Every once in awhile I need to light myself on fire.
I need to take the bullets, slings and arrows so that other people don’t have to.
I need to say the things that need to be said. You know that many of you are thinking it, but I am going to say it, and face the wrath and consequences.
Mentally ill people need to be quarantined.
Drug them up, lock them up, but for the love of God, just shut them up.
Fine. I am a compassionless, heartless b@stard. So what? When mentally ill people are not around, I have something that is more priceless than platinum. I have peace of mind.
I was not born with this hostility. It has taken a lifetime for me to want to take these people and rip their tongues out so that they cannot utter another bat spit crazy word.
I was not born wanting to hack their hands off so they could never send another angry text message at 4am.
I was not born wanting to be a vigilante because these mental lunatics have lawyers that want to trumpet their causes as they sue because they are angry about something, even if they are not sure exactly what and why they are angry.
As a productive worker, I have seen truly deranged people force my firm to spend legal bills defending junk lawsuits while refusing to say exactly what they want. Even Al Queda has a list of actual demands.
Legal Aid lawyers take these cases, and thousands of dollars later my firm still has no idea exactly WHY the other side is angry. They have doctor’s notices, but it has nothing to do with us.
Even when they do not sue, they call in and complain. One woman screamed at me for 10 minutes because her husband was cheating on her. She did mention her “condition,” but finally I had to ask her exactly what that had to do with our company.
Apparently we randomly cold called him. She was checking all of his messages to see who was on his cell phone. I finally convinced this nutcase of a woman that we had never met, spoken to, or done business with this man. I will never get those minutes of my life back.
It is not just work. One woman I went to college with once blew up at me as I was planning her birthday party. She had just seen the movie “Thelma and Louise,” and it put her in an angry mood towards men. She had “issues,” and I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
18 years later, this woman sent me hate mail because she did not like one of my columns. That hate mail will be an entire column in itself. She has threatened to sue me if I publish it, even though I have told her the names will be redacted. Needless to say, her language was as uncivil as her brain was fried.
These are not aberrations. Some people are just certifiable.
An ex-girlfriend of mine was very troubled. When I say troubled, I mean unstable. When I quickly broke it off, the hostile phone calls kept coming. I had to call her mother, who apologized for her daughter’s behavior, and promised to make her cease. She did.
Now all of these nutcases were women. Yet men get no exemption.
Twice in my life, I have had roommates that were simply not mentally all there. They hid it well in the beginning.
Both of them would fly into rages over politics, especially when they did not take their medication.
In fact every one of these people mentioned above was politically left wing.
I am not in any way implying that being a liberal makes one mentally ill. I am sure there are non-liberals that have mental illnesses. I have just been lucky enough to not meet them.
I will at some point try to analyze why the correlation between mental illness and far leftism is so strong, but that is not what today is about. My suspicion is that leftism teaches people to rail against perceived injustices. Easily susceptible people then consider every possible real or imaginary slight to be an injustice. They become crusaders. Railing against the rich and the powerful is just an extension of railing at random inanimate objects on the street.
I did not start these political conversations. I would be watching tv, minding my own business, and they would start yelling. You cannot win an argument with a lunatic. You have to wait until they burn themselves out. It is truly like being subjected to domestic terrorism.
Again, my analysis is not scientific. Anyway, back to the crazies.
Two members of my family are mentally ill.
The good news for me is that neither one of them are my mother or father. The bad news is that my parents want me to be more “compassionate.”
No. I am done. I gave at the office. Repeatedly.
I am tired of being let down. I am tired of having to tolerate bad behavior. I am tired of being told that these people are “not well,” and that “they can’t help what they do.”
Yes they can. They can check themselves into treatment centers. If they won’t, then their caretakers should forcibly enter them.
Some say the law will not allow this. Well the law needs to be fixed. Do we have to wait until these people boil a bunny rabbit or kill a productive human being before we realize that something should have been done? The Son of Sam may have been a lovely child, but if a dog is telling him to kill people, either shoot the dog for telling him to do it, or get rid of him for listening!
Some say that a major problem in this society is that we do not give mental illness the same respect that we give physical illnesses. There is a major difference.
Nobody used cancer or heart disease as an excuse to make my life miserable. The physically ill do not drag down healthy people.
Mentally ill people are a threat to the very survival of people who have a chance at success and normalcy.
I have experienced years of trying to love “sick” relatives only to be violated over and over again.
I cannot be pulled out of a business meeting where serious issues are on the line because somebody is having a breakdown and crying because that is what they do.
My parents have told me to just turn my cell phone off. No. I leave it on in case of an emergency.
This gets to the heart of what I freely admit is rage towards these people. It is not the normal people that should be forced to adapt. It is so easy to tell productive and sane people, “Just change so the behavior of ill people will not interfere.”
I don’t have to change. Nor should I. It is the people who scream and yell at inanimate objects that need to change.
“They can’t help who and how they are.”
That does not mean I have to tolerate these people. Get them away from me.
One day I plan to have a family. I cannot have these people near my family. Safety comes first.
What if one day I gave birth to a mentally ill child?
I would be crushed, angry, bitter, and would still love my child. What I would not do is let them be unleashed on society to wreak havoc. I will get them the appropriate treatment.
Those who are responsible for mentally ill people, be it their parents or their government, must force these people into getting better. In fact, if a parent of a mentally ill teenager does not get them treatment, and the mentally ill teenager goes and kills somebody, the parents should be arrested immediately.
“You can’t try the parents. They have suffered enough.”
No. The people that had their family member killed by a lunatic are the ones that suffered. The parents enabled this. Behind every act of violence by one of these monsters is a person or people that did nothing to stop it, preferring excuses over corrective actions.
Don’t be fooled by feel good Hollywood garbage. In real life Forrest Gump is not charming. He is not a hero. He is a babbling psychopath that most likely is wielding a knife while yelling about “The eye of the dog of the drum of the morlock of the power broker of the King of Henry the Eighth I am!”
I have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I have a right to walk down the street safely. I have the right to watch television without being verbally assaulted. I have the right to get through a business meeting without “emergencies” that are not actual emergencies getting in the way. I have the right to not be inundated with text messages at 4am.
I have the right to not have to deplete my savings because others failed in their financial obligations, and will continue to fail forever and ever. A 0% success rate is a pretty reliable statistic to predict future failures.
I have the right to be left the heck alone.
I don’t care how many people get hurt by this column. I really don’t.
Call me every name in the book, but I honor my responsibilities.
When you have pets that are wild and out of control, you get them spayed or neutered. If people are willing to get their animals treated so that society does not suffer, then surely people deserve no less.
Drug them up. Lock them up. Do what it takes. Just shut them up.
Otherwise we will all be driven to that level of insanity, and nobody will be left to produce.
Besides, if any one of us sane people snap and kill one of them, we can always just claim we are crazy and be absolved of all responsibility.
Heck, it works for both of my relatives. They attack everybody and answer to nobody.
I am done trying to help people that only hurt others. At this point I would be willing to stick them in Guantanamo Bay before it gets shut down for good. Maybe they can make the Al Queda crazies even crazier. It would be interesting to see who surrenders at that point.
Mentally ill people turn into verbal terrorists. They become verbal (unless they cross over into actual) suicide bombers. The only solution is to break them in half. Indulging them does not work. Enabling them emboldens them.
Like other terrorists, the solution is force.
I pray that the various people I have cited above, including my relatives, get forcibly dragged into the appropriate treatment facilities. I hope they get drugged against their will until they stop being threatening.
I have the right to live in peace and tranquility.
Until the streets are cleared from these dangerous people, none of us are safe.
“They can’t help it.”
Well make them help it.
Because I can’t help it anymore. I shouldn’t have to.
I gave at the office. Then they interrupted a critical meeting and demanded that I give even more.
It’s them or me. It sure as well won’t be me. I worked too d@mn hard.
eric