Saturday, August 20, 2011

I need my happy pills

I believe we are experiencing the repercussions of the culture of pharmaceutical solutions to everyday problems.

First a little background. Life is a series of good times and not-so-good times.

We all experience rough patches in our lives. This is not new, it has been going on since man first breathed. Early man used the bad times to their advantage to grow and learn from mistakes. Societies were built and destroyed, and each time a lesson was learned; not during the times of celebration and excess, but during the lean times when difficulties needed to be overcome through persistence. Rome was not built in a day, the saying goes, nor did it fall overnight. Our founding fathers knew what it was to experience tough times, the first colony in the new world experienced the loss of roughly half its population due to the hardships of climate and disease.

But times have changed. We no longer want to experience the growing pains. We pharmaceutical away the hard times. Too many people are just popping a pill to feel better. I have some experience in this area, first I work in a pharmacy, I see first hand the abuse of medications. Okay before you call be a hypocrite, there are legitimate uses for medications, I am not advocating against pharmaceuticals, only the excessive use of mostly psychological medications that are meant to "even out the mood".

When some people hit a rough patch, they go to the doctor and get all weepy and depressed and claim that their lives are the worst and will never get better, so they need to pop a pill. This is doing horrendous things to our society, and world at large. There is no need to persist in something that is viewed as difficult anymore, there is no need to bear up against a burden, there is no need to work hard against all odds to achieve. All you need is to take this pharmaceutical and it will make everything better, too many people have fallen into this trap.

My graciousness, the number of young kids on ADHD drugs is staggering, and they don't just need them for school. Parents pick the drugs up even during the summer, when a kid should be outside, playing and using their excess, pent-up energy. We are medicating the difficulty out of raising kids, the job is not supposed to be easy; just give the kids his Ritalin and let them zone out so we parents can get a break. Give me a break, kids are supposed to teach US lessons, we are supposed to be the parent, it is not supposed to be easy. Life is not supposed to be easy.

Along this same line, why is the school system demanding that kids get medication if they are not attentive in the classroom? Believe it or not, the reason we hired the teachers in the first place is to teach the kids, not give their students piles of paper to fill out while the teachers just watch over them. That is something I could do just as easily at home, so why should we even send our kids to school in the first place? If your child's teacher is demanding you get your kid on drugs, you need to find a new teacher, the kid is not the problem.

Secondly, I had a friend who was not stable. She needed medications to function (see I am not against pshych meds). I never once advocated for her to get off her meds. I saw first hand how a person may need the medications. I saw how others in the church reacted to her medications, and how she reacted when she was persuaded to stop taking the meds. There are legitimate uses for medications. We have patients who come into our pharmacy that legitimately need their meds, and who can become belligerent and uncontrollable when they are not taking their medications properly.

We also have patients come in to fill their "happy pills". Oh good grief, have we gotten so bad that we cannot allow ourselves to be sad at times? College kids are taking highly-addicting sedatives to help them do better on tests, in fact, more of these drugs are sold during finals week than at any other time of the year. Our pharmacy has been experiencing a shortage of these type of medications, and these college kids just flip out, claiming they "need" their medication. What they really need is to do some studying.

If you really think about it most of our problems as a society are centered around the whole not- wanting-to-do-something-hard mind set. We HAD to raise the debt ceiling because it would be too hard to cut spending. We had to extend unemployment benefits because it would be too hard to make someone find a new way to feed himself. We had to create a social services safety net because it would be too hard for some people. We had to make abortion legal because it was too hard on women to carry a child to term and give the child up for adoption. We had to recall the Senators in Wisconsin because it will be too hard for union members to pay for their own benefits. We have to "tax the rich" because it is too hard to let people suffer who cannot earn as much as someone else.

Our society is sick, and the last thing we need is more self medication. We must either again experience hardships or our country is doomed. Simply put, we cannot afford to look past the hard times anymore. My fiancée has a song he likes, the lines are: "there ain't no way but the hard way, so get used to it."


Saturday, August 6, 2011

Wisconsin's leaky sink


Here is an analogy that might make things clearer.

I have a sink that has sprung a leak, it is leaking water all over, gallons upon gallons and nothing stops it. I call a plumber to fix the leak, but my kids don't like having someone else come into the house to do the work, some get upset. Of my 33 kids, 14 of them decide they are going to prevent the other 19 from getting the leak fixed by running away with the plumbers tools, nothing can get done without those tools. They stay away for weeks, and threaten to never return.
Finally my 19 kids decide they will work around the impasse caused by the 14 runaways and give the plumber a tool that he can work with and fix the leak; not quite the same tool, and not as effective, but it will help.
When the 14 runaways hear about the fix they return, and now they are incensed that somehow the plumber was given the tools needed to plug the leak and stop the unnecessary wasting of water. Now they have gotten a bunch of their friends to threaten violence and intimidate the 19 kids who stayed home and tried to find a solution for the leak. They have also started making trouble for them in their own homes, so their families would see how "mean" they were, for stopping the leak, and get rid of them.
Even some members of the families of the 14 runaways decided that maybe it wasn't for the good of all to have them try to throw a monkey wrench into the leak problem by running away with the plumbers tools. A lot of the family members decided to give the plumber some extra tools to help keep the leak plugged and not allow the 14 runaways and their friends to cause the repair to fail. Now the rift between my 33 kids and the plumber has gotten out of hand, not only are my 14 kids fighting against the 19, but they are also threatening the plumber with all kinds of sanctions. Even so far as trying to get some other states plumbers money to prevent the plumber from doing anymore work on the leak.
And why all the commotion? Because they wanted the sink to keep leaking, they liked the leak, because they could get all the water they wanted from the leak; and now that the leak is temporarily fixed they have to use the faucet to get their water. They don't like using the faucet. Using the faucet means they have to do some work, and they have to turn it off when they are finished getting their drink. They would much rather have the water running constantly and aplenty so they don't have to be responsible.

Cast of characters:
14 Runaway kids: Wisconsin's Democratic Senators
19 Stay at home kids: Wisconsin's Republican Senators
Runaways friends: Unions, protesters, Democratic Assembly, Mainstream Media,
The plumber: Scott Walker
The Leak: the Budget of Wisconsin
The Narrator: The people of Wisconsin

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

We The Stupid

We The Stupid

What kind of nation will our children be living in? As long as obama can keep us fighting each other we will be too occupied to fight him. Class warfare is just the beginning.

Monday, August 1, 2011

EXCLUSIVE: Source Reports Wisconsin Jobs Now! Engages in Illegal Election Behavior | Media Trackers

EXCLUSIVE: Source Reports Wisconsin Jobs Now! Engages in Illegal Election Behavior | Media Trackers

But the liberals are extremely PO'd about disenfranchising people who don't have an ID card, maybe they could get some drivers to take people to the DMV to get their ID cards so they can vote, instead of helping people break the law by paying them to vote. They continue to amaze me at how low they will stoop while pointing fingers at conservatives for even thinking of putting ringers into a protest. Come on already!!!

Patriot Proclamation

I don't know who wrote this, but I had to keep it and share it.

Patriot Proclamation
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to replace the politicians who have failed to properly govern our nation, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that we should declare the causes which impel us to this action.
We remind all that we still hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created Equal, and that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, among these Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. In order to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. However, when those in power become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to replace them, to alter the system by which they are chosen, and to institute a new process that is more likely to secure our Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that processes long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind is more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations persist, it is our right and our duty to throw out such leaders, and to provide new guards for our future.
Such has been the patient sufferance of We the American People; and such is now the necessity which compels us to alter the process by which our leaders are chosen. The history of the present and recent politicians is a history of repeated malfeasance and usurpations, all having directly or indirectly established an absolute control over We the People. To prove this, let these facts be submitted to a suffering nation:

The politicians have continuously ignored our Constitution, trampling the rights of the States and the people.
The politicians have completely destroyed the concept of equality, dividing the nation into countless factions in order to garner political support.
The politicians have criminally refused fiscal responsibility, incurring debts and obligations designed to enslave our posterity in the cruelest of ways.
The politicians have repeatedly failed our children by blindly supporting a failing, and in places, inept education system.
The politicians have blatantly abused our citizens with a ridiculously complex and intrusive tax code.
The politicians have consistently championed political correctness instead of making the difficult decisions that wisdom demands.
The politicians have cunningly rigged the election process so that the vast majority of incumbents are re-elected despite an overwhelming disapproval of their work.
Too many politicians have routinely ignored our Creator.

We have warned them from time to time, with correspondence of every kind, but they have been deaf to the voice of reason. We must, therefore, rally the members of this nation and peacefully replace those who have ashamedly usurped power that belongs to the States and the people.
We, therefore, as dutiful spokesmen for citizens all across America, hereby request that every patriot in this country join the GOOOH movement and help select a new slate of independent citizen representatives who will serve the people of their district.
For the good of this nation, and for the future of all who will follow, with a firm reliance on Divine Providence, we respectfully sign this Proclamation and mutually pledge to our fellow countrymen our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.