Comment character limits, Jesus, who dreamed that up?

You know why I rant at any unfortunate rightwinger who enters my range when some random nutjob commits violence against anybody? Because they have spent the last thirty years tearing apart whatever feeble nets we have had in place to help people before they get to that point. They are determined to shrink government and lower taxes, whatever the costs to society. And one of those costs is that people who are mentally ill can get ahold of guns, can kill people, can kill themselves, can destroy lives. And there's no reason for it. We can catch most of these people before they hurt someone. But it costs too much, it means having mental hospitals in someone's neighborhood, it means decent background checks on people buying guns, it means universal health care, and not just any health care, but universal mental health care. And if you think these people think people with cancer don't deserve help, you better believe they don't think people with mental disorders deserve help, because, hell, they're probably just faking it anyway. Remember the Newt Gingrich/Rush Limbaugh nonsense that disability to help mentally disorderd kids was causing child abuse because kids were being beaten by welfare moms for not getting "crazy money"? This has been going on a very long time. Conservatives don't want to help anyone, but they especially don't want to help those creepy crazy people whose problems are probably just drug-related anyway. Better to dismiss them after the fact as just the random acts of evil, and pretend there are no underlying causes we can do anything about.

Mental illness destroys people. Most of the time it does it in ways that are less obvious, people dying of drug overdoses as they desperately self-medicate, people dying on the streets because they are non-functional, people killing themselves. And it doesn't have to happen, much of the time, if we just accept that we are all in this together, that we are our brothers' keepers. A decent health care system, a decent welfare system, a decent disability system, a decent education and screening system, a decent drug treatment program--even just laws that keep the guns away from people who really shouldn't have them.

We can catch a lot of these people before they quietly destroy themselves and their loved ones, or before they loudly destroy strangers in a parking lot. If we only are willing to accept that it's a priority, that it's a problem, even when there aren't a dozen people bleeding out in a public school or a mall or a workplace. But to do that, we'd have to accept that we have some kind of responsibility to help these people, even if only out of self-defense. And eliminationist rhetoric aside, we've been inundated for decades with conservative policy and politics that say government big enough to help people who can't help themselves is too big, too expensive.

Look, I'm schizophrenic. I'm out, and this week has been awful on several levels both in my own head and dealing with the suddenly very concerned people who desperately want me back on the antipsychotics that had me suicidal for the last year. My partner, in a dying industry, has had five jobs in three years, just started a new one, and after some debate has insurance that will cover me, but you better believe we're an experiment. And if I get too costly--and trying to sort out medications so that everyone is adequately convinced I am not a danger to myself or others (I have never been violent, most of us aren't, but hey, one nutjob and everybody starts freaking out) is going to get really expensive really fast--they may consider the experiment failed and drop partner coverage. Plus this sort of shit always leaves me worrying that hey, maybe I could wind up violent, and I would do literally anything to prevent that happening, which in this case means going back on drugs that leave me even less functional than I am now.

I know exactly how much harm the "We are none of us responsible to or for anyone else" policies of the Randian supermen do. I see it when one of us destroys his or her own life. And yes, I get outraged. But usually no one pays much attention until one of us destroys someone else's life. Never mind the violent talk and the ads and soundbites explicitly designed to make the other party sound like baby- and grandma-killing jackbooted terrorist-sympathizing fascists (and I think it absolutely does have an impact, but let's say just for right now that it doesn't), I watched a guy from a right wing think tank on CSPAN the other morning explain with contempt that liberals believe that we're all responsible for each other, as though that were the most revolting notion possible. *This* is what they've been doing since Reagan and before. And now that they're finally drowning what's left of our society in the bathtub, they expect us to keep quiet when the bodies float to the surface and they use them to as soapboxes to do more of it.

I'd have been outraged if it'd been Dick Cheney, though I deeply loathe that man. I'm outraged because, while we can't say for sure, there's a good chance this guy could have been helped before he destroyed so many lives. I'm outraged because we are absolutely determined not only not to learn from this, but to use it to actually make things worse. And that's crazy. Me, the unmedicated schizophrenic, is telling you that that. Is. Crazy.

It is worthy of comment, it is worthy of a search for explanations and ways to prevent it in the future, it is worthy of outrage.