.  It was a reason that a Gun Rights advocate had given to explain his fervent refusal to accept any infringement on the Second Amendment right, especially in the case of a military-grade weapons ban.

He said: the Second Amendment was created, not to defend ourselves against our fellow citizens, but against government tyranny, and to discourage it.  I'm paraphrasing, but I'm sure you'll get the gist of the argument.  I have always shied away from the Gun Rights debate, simply because the idea of taking up arms against one another really made me sick, and simply sealed in my mind the idea that guns are only an item which symbolized the divisiveness in our society which is eating away at our own strength.

 But this argument stuck, not because I feel the need to take up arms and begin another Civil War, but because it put forth this idea that perhaps the American Public is a figurative "fourth branch" of the American government, the Bill of Rights - necessarily including the 2nd Amendment - our claws.  The most powerful of the branches, and unfortunately in the last thirty years, the most complaisant and the most absent.

But it gave me some hope that now perhaps We, the People, could change our country for the better.  Not only because we are the most powerful "branch", should we choose to once again be active in our own lives and communities, but because we are also by extension the most to blame for the poor state of our nation.


That statement struck me deeply, and I found myself nodding my head and agreeing with that statement.  I was surprised this morning, for that was the concise, powerful, and persuasive argument I had been looking for in the Gun Rights advocates.  Now, for that reason stated above, I am pro-Gun Rights completely.  That reason alone. (...Although the second amendment doesn't say anything about the government being prohibited from regulating guns and so forth...but that is for another post.)

But now comes the hard part, because I don't believe that the best alternative is to arm everyone, everywhere, to protect against violence.

Now, we have to confront the reason for the violence in the first place.  A broken mental health system, which I talked about in my previous post, Mental Health and Mass Murder: the Elephant in the Room, the quick and constant increase of income inequality, and most importantly, the double-edged sword that is our extremely polarized political system and the deteriorating sense of community within our communities.



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Look out for my next few posts, which will be addressing these rifts within the U.S. systems, questions that need to be posed, and ideas on how to start fixing them.  ALSO!!! If you are interested in creating a community with me, to help get the effort started, LET ME KNOW IN THE COMMENTS!  I value your opinion and I love you.  I promise o.o!

(>^_^)>#

The Legitimacy Crisis

After the “end” of the Great Recession (many would disagree with the idea that it has ended for anyone except the EXTREMELY well off), people have noticed the stock market climbing ever higher.

     Large corporations, especially those in the financial sector, have become better-off, bigger, and ultimately – in the words of Attorney General Eric Holder – that banks are not only Too-Big-To-Fail, but also Too-Big-To-Jail.  Quarterly earnings are up, the housing market is supposedly rebounding, and the middle class is regaining its…strength?

     Not so much.  In fact, looking at the unemployment rate – no, looking at the labor force participation rate which has of February 2013 is 63.5% according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (read: 36.5% unemployment including those who’ve dropped out of the workforce), it’s kind of difficult to imagine that the middle class is still doing well.  Especially considering that, according to NBC News, roughly 15% of Americans are on Food Stamps and need supplemental aid to even feed themselves, it’s absurd to believe that this “recovery” has accomplished anything besides restoring the financial sector to their former “glory” just before the beginning of the Great Recession.  For everyone else, recessionary conditions drag on.

     And that’s what worries me.  The U.S. economy is dependent more than ever on a growing financial sector, one whose fundamental flaws have not changed since before the financial collapse.  There is still little to no real regulation in place, rating agencies have yet to regain their credibility, and commercial and investment banks are accounting for more and more of U.S. GDP.

     To put it briefly, the same system – with the same incentives for corruption and poor decision making for short-term profits – remains.

     Except it got bigger.

     So now we have all of our metaphorical eggs in the same severely damaged basket.  Social mobility – the foundation of the American dream – has been virtually wiped out and income inequality in the U.S. has soared.  Furthermore, the majority of Americans no longer trust their own government, as the single digit approval ratings of congress very blatantly show.

    This raises a very disturbing, very necessary question.  When the majority of American citizens no longer see the government as a legitimate political body of the U.S. state, what happens?

    There was the Occupy movement.

    There was the Tea Party movement (before they got hijacked), but there hasn’t been a widespread, unified stand by the American people as a whole.

     Is it because they’re too busy bickering about which of the two corrupted political parties is less absurd while Rome burns?

     Is it because there hasn’t been enough of a shock to the average American to spur the public to action?

                Is it out of complacency?  Is it out of fear?

               

     When a person goes bankrupt and they can no longer pay their mortgage, their house is repossessed by the bank who owns the mortgage.

     When a corporation goes bankrupt, it is often placed into conservatorship, where the government temporarily takes control of the business and corporate bondholders become the new shareholders.

     Now.

     When a small portion of the U.S. population and economy accounts for a wide majority of concentrated political and financial power, and the U.S. government has sanctioned this through policy (deregulation of the riskiest and biggest portion of the economy), constitutional interpretation (read: Citizens United), and through testimony (as Eric Holder obviously shows), what will the American people, the source of legitimacy of the U.S. government, do when its government has become derelict and corrupt?

     Will we protest and participate in Civil Disobedience?  Will we riot?  Will we hold national conventions?

Or will we cower?  Will we wait for change to produce itself without our effort?  Will we sip our chai tea lattes and watch quietly as our country destroys itself?

These are questions that must be asked.

Gandhi once said we must “be the change we wish to see in the world,” …but I do love a good chai latte. (>^_^)>#

Sources:

Eric Holder: “Banks too big to prosecute”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3zwhp5-jXA

Labor Force Participation Rate (Bureau of Labor Statistics) http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000

Food Stamps info http://www.nbcnews.com/business/report-15-americans-food-stamps-980690

Wealth Inequality in America (Sorry, I couldn’t find the sources for the video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTj9AcwkaKM