Category Archives: work

In my opinion Grand Canyon University is a ripoff. Don’t waste your money there.

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in common sense, Economy, work

ETA #2:  Well, their webspider is working, I already have a comment from their bot asking me to contact them for resolution.  PLUS:  I have a bill from the federal loan servicer in front of me.  It specifically states I received an UN subsidized loan.  Desiree from the school insists they sent me money from a subsidized loan in error.  In fact, the amount I received was nearly $2000 less than I was entitled to, and the amount I am being billed for by the loan servicer.  She says she can’t do print screen to give me proof, that I have to go into the website and get it myself.  I told her that obviously I was going to need a lawyer.

 

I called my education counselor today to ask for unofficial transcripts.  She began talking about how I owe the university money I must pay back because I was ‘overawarded’ money in my student loan.  It seems that because my company participated in a direct bill program (I never paid for it, my company did) that Grand Canyon considers that a ‘scholarship’ and therefore my maximum award was decreased.  The counselor said that Grand Canyon had to send that money back to the Education dept and that I was responsible for that money.  I said that in that case my student loan amount that I owe should have been decreased if they sent money back, yet it’s not, therefore I’m being double billed for the same money – I can’t owe the federal govt and the school for the same amount.  I was pretty upset by this time, as you can imagine.  She then said I needed to produce proof the school was double billing me and I replied that I would be in contact with the Education Dept directly.   She said that I would have to talk with the finance manager from now on as I am ‘escalating the situation’ … OK, whatever.  You can’t produce proof I owe anything but you are threatening my future by withholding transcripts…who is the aggressor here?

So anyway.  I contacted the Borrower Tracking Dept of the Dept of Education.  I did NOT receive an overpayment, there have been NO changes to my financial aid package for the 2010 school year made by the school, I have received no other aid,  and I have had only one federal loan disbursement which I was legally entitled to.  Note that while Grand Canyon calls the direct bill program a ‘scholarship’ the federal government does not.  They don’t care about private agreements apparently, which are not between the student and the school.

On to step two.  I contacted a representative from the loan servicer.  He kept talking about a re-affirmation letter which I asked him to explain to me – apparently if I was awarded too much money the school was supposed to send me a letter to that effect and say that I’m not eligible for any more financial aid (or to ask for some of the award back) at the time.  The key words in that letter were supposed to be to the effect that the ‘funds disbursed exceeds the maximum allowable’.  Well, that never happened.

Well, it gets curiouser and curiouser.  Apparently, there were THREE loans taken out in my name!  Two of which were paid back by the school in two payments each.  Only ONE of which I signed a master promissary note for, and only ONE of which I received a disbursement for.  So the school is apparently billing me for the money they accepted in my name, which I NEVER RECEIVED NOR SIGNED FOR, and they then paid back.  Yes, I am getting confirmation of this via snail mail.

The loan servicer recommended I write a letter agreeing to pay it back – before he understood that the money they are apparently billing me for is the money they took out in my name and paid back – which would essentially put me legally on the hook for the amount owed, but would allow me to get my transcripts.  NOT.  GONNA.  HAPPEN.  I am perfectly willing to pay back money I owe.  NOT money I don’t.

Why did I take out a loan for the schooling anyway if it was being paid for, you might ask.   Well, they only paid for the classes I completed, not the classes I withdrew from.  I had to take a class twice, and since I withdrew after the refund deadline I was responsible for the payment of the tuition for it.  Plus, the books were NOT cheap.  And when you’re taking a new class every five weeks, $200 a month (approximately) is a lot to drop on books for 14 months solid.  So now, for my trouble, I have a bachelor’s degree I can’t do anything with because I can’t go to any other schools because I can’t get my transcripts.

Plus I have to pay back my employer some of the cost as well, because I didn’t stay for a year after graduating.  This has turned into the nightmare that just won’t end.

ETA:  well, they will apparently send UN official transcripts, just not official ones.

Limits

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in common sense, home, work

I quit one of my jobs on Sunday.  I was apologetic for the short (as in NO) notice, but explained that I simply can’t work in the hospital environment any more.  I get too stressed out, and my anxiety makes me vulnerable to making mistakes.  I can’t afford mistakes when I’m going to be in a master’s program in five months.

It was a strange feeling to realize that middle age really does begin imposing limits.  I was thinking that the limits were mostly physical, and that I could stave them off for quite a while by just keeping flexible, active, agile.  Nope.  Just like broken bones don’t heal as well in our forties as they did in our twenties, the beating the emotions and psyche take don’t heal as well in our forties either.

Interestingly, both of the house supervisors that I spoke with agreed that the hospital environment there is…extreme.  In fact that is a quote from one of them.  Both wished me luck and said it was the hospital’s loss.  There would have been a time when I would have agreed, but not today.  I think it is best for both me and for the hospital I do not work there.

The garden is winding down; the temperature in the day is in the 80′s but our first frost date is estimated for the 29th.  That’s not nearly enough time for anything that’s not already ripening to finish; I’ll probably get out there and begin pulling plants for the composter later this week.  NOT a great year for the garden.  Since this was the first year I actually got a Thai hot plant to grow, let alone fruit, I may put that into a pot and bring it in for the winter.

I have a feeling it will be a more powerful than usual Samhain.

Uh Oh. I did it now.

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in survivalist, the dreaded politics, work

I received two job offers today, both of which were from jobs I applied for before I went out on stress related illness. So, after seeing the assigned physician yesterday and my personal doc today, I have officially submitted my two weeks’ notice to my present employer.

Scary, scary, scary. I’m giving up job security (Ha!) and benefits in exchange for sanity and flexibility. No guarantees of work from either job though; they’re both pool/on call which scares the bejezuz out of me. I know, realistically, I’ll work probably as much as I can handle, especially during the cold months, but still. Scareeee.

Now I have to go get my personal stuff from my locker, before they cut off the lock and take it. I’m not sure how that works when you go out on disability and then give notice that you’re quitting on the day you’re due back. Probably not in the best taste, but it can’t be helped that my appointments fell the way they did. I’m just glad I got my appointments, because doctors and the phrase ‘booked for a long way out’ go hand in hand.

I learned a lot in my term of employment there, about the health care system, people, and myself. Mostly myself, I think. Which may be the most important information I will ever garner, and is something a lot of people die without ever gaining. Often, in fact, they die because they don’t learn it.  I feel lucky in a way, to have had this massive breakdown, because it forced me to look at my lifestyle, my spirituality, my marriage, my goals, my career, and so many facets of each in a way that simply would not have been possible had I not run right up to the edge of that cliff and nearly fallen off.  Perhaps, in a way, I did fall off that cliff.  The Gods, however, had other plans for me and I fell onto a ledge about ten feet down.   “What’s wrong with you is no little thing” as my DH says…but what’s right with me is no little thing either, and the knowledge of that is what I really needed.

I am just another casualty of our broken health care system.  Thankfully there was a safety net for me; so very many people are not so lucky.  I can’t imagine how awful our life would be right now without that safety net.  I think perhaps I will do more letter writing, more lobbying (though I hate lobbyists!) for causes that we as a nation cannot afford to ignore, even in an era of austerity.

On my palm my lifeline is broken into three segments – one stops abruptly, the next starts right below it but not connected to it, and the third breaks off as a new line from the second.  I don’t follow palmistry, but my aunt was always amazed by that and predicted I would have great upheavals in my life.  If the last year is any proof, she was definitely right!

 

Re-evaluating things

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in common sense, sustainability, work

As some of you may know from previous posts, I’ve been home for a while due to work related stress.  When this started, ever so long ago, I attributed it to ‘just part of the job’ and assumed that there was something wrong with me because I seemed to get little satisfaction that I had accomplished anything of value at the end of the day.  I can even remember having a conversation with a coworker who was also struggling a little, and she asked “why do we do this?”  My reply was “for the money” which even then I was trying to convince myself was the case.  Now, monetary matters always play a part in what one ultimately chooses to do for a living, but it shouldn’t be the primary reason – ever.

As it turns out, while my reason for staying where I was might have been a monetary reason, my actual reason for choosing my profession is something quite different.  I’ve been seeing a counselor and a psychiatrist as a part of my recovery, and they both tell me that the reason I ended up ‘breaking’ is because I care, not because I don’t.  Apparently the disconnect between the compassion in me – and others who care – and the financial drivers of today’s health care is so great that, for some of us, it becomes too much to live with.  Lying to oneself only works for so long, and trying to disconnect from caring means creating an emotional and psychological dissonance so great that it is only a matter of time before one ‘breaks’.  I spoke with someone else I used to work with today, and we have much more in common than it appears on the surface; our greatest differences are that she refused to lie to herself, and that she had the good sense to realize that the problem wasn’t within her.  It gave me great hope to speak with her and catch up; we will be meeting for coffee next week and I have to say I am overjoyed at the prospect.  I have avoided cultivating friendships within my sphere of colleagues, feeling that whatever was wrong with me was something I didn’t want to share, and truly failing to understand much of their lifestyle.  Some of that is because I’m peak oil aware and I follow they financial world and they don’t, of course, but much of it is because they just seem to be able to ‘cope’ better than me.  Finally, frankly, several of them are not people I would want to spend my valuable free time with any way.

It has been a great relief to realize that I’m not a horrible person (although some may disagree), I still care about individuals I come in contact with, though I could care less about our species as a whole,  and that I actually DO want to continue to do what I spent so much effort attaining.  To realize this is possibly the greatest burden lifted off my shoulders I could have had.  So if there’s a bright spot in this, it’s that this time off has given me perspective on myself.  Sometimes sucking it up and dealing with it, though many times IS  the solution, isn’t always the best choice, particularly if it means ignoring those little soft voices whispering in the back of your ear that this is wrong, it’s not supposed to be this way, you’re in a helping profession, …

So that’s it, my little bit of nothing.

 

The Economy of Food

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in common sense, Economy, home, work

ETA:  I raised three boys on about $9000 per year, without the help of food stamps.  And they did not eat very much frozen or fast food.  We ate a lot of Chinese type foods, and a lot of vegetarian meals, and cooked from scratch was pretty much normal.  So I know whereof I speak.

H/T Sharon Astyk for the link and her commentary on her blog; what she has to say as well as the comments on her blog are well worth considering.  I just have a few insights of my own to add.

A new article in Harvard Magazine discusses the rise of restaurant culture in America, and makes some statements regarding eating out and food in general that I just don’t agree with.  They state, for one, that eating at McDonald’s is cheaper than eating at home.  Really?  What about the gas it takes to drive there?  At four dollars a gallon?  And McDonald’s cannot accept food stamps because food stamps can only be used for UNcooked food.  For instance, you can buy a burrito at the local gas/mart, pay for it with food stamps – THEN put it into their microwave and cook it, but you cannot cook it first and then pay for it with food stamps.  Now, that may be possible, but again, it’s still fast food, and not a very good use of a finite resource – your food stamps.  At last reading, 1 in 8 adults and 1 in 4 children eat thanks to food stamps.  That is a LOT of the population relying on them.  All of these people are faced with being money poor, and I would suspect that buying a burger at McDonald’s, is putting a further strain on an already strained budget that must also pay rent, utilities, gas, etc.

So, McDonald’s may have cheap food, but you have to factor in the cost of gas to get there, the fact that there is next to zero nutritional content in the food, the time spent driving to and from versus staying at home and cooking, and the loss of that money to purchase other necessary goods/services.  Not to mention the nutritional content versus McDonald’s, or even a frozen burrito compared to home cooked food.

I am astounded that people really think they do not have time to cook.  Now, I can believe that they may be too tired to cook.  When I come home from a shift where I work, I am lucky if I have not had to fight nodding off in the car, and I get home with exactly enough time to get my clothes and food around, and go to bed and get ready to do it all over again in the morning.  But my situation is not really normal, except for others who also work 12 or more hours in a day.  But.  Notice one particular thing in my previous statement.  Get my food around.

Yes, I take my own lunch.  On my days off, or on days my husband is home and he cooks, we deliberately make enough for leftovers.  Last night’s dinner becomes today’s lunch.  A meal at the cafeteria, or at McDonald’s costs at least $6.  Taking my lunch costs perhaps $2, if it was an expensive dish.  Often my meal costs 50 cents or less.  A meal of curried lentils and rice with slivered almonds, and some pickles, costs perhaps that 50 cents.  It takes time to make the pickles, of course, but that time is amortized across an entire year until I do it again – one or two marathon days of canning dill, bread and butter pickles, dilly beans, and relish mean we have those things for the rest of the year. The lentils are maybe 99 cents for a pound, and I use a cup which I am guessing is about a quarter pound for the meal; the rice is also about a dollar a pound and I use 2 cups of that.  The almonds are the expensive part; they are garnish though and a quarter cup is more than enough for the meal.  The spices of course are expensive but like the pickles the price is amortized across every meal I prepare with them.  Then of course, there is the cost of utilities both to prepare and to clean up.  Even so, I think that my meal made at home, which takes about 10 minutes to prep and 30 minutes to cook, still takes both less time and money than that meal from McDonald’s.  Plus, my meal gives us leftovers and feeds us for at least one other meal.

Or say we had poached salmon in a cream sauce with peas over pasta.  The salmon obviously is the expensive portion of the meal; I believe it was $8 or $9 per pound the last time I shopped.  Well, we use perhaps 10 ounces for both of us in this meal, probably more like 7 or 8 ounces.  So that’s much more expensive than the lentils, but we are still less than the McDonald’s meal so far, say $4.  I only purchase pasta when it’s on sale, so it’s usually about $1 for a package at most.  We use perhaps a third to a half package for this recipe.  The peas I buy early in the season, in bulk, and keep frozen, so they’re maybe $1 per pound.  We use a cup of peas in this recipe.  It uses 1/4 cup butter as well as 1 cup cream which we substitute with milk and a little cornstarch for thickening.  A little garlic which we grow ourselves, some salt and pepper, and 1/4 cup onion which we may or may not have grown in the garden.  This meal will feed us for at least two full meals.  So the cost, $9 say, actually is still cheaper than the McDonald’s meal because that cost gets divided in half – $4.50 to feed us both.  Twice.  The time it takes to make this meal is approximately 40 minutes. Possibly more time than McDonald’s, but certainly still cheaper.  I would guess that my meal, eaten in the quiet of my home, or on my deck, is less stressful as well.

Or say we just make beans and rice.  Typical subsistence food, made in the crock pot.  Pennies to make, next to no time in active preparation, and feeds us until we’re so sick of it we give the last bit to the chickens.

There is no possible way that eating at McDonald’s is cheaper than eating at home, even if you factor in utilities!

The denseness of the nutrition of my home prepared foods, as well as the lack of preservatives and other assorted nasties, means that even with butter as one of the chief ingredients (organic naturally) that my meal is significantly healthier, and more filling with smaller portion sizes, than anything McDonald’s can offer.  Spiritually, McDonald’s can offer nothing to me or my family either.  My kitchen is the center of my house, both literally and figuratively.  How can McDonald’s compete with that?

No, making an idiotic statement like the one quoted in the article above is simply a lie, whether perpetrated deliberately or out of ignorance.  The sad part is that McDonald’s profits by this ignorance, and the general ignorance of our young people in how to cook.  THAT is perhaps the most troubling part of this article.  People spend hours watching food and cooking shows, but do not learn how to do it themselves.

Perhaps the best thing I could do for my community while I’m home for a while is to offer cooking classes.  They wouldn’t have to be anything so unusual as what we eat, just simple foods – pot roast, potatoes, veggies.  Meatloaf.  Mashed potatoes.  Fried chicken.  These are simple meals, but take skill to make well. And most importantly, since I would bet that 90% of the population is on, or qualifies for food stamps, these are nutritionally dense meals which can be made with things food stamps will purchase, unlike my burrito example from the frozen food section.

Food for thought.

My job is making me sick.

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in common sense, Economy, the dreaded politics, work

My job is making me sick.  Well, I guess it isn’t the job itself, per se, it’s the fact that my level of work related stress is so incredibly high, and my ability to recover between shifts is non-existent, that my defenses are simply down for the count.

When I say sick, I don’t mean, “oh, well I just can’t face going to work today so I’m going to call out” kind of sick.  I mean, pulling over on the side of the road on the way to to work so I can puke, stopping in gas stations to purge myself in the bathroom kind of sick.  I’ve had dysentery and frankly I’ll take that over this.  It is without a doubt stress related but legitimate illness none the less.  Fevers, the whole nine yards.  Even water becomes a luxury because I can’t keep it down.  This is the second time in a month this has happened to me; I’ve also begun having migraines with disturbing regularity after a period of several years with less than one per year.  These too have picked up in severity; I never used to actually vomit with migraines although I would be nauseated.  I’m not so lucky any more.

As some of you might know from my previous posts, I work in a very busy metropolitan emergency room.  It means that we take care of a high volume of patients daily, regardless of whether or not the trauma services are needed.  I recently heard the numbers:  last year, we cared for an average of 150 patients per day.  This year, we are caring for an average of close to 200.  Now, fifty people doesn’t maybe seem like that much, but you multiply that by the fact that each nurse is caring for an average of close to 6 additional patients per day, it adds up.  Each of those people is another assessment; each more than likely means lab draws, IV’s, medications, re-assessments, other treatments as needed, final assessment, discharge, and escorting to the discharge area.  All of that needs to be crammed into the same time period as the previous patient load used to be, and means that everyone is constantly under time pressures as well as direct pressures by management to ‘move them through!’

When I went from being a firefighter paramedic and working 24 hour shifts to being a nurse and working 12 hour shifts, probably the biggest surprise to me was the fact that working a 12 hour shift is as mentally and sometimes physically taxing as working a 24.  That’s because as a nurse, you don’t get ‘down time’ in between patients.  You always have at least one, usually more, and you are always thinking ahead to what has been done, what still needs to be done, who is sitting in triage and will probably be your next patient and what will be need to be done immediately for that patient, and so on…for 12 hours.  Now, I’ve worked 24 hour shifts and worked two jobs at a time for nearly 20 years, but this is without a doubt the most stressful job I’ve ever done.

Add to that the fact that our administration is –wasting- hundreds of thousands of dollars on ‘consulting groups’ to *supposedly* increase our productivity, and we are in a constant state of flux because of that, and there are now constant and unrelenting pressures on us to produce as though we were assembly line worker s pumping out auto parts, and you can maybe understand that my level of stress has been bumped up by more than a few notches in the last eight months or so.  The fact that we are a not for profit organization, and that people come to our facility from all over the Valley specifically because of the reputation for quality care we have sustained for nearly 50 years, doesn’t seem to matter to our administration.  They have lost sight of the fact that we are non-profit, and only care about increasing the profit margins, I would guess so that their salaries remain completely OUT of line with the rest of the line staff, and so that they continue to accrue ridiculous bonuses for said ‘productivity’.  If you are getting the idea that I’m bitter about that you’d be right.  If you are getting the idea that I’m not alone in my feelings of stress and alienation you’d also be right on the mark.  Administration approved the purchase of pizza for the entire hospital last week….big whoop.  Yeah, that makes up for treating us like crap for the last year.  Totally.

As you might guess, it shows in sick calls, in short staffing, in the numbers of people – many of whom have been at our facility their entire careers – leaving for other places and jobs where they aren’t treated as cattle herders and brow beaten constantly.  Our facility got rid of the incentive pay for extra shifts a couple of years ago; I recently heard it is probably being brought back because it’s nearly impossible to get people to come in on their days off any more.  They can’t get pool people to stay because they can work elsewhere and be treated better (which is saying something very significant when you consider that our facility, for many years, was almost impossible to get hired into unless someone died) In fact, it’s now down to when they DO get someone to work extra, they send people home based on how much they make per hour rather than who is next on the go home list.

I actually think the way our facility’s administration thinks is related to our culture at large.  The dysfunctional value they place on themselves as being necessary to the functioning of the facility while they remain completely oblivious to the problems at the level of the baseline reason for the facility’s existence seems to be to be related to the profits and bonuses of Wall Street executives.  Their bonuses too are completely out of line with the line staff salaries.  They too value themselves as entirely too valuable while ignoring the fact that their companies wouldn’t work without the little people do actually do work for them.

I recently heard on BBC radio that a study was recently done using college level business students at a major university.  The premise of the study was to see if bonuses raised productivity or if the threat of punishment – to management – raised it.  It turns out the threat of punishment – not only losing bonuses, but losing position, motivated managers to do their job properly – to actually manage – and be involved in the day to day activities that were tied to the punishment.  Performance significantly increased for the group with the threat of punishment.  Now, what that says about human nature I wouldn’t like to guess, but I think it’s worth noting that our administration is utilizing the threat of punishment – for lower level staff – as a stick while keeping any and all bonuses for our increased productivity for themselves.

I have no good conclusion for this rant except to point out that I – someone who has been pretty resilient for a lifetime – am becoming as I get older, prey to stress related illness.  I shudder to think what that might mean if I were to become disabled.

Walker is a Koch whore, bought and paid for….just listen!

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in Economy, the dreaded politics, work

It’s a two part audio; someone called Walker’s office pretending to be David Koch. Quite the interesting audio, I must say, well worth the nearly 20 minutes to listen to the whole exchange. Link to the original blog site (thanks to the Beast for posing and posting!!) after the two audio links. Partial transcript there, but you really lose some of the juiciest parts if you only read the transcript…

The Beast’s blog

Awesome.

Now, as I said I think union brass are out of touch with reality; they are greedy in many cases. But that is not the case with the average union member. My dad was a union organizer for many years; I am slightly ashamed to say that when I was growing up I thought it was a stupid job whose time had passed 50 years ago. Then I moved to Arizona, the ‘right to work’ state and took a job in a casino right across the river in Nevada. I started working right when the casino workers were trying to organize for better treatment and pay. Shortly after that was when union organizers were found murdered in the parking lot of a casino. Wow. What my dad did was dangerous and valuable, and it took moving nearly 3000 miles away for me to realize that.

My home state is one of the states now trying to bust unions. And my dad is now one of my heroes.

Update: Great article. Puts my sentiments into better words than I could have, and I had been kicking around a post on exactly this.  (of course, that’s probably why he gets paid to write and I only blog.)

Another belwether of our broken system

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in common sense, Economy, the dreaded politics, work

Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance :  “This isn’t the story of a poor family with a mother who has a dreadful disease that bankrupts them, or with a child who has to go without vital medicines. Unlike many others, my family can afford medical care, with or without insurance.

Instead, this is a story about how broken the market for health insurance is, even for those who are healthy and who are willing and able to pay for it.”

I absolutely LOVE this woman’s idea.  How about a nationwide petition to force Congress (and the President, BTW) to quit receiving health insurance at taxpayer expense and require them to purchase their own health insurance at market rates?

“If members of Congress feel so strongly about undoing this important legislation, perhaps we should stop providing them with health insurance. Let’s credit their pay for the amount that has been paid by the taxpayers, and let them try to buy health insurance in the individual market. My bet is that they all would be denied. Health insurance reform might suddenly not seem to them like such a bad idea.”

Our health care system is broken beyond repair, I know this to be true.  As someone on the front lines in an inner city emergency room, I can assure you that we are experiencing the slow, dreadful, halt of taxpayer supported health care; indeed health care as a consumer commodity period.  My job has a very limited life span, even were I the ideal “Rah! Rah!” employee (and if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time you’ve had to realize I’m not).  Or at least, it has a limited life span in its present form–a full time job with benefits and retirement.  It may certainly continue to exist as a part time job, on a contract worker basis, with no benefits and no retirement.  And I am not certain in the least that my pay will continue to be what it is presently either; I anticipate at least a third reduction in my wage in the coming years.  If not more.

Yep, system’s broken.  Ain’t no fixin’ it neither.  But making Congress pay for their own damned health insurance is a good start.

Jared is a trailbreaker.

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in Economy, preparedness, the dreaded politics, Uncategorized, work

All the news media regarding the shooting, and the salacious drama endlessly paraded by pundits, really misses the point.  Jared wasn’t alone, and isn’t alone.  Not in Arizona, and not in the world.  He merely chose to do something that would make him internationally known; most merely turn their rage and hopelessness on themselves or their families.

Some people simply don’t want to work, want the system to support them, and will do whatever it takes to manipulate the welfare system into supporting them.  These are not the people I am speaking of, nor do I wish to speak of them now.  They are another entity entirely.

I’ve blogged before about the crisis here in Arizona regarding psychiatric services and how that affects delivery of service via the emergency room.  I’ve explained about ‘psych holds’ and how they often spend days awaiting transfer to a psych facility.  Some of these are people already in the ‘system’ so to speak, who are clients of the contracted psychiatric services but many are new.  They were surviving, hanging on, until the economic crisis and stresses of it pushed them over the edge.  They lose their jobs then their marriages; a consequence of being a citizen of Arizona is that often there is no other family within five hundred miles, so the loss of spousal support means the loss of the only emotional support available.  These people are used to taking care of themselves.  The idea of needing help is foreign, and they don’t know how to navigate the system to get any sort of assistance, whether health care or psychiatric care. In the end they simply punish themselves for their own failure to ‘beat’ the system.

Another new thing is that domestic violence seems to be getting more violent; I could be wrong but it seems to me that we are seeing more cases of extreme violence coming to the emergency rooms (and morgues) as traumas — gunshot wounds, stabbings, beatings not just with fists but with bats. This too I attribute to the stresses of our present economic situation.

So what does that have to do with Jared?  Well, a lot, actually.  While I detest the thought of giving him any more notoriety, he is a symbol of what’s happening.  He is intelligent, perhaps beyond average.  He is well read and reads literature that provokes independent thought.  He challenges the ideas thrust upon us by media regarding the proper ways to think, behave, eat, consume.  He appears to have been a sensitive individual who did not have the emotional reserves to simply hunker down and try to fit in, to prostitute his psyche in exchange for a job and a paycheck.  He sees that the system is dreadfully broken.  All this is common to many of the people who come to the emergency room in emotional crisis.  They are perhaps less articulate than he was, but they share the same despair and frustration.  They simply turned it on themselves rather than others, and so remain invisible to our society at large; indeed, they may have even further damaged their chances at ‘beating’ the system because our society frowns on emotional weakness, which is still how psychiatric diagnoses are viewed, as though they are personal failings, and therefore are less likely to get a chance to get a leg up.

It is a measure of the broken-ness of our society that unmannered and violent yet attractive young women from New Jersey, with far too much money and far too little common sense, education, and decorum, are touted as models for our young people.  It is a measure of our broken-ness that Justin Bieber is a model for young people. In some ways I am reminded of Galadriel in Tolkein’s saga.  When Frodo offers her the ring of power, she considers the offer and what she will become.  She says that all will look on her beauty; they will love her and despair.  Perhaps the dedicated watchers of the New Jersey girls look on them and despair in the same way.

Beware, though.  Those that watch are also learning valuable lessons on how to break the rules to get what they want.  As people become more cognizant of the fact that what our society has fed them regarding their chances to make it big is nothing but lies, they’ll be less and less afraid to act out.  And in a world of twitter and facebook, they’ll not all turn it in.