"We're Getting Used to It": Mental Illness and the Onset of Cultural Amnesia

One of the most horrifying and wasteful events Alan and I have been covering over the course of MoPod has been the forlorn War on Drugs in Mexico.  Last week, a piece in the NY Times (Archibold, R. (2012, Jan. 19) "Mexico Drug War Bloodies Areas Thought Safe") reports that the violence and carnage in Mexico not only is failing to stop the drug trade, but is spreading to parts of the country once though insulated from it.  In other words, typical of the times in which we live, everything continues to get worse. 

Originally, the article states that violence was concentrated around border areas.  Now it has seeped into the heart of the country, including posh areas in Mexico City.  An estimated 47,000 people have been killed since Mexico officially declared war on its drug cartels in 2007, upon orders of then Northern Hemisphere President George W. Bush, and continued, of course, under President Obamacon (whom Alan has delightfully nicknamed George Bush III). 

Mexican Government officials predictably endorse the chaos and bloodshed, despite acknowledging "violence probably would not decrease significantly for five more years."  Just as U.S. officials said of the bloodshed in Iraq after declaring "mission accomplished" Mexico's Public Safety Secretary, Genaro Garcia Luna, says, "You have to give the process more time to measure its efficency."  This absurd statement basically says we have to wait and wait and wait while more mutilation and killing go on before we can "measure" something that already has been declared as "efficient," in spite of the fact it obviously is the complete opposite thereof. 

The most disturbing part of the report, though, is that instead of getting sick of the incessant violence and wanting the Drug War to end, Mexicans are "worried but growing accustomed to the gruesome violence."  Well, how about that.  I can't think of a more noble or worthy mission of government than to condition its citizens to perceive "gruesome violence" as normal, an obviously pathological, if not outright savage mindset.  Says Jasia Grinberg, 65, who works in an upscale shopping mall recently strewn with human blood and body parts, "We are living in a terrible situation, and meanwhile getting used to it" (emphasis added).

The "getting used to it" is the final stage of cultural amnesia and the onset of a Dark Age.  Societies always have problems, but in more enlightened times the problems actually bother people, to the point where corrective, stabilizing measures are taken to deal with the problems.  Instead, the collective mentality moves toward acceptance of what normal human psychology would never find acceptable: "living in a terrible situation."

That, I am afraid, is the agenda of governments all around the world: to persist with agendas that serve to do nothing but perpetuate "terrible situations" for its people until the living memory of times when things were not so terrible is lost through the eventual death of the older generation, leaving only a population whose apparent legacy to future generations will be that they got "used to" the "terrible situations" that surround their everyday lives.