America Breaks Down: The Anatomy of a National Nervous Breakdown

Guest Post by John W. Whitehead

Another shooting, another day in America.

Or so it seems.

With alarming regularity, the nation is being subjected to a spate of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country’s fragile ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Take this latest mass shooting that took place at a small church in a small Texas town.

The lone gunman—a former member of the Air Force—was dressed all in black, wearing body armor, a tactical vest and a mask, and firing an assault rifle.

Devin Patrick Kelley, the 26-year-old gunman, was described as a “regular guy” by those who knew him.

This “regular” guy’s shooting rampage left at least 26 people.

President Trump and the Governor of Texas have chalked the shooting up to mental illness.

That may well be the case here.

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Still, there’s something to be said for the fact that this shooting bore many of the same marks of other recent attacks: the gunman appeared out of the blue without triggering any alarms, he was dressed like a soldier or militarized police officer, he was armed with military-style weapons and clearly trained in the art of killing, and the attacker died before any insight could be gained into his motives.

As usual, we’re left with more questions than answers and a whole lot more fear and anxiety.

That sense of unease is growing.

How do you keep a nation safe when not even seemingly “safe places” like churches and rock concerts and shopping malls are immune from violence?

The government’s answer, as always, will lead us further down the road we’ve travelled since 9/11 towards totalitarianism and away from freedom.

Those who want safety at all costs will clamor for more gun control measures (if not at an outright ban on weapons for non-military, non-police personnel), widespread mental health screening of the general population and greater scrutiny of military veterans, more threat assessments and behavioral sensing warnings, more CCTV cameras with facial recognition capabilities, more “See Something, Say Something” programs aimed at turning Americans into snitches and spies, more metal detectors and whole-body imaging devices at soft targets, more roaming squads of militarized police empowered to do random bag searches, more fusion centers to centralize and disseminate information to law enforcement agencies, and more surveillance of what Americans say and do, where they go, what they buy and how they spend their time.

All of these measures play into the government’s hands.

As we have learned the hard way, the phantom promise of safety in exchange for restricted or regulated liberty is a false, misguided doctrine that has no basis in the truth.

Still, why do these things happening?

Clearly, America is in the midst of a national nervous breakdown.

Things are falling apart, and the inmates in the asylum are starting to turn on each other.

This breakdown—triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, militarization and militainment (the selling of war and violence as entertainment), a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing corruption, the government’s alienation from its populace, and an economy that has much of the population struggling to get by—is manifesting itself in madness, mayhem and an utter disregard for the very principles and liberties that have kept us out of the clutches of totalitarianism for so long.

When things start to fall apart or implode, as they seem to be doing lately, I have to wonder who stands to benefit from it. In most cases, it’s the government that stands to benefit by amassing greater powers at the citizenry’s expense.

See, we’re like lab mice, conditioned to respond appropriately to certain stimuli.

Right now, we’re being conditioned to be reactionaries capable of little more than watching and worrying. Indeed, we are fast becoming a nation of bad news junkies, addicted to the steady and predictable drip-drip-drip of news—be it sensational, devastating, demoralizing, disastrous, or just titillating—that keeps us plastered to our screen devices for the next round of breaking news.

So much is happening on a daily basis that the average American understandably has a hard time keeping up with and remembering all of the “events,” manufactured or otherwise, which occur like clockwork and keep us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from reality.

We are suffering from “the crisis of the now.”

All the while, the government continues to amass more power and authority over the citizenry.

This is how the corporate elite controls a population, either inadvertently or intentionally, and advances their agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.

Rod Serling, the creator of the Twilight Zone, imagined just such a world in which the powers-that-be carry out a social experiment to see how long it would take before the members of a small American neighborhood, frightened by a sudden loss of electric power and caught up in fears of the unknown, will transform into an irrational mob and turn on each other.

It doesn’t take long at all.

So you see, Devin Patrick Kelley may have pulled the trigger that resulted in the mayhem in that small Texas church, but something else is driving the madness.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’re caught in a vicious cycle right now between terror and fear and distraction and hate and partisan politics and an inescapable longing for a time when life was simpler and people were kinder and the government was less of a monster.

Our prolonged exposure to the American police state is not helping.

As always, the solution to most problems must start locally, in our homes, in our neighborhoods, and in our communities. We’ve got to refrain from the toxic us vs. them rhetoric that is consuming the nation. We’ve got to work harder to build bridges, instead of burning them to the ground. We’ve got to learn to stop bottling up dissent and disagreeable ideas and learn how to agree to disagree. We’ve got to de-militarize our police and lower the levels of violence here and abroad, whether it’s violence we export to other countries, violence we glorify in entertainment, or violence we revel in when it’s leveled at our so-called enemies, politically or otherwise.

Unless we can learn to live together as brothers and sisters and fellow citizens, we will perish as tools and prisoners of the American police state.

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hardscrabble farmer

“Unless we can learn to live together as brothers and sisters and fellow citizens, we will perish as tools and prisoners of the American police state.”

It should be obvious that there is a connection between brothers and sisters that cannot begin to be replicated with people who are not related to one another in any form or fashion. The deliberate diversification of America leads inevitably to a prison state- that was the intention.

curtmilr
curtmilr

Spot on, HSF!

There’s nothing that compares to a familial link. But we can create extra-familial linkages for various purposes, Neighborhood Watch programs come to mind.

Modern American life has become so insular that it becomes harder to see even the potential linkages. We moved to a new neighborhood this spring, and have yet to truly connect with any of our neighbors. We’ve briefly met a few, but no one sits on a porch, or walks open to interaction. Everyone is shielded from interaction by their mobile devices. We are just as “guilty” as the next family, so I’m not casting stones. Everyone is cocooned, not seeking community outside their children thru school and church, and fewer attend due to the ongoing secularization of the society. Diversity and multiculturalism are corrosive effects on true community.

I think we can all see the ongoing atomization, and the negative consequences of it, but if there is a will to reverse that trend, no one seems to know how to go about it.

NoneYaBiz
NoneYaBiz

Sitting on one’s porch, standing in one’s yard or walking in one’s neighborhood can make you a target of and can invite the unwanted attention of either the state’s criminal gang or members of rival criminal gangs. I stay inside until I need to buy necessities. Even then I keep a firearm handy. Of course, when I venture out I do so armed.

NoneYaBiz

Stucky

Seems like you live as a prisoner in your own house.

Anonymous
Anonymous

A prisoner of fear.

kokoda - AZEK (Deck Boards) doesn't stand behind its product
kokoda - AZEK (Deck Boards) doesn't stand behind its product

Obviously a superb neighborhood, especially for children. Ever give a thought to MOVING!!!

jimmieoakland
jimmieoakland

I don’t know where you live, but I’ve lived in Oakland for 30 + years, and I have never been tempted to walk around with a gun, even through I was an ear witness once to a murder that occurred 2 blocks from my house. Statistically, there a lot more likely ways for you to die than being shot by a stranger, unless you are a drug dealer or gang banger yourself. People have an unfortunate tendency to exaggerate the risk of dangers that get the most news coverage. Parents are paranoid about leaving their kids unattended for second, lest they be snatched away by some pervert. How often does that happen in real life? It’s more dangerous to let your kid get in a car. It’s these unrealistic fears that are ruining peoples’ lives.

Done in Dallas
Done in Dallas

Throw in the fact that we have gotten more mobility in the last 50+ years and you get more atomized. People move for jobs and the days of living near family are long gone.

MarshRabbit
MarshRabbit

“but no one sits on a porch”, I’ve often wondered how much air conditioning contributed to the insular nature of our current communities. When I was a kid, it was common for dads to sit on the porch after work, read the paper, talk sports with the neighbors, etc. Also, two-earner families and grueling commutes might play a role.

Iska Waran
Iska Waran

Even when people are “brothers” they don’t always act like brothers. Witness Northern Ireland for decades. This shooter was a white guy, raised Christian, who killed white Christians. A homogeneous society is probably less prone to violence, but it’s no guarantee. Today, Scandinavians are assumed to be inherently peaceful, but historians believe it was only a few centuries ago (an instant in evolutionary terms) when they held 1/4 of their seeming kinsmen in vicious thralldom.

Anonymous
Anonymous

He may have been “raised Christian” but he was a professing activist atheist who called Christians stupid and frequently attacked them in online posts on a regular basis.

Don’t try to avoid that fact, he wasn’t a Christian and it is disingenuous to imply he was by not mentioning he was a professing atheist.

FWIW, the Air Force failed to report his conviction which allowed him to buy the gun he used. IOW, this was caused by a government screw up as much as all the other factors.

razzle
razzle

— “A homogeneous society is probably less prone to violence, but it’s no guarantee.”

Nobody expects a guarantee of safety except mentally ill progressives. Pursuing perfection guarantees total destruction.

The difference is that homogenous societies can *deal* with their failure cases better because cries of victimhood are MUCH harder to pull off granting the community much more coherent standards to strive to, and measure each other against.

When everyone is a “unique lived experience” that “you can’t judge” you provide cover for Satan zirself to walk openly with a giant grin on zims face.

Stucky

USAF dudes are rarely, if ever, “clearly trained in the art of killing”.

He wrote, “We’ve got to refrain from the toxic us vs. them rhetoric …”

Riiiight. Let’s all just pretend that there isn’t an us-vs-them plainly evident throughout America. That will work!!

Anonymous
Anonymous

USAF dudes are rarely, if ever, “clearly trained in the art of killing”.
Stuck, it ain’t the USAF that you, me and Magita the Red Rope knew.
They’re warriors now.

IndenturedServant

It’s clearly a case of monkey see, monkey do. The govt can’t get some group to cooperate with what we impose on them so we bomb the shit out of them and call it collateral damage. No one is punished.

Sooner or later the more depraved among us begin to act just like our depraved govt and so called leaders. We can spend trillions of fucking dollars endlessly bombing 12th century savages on multiple continents and them import the same savages and give three free welfare but we can’t take care of our own.

They only care about themselves and the rest of the world can suck hind tit. I really love it when they lecture us dirt people about how we need to do better. It just warms my little black heart.

pyrrhus
pyrrhus

No, the shooter was a militant atheist and antifa, as revealed by his FB page. You can skip the psychology, these people want us dead….

Stucky

I’ve known many atheists, and we have several here. Atheism has nothing to do with wanting fellow Americans dead, even with the ‘militaristic’ qualifier.

Antifa, on the other hand ….

kokoda - AZEK (Deck Boards) doesn't stand behind its product
kokoda - AZEK (Deck Boards) doesn't stand behind its product

I can vouch for that.

Anonymous
Anonymous

I disagree to an extent. A large proportion of atheists, esp. activist ones, have a virulent hatred of Christianity and Christians. Mix that hatred in w/ some mental instability and some SRI’s and the combination is likely pretty dangerous.

Gayle
Gayle

Careful. There have been some misguided murderous Christians over the ages.

Kelley’s past indicates emotional and mental instability that was unaddressed. Anybody who kills a puppy, cracks an infant’s skull, and wants to date 13-year-olds shouldn’t be free to wander the community, end of discussion.

Wouldn’t you know some government employee screwed up putting his name in the database? Would someone please explain to me again the exact purpose of that $billions computer facility in Utah?

IndenturedServant

Gayle, search on Operation Stellar Wind and much will be revealed.

Stucky

“A large proportion of atheists, esp. activist ones, have a virulent hatred of Christianity …”

Sure, OK.

The opposite is equally true, that Christians have a virulent hatred for atheists.

You see them here all the time … bb even wants to kill them all or see them dead ….. by his own words.

Anonymous
Anonymous

Christians are instructed to love and pray for their enemies and carry the Gospel to them that they may be saved from eternal destruction.

Those preaching hatred instead, no matter who it is for, are not Christians. They may call themselves Christians but they are not.

GilbertS
GilbertS

And we haven’t heard about what crazy pills he was on.

We don’t need Gun Control, we need Crazy Control.
As far as I’m concerned, if you need crazy pills to function, you need to be locked up. Why do we put potentially fucking crazy people on the Honor Code and assume they’ll just keep taking their crazy pills and not kill us all? Seems like an abdication of responsibility and a lack of Will on our part to do what needs to be done. I saw a list a while back that showed nearly every mass shooter has been a nut on some form of medication for their higher clumpage. If you lock up all the crazy fuckers, they won’t be grabbing guns and shooting us up in movie theaters, walmarts, churches, malls, etc. Then, we can get down to the threat posed merely by illegal alien gang bangers and DNC voters.

Anonymous
Anonymous

We’ll never know his psychiatric treatment history, if there is one (which is likely, IMO).

I understand he was known for trying to hire underage girls to “date” him, something that is not really normal in context with our times and laws (Muslims would be normal doing this, regular people not so much).

The Leftists want to register guns to make us safe, if they were sincere in their claimed desire of making us safe they would require registering psychiatric drug users instead.

MarshRabbit
MarshRabbit

“if you need crazy pills to function, you need to be locked up”,. Sounds like you would have loved Stalinist Russia.

Bilco

We long for a time that was simpler.When people were kind ,and government was less of a monster. For those of us who can remember that time.This is a very true statement. However humans as we know it tend to live in the now. All these things that have changed America have a root,and that is where it needs to be eradicated. This being Liberal Progressive policies. Examples- Disregarding Faith, Destruction of the family unit, Feminism, Irresponsibility,and on and on and on. These evil roots are almost never brought up as to the cause of the country’s problems. As much as it hurts me to say it…The Progressives have done an enormous job of implementing their evil agenda.

Iska Waran
Iska Waran

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Ben Franklin

When liberals objected – in many cases rightly – to the Patriot Act, the Great War on Terror or to efforts to fight illegal immigration, they used that Franklin quote. It’s just as applicable to the right to bear arms.

Marty
Marty

We can remain us vs: them while focusing on virtuous behavior. Morality is built on virtuous behavior.
The fish rots from the head, get rid of endless warring.
Here’s where evil comes from: https://youtu.be/OsFEV35tWsg

anarchyst
anarchyst

The seeds of distrust were planted with the second “Drug War” instituted in the late 1960s and 1970s. Trust was replaced with mandatory “drug testing”, getting around Constitutional prohibitions by relegating (and encouraging) employers to act as government agents. Since suspicionless searches (yes, this includes urine and blood tests) were Constitutionally impermissable, employers were tasked with the job, receiving “federal funds” in order to “encourage” them to comply with government “drug testing” requirements. These requirements were a condition of receiving government contracts, thereby “roping in” the private sector into providing suspicionless drug testing. Employees risked job loss for not complying with these government-backed and enforced mandates.
The pervasiveness of this mistrust filtered into “law enforcement”, along with the “supreme court” rendering an opinion that there was a “drug exception” to the Constitution, especially when it came to “warrantless searches and seizures”. SWAT teams, once only used for hostage rescue situations were being used for routine “drug busts”, and have since, been used for any reason that prosecutors can think up. “Dynamic entry” techniques were (and are) routinely used against the citizenry, smashing everything in sight “just because they can”, while police blame it on “adrenaline.
“Asset forfeiture” is “the elephant in the room”, being a “legalized” form of highway robbery, (actually robbery “under color of authority”) which is totally unconstitutional.
The “us vs. them” attitude is pervasive and has made the ordinary citizenry no better than a serf. We are all Palestinians now…

Zarathustra

” We are all Palestinians now…”

Where there is empathy, there is hope.

Anonymous
Anonymous

But hope for what?

Maybe not something most people would want.

Zarathustra

Did it ever occur to you that the commonly American attitude of not giving a fuck about the suffering of other people that is either a direct or indirect consequence of US Govt actions and policies because they are “different” is exactly the same one that allows one with impunity to walk into a mall, a school or a church and start killing people?

We are taught to lump people together into faceless pejoritive classifications in order to dehumanize them. But only if they are “enemies.” And of course the definition of enemy is anyone who doesn’t bow down to US imperium. The domestic equivalent is the American who refuses to bow down to Copfuk imperium.

Ya gotta first know who your enemy really is…

kokoda - AZEK (Deck Boards) doesn't stand behind its product
kokoda - AZEK (Deck Boards) doesn't stand behind its product

“Did it ever occur to you that the commonly American attitude…”, and “…the definition of enemy is anyone who doesn’t bow down to US imperium.”

I interpreted the 1st quote as individual US citizens, but 2nd quote as referring to US Gov’t (CONgress/President).

methatbe
methatbe

‘No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolph Hitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it.’
-William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

Axel
Axel

I like PC games as much as anybody, but there is one unmentioned factor: our youth is growing up with online murder simulators as entertainment. Yeah sure I played guns and cowboys and Indians growing up, and watched violent movies and even cartoons ( Tom and Jerry, Roadrunner). But today’s entertainment is magnitudes different. For example is PUBG. Player Unknown Battlegrounds. It is the hottest game out there right now. Premise is that 100 people online, whose avatars are men and women dressed in everyday civilian clothes, parachute onto an island and raid abandoned buildings for weapons and then kill each other until only one person (or team of two or four) is left. The environment is ultra realistically rendered with weapons that are contemporary, not fantasy in nature. I admit I play it myself, but I am a fifty plus year old guy presumably rooted in reality. WhT about the sixteen year old playing this frequently? At the very least, it depersonalize human beings in a way that makes them easier to kill.

Anonymous
Anonymous

Very much agree. Young minds cannot handle this material. I did not allow shooter games at my house w/ my boys growing up. Sure, they played some at friends, etc. but their exposure was much reduced because of the home environment.

Gayle
Gayle

Thank you. Garbage in, garbage out. The same problem exists in every measure of our culture.

razzle
razzle

Violence has decreased in the years that video games have been available. This is in part because the kids are pacified by the games.

Also…
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170308081057.htm
“The link between playing violent video games and antisocial behavior, such as increased aggression and decreased empathy, is hotly debated. Researchers in Germany used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on long-term players of violent video games and found that they had the same neural response to emotionally provocative images as non-gamers. This finding suggests that empathy is not blunted by playing such games long-term.”

Penforce

The problems seems much bigger than what can be explained in a thousand words. The pendulum swings. The great swinging thing comes from a time when we were more the same, when things were simpler. I, like others, can only look back and lament. The pendulum’s current direction is towards chaos. If we could explain it, change it, it wouldn’t be called chaos. I don’t believe in much, I trust very few. I have come to the realization that the fourth turning is now. Those with half a brain and half their years to live yet will provide some direction, hopefully. If I was a believer, I would pray. But since I don’t I just read the shit fest at TBP and wonder who’s going to lead.

Trumpeter

Pen, so true. I tell my daughter all the time that it is her time to take the lead. I say the same to melenials and x’ers. Me, I am just prepping to get the youngsters through the turning, can anyone say grandkids. Still I might be of some use watering the Tree.
Thanks for speaking so clear.

Wolverine
Wolverine

What many of our young men are failing to learn, either through absent fathers or fathers that are not real men; You’ve Got to Be a Man, Before You Can Be a Gentleman.

http://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/06/29/youve-got-to-be-a-man-before-you-can-be-a-gentleman/

KaD
KaD

Well I watched a nervous breakdown at work today and didn’t have to pay for the ticket. My millennial co-worker went apeshit today on OUR BOSS about how he thinks realtors are stupid, she has friends that are realtors, she’s ‘offended’. Holy shit. I could not believe it! And her boss Joe was the BEST BOSS in the world and well, he’s just NOT JOE. I would have fired her ass. Here’s an idea-if you think JOE is so great take your ass back to where you came from and go work for JOE. WTF was she thinking? Since when do you get to tell your boss what to do and how he’s allowed to speak and have an opinion? Yes, he has his faults BUT he is generous to us- we got hired for $3 hour more than his last employees, got a raise already, and he buys us drinks and lunch. WOW. Just unbelievable. What a BABY. She has NO idea how lucky she was to have just moved into town and got hired with him getting something like 80 applications. Talk about having a lot of growing up to d0-especially career wise.

Thunderbird
Thunderbird

The media is in control of the narrative. So the shooter had a mask on. So No one really knows who the shooter was. No pictures of the dead shooter or the dead people.

We the public are not children. Show us the facts. Show us the dead victims and the dead shooter then we can have a national discussion.

Talk is cheap. Until we are presented with the facts up front it is all show.

In a few days this event will fade into nothingness as far as the media is concerned. So what benefit to the public is gained by the media reporting stories as heresay presented as truth? No diverse opinions from eye witnesses other than shock about what happened. It seems that the media knows all about the shooter. Notice the people interviewed are not identifying the shooter. How is this? Who is feeding the media all this information? It seems that the media is good at talking story but it begs the question Why?

Thunderbird
Thunderbird

Our problems are too big to solve so the natural course is a breakdown. We have no mechanisms in place to solve our social, political, economic, educational, judicial, or infrastructure problems.

No one in government or our religious institutions are talking about solutions. Some are talking about reforms but reforms are not solutions. How can reforms help a decaying system that is too big to manage.

If we are honest with ourselves we can feel in ourselves that our systems are collapsing. Too much traffic in the cities, too little affordable housing, too many laws to follow, too little love, too much judgment of others, not enough money to live in a system where everything costs. It goes on and on.

All we can hope for is a soft landing.

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