Don't Be A Corpse

When did having emotions become wrong and something to be managed? These days, according to some statistics, antidepressants are the most commonly prescribed medication in America and the numbers are only rising. I often lament about the state of the world and how we are being forced into smaller and smaller boxes of accepted behavior and I see the mindset coming at us from many angles.

Medically, if you undergo a traumatic experience or are dissatisfied with your life, that is a reason to medicate. Religious beliefs of all description, including the new age, suggest that our emotions must be tightly reined in; we must control our emotions and our thoughts, to reach a higher realm. And with the new terror state that we live, law enforcement is taught to look at all emotions suspiciously.

And yet, our media, owned by just a handful of men, show us out of control behavior at every turn, the ridiculous reality shows exposing the worst of humanity, the dozens of police shows giving a first hand view of murders and depravity that we would never have conceived without their help. The “talk” shows specializing in the darkest and most embarrassing of human behavior and the constant parade of sexualized images. Most will say, it’s just TV, is has no effect on me, but we don’t see how society is degrading, we don’t see because we are blinded by our TV, our prescriptions and our loss of emotion.

What we don’t see is that by tapping down our own emotion, our internal sense of what is just, they are easily instilling their brand of emotion, the darkest emotions. If we are dissatisfied with our life, the simplest thing to do would be correct what is leaving us unsettled, but society has deemed it wise to just medicate yourself and leave things be. Earlier in our history when someone was grieving it was perfectly acceptable to don black and experience mourning, it could last a month, a year or forever and it was understood. Nowadays, though, we have a few days off and then we must get back to normal and if normal isn’t found in a week or two, it’s time for medication.

When did we sacrifice so much? When did we give away our basic right to feel? We are lost. A wise man once said, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you.". We are not to tap down our emotion, we are to live it, feel it, learn from it, grow from it and if we don’t, we are no more than walking corpses.