The crazification of America

Reposted from the SNarky Penguin

When I was but a young penguin, I worked in a facility for mentally ill youngsters. I’m not talking troubled youngsters, I’m talking about crazyyoungsters, kids with serious reality problems, a few bulbs shy of a few chandelier, a few screws loose, babbling to imaginary friends and responding to normal events in quite abnormal ways requiring anti-psychotics to even barely function crazy youngsters.

Now, the staff, we were all sane. To start with. But here’s the deal. After spending forty hours a week with crazy people, staffers started acting crazy. And none of us really noticed, because when you’re with crazy people so much, crazy just starts to seem normal. A supervisor who didn’t normally work with the clients had to notice and send a staffer home for a week’s decompression once said staffer started leaving the reservation, so to speak, because none of the people who worked the floor would ever notice that, yo, Joe Orderly is acting, like, pure-dee cuh-RAY-zee.

What brings this to mind is the past couple of days of just balls to the wall crazy, and the question, how could so many people have so little connection to reality? Then it hit me: We are so bombarded with crazy from the right wing, day after day, week after week, year after year, that we’re like the staff in that facility. A sizable percentage are just gonna start acting crazy after a while of being exposed to so much crazy, and they aren’t going to notice it because they are exposed to so much crazy that crazy starts to seem normal.

And that, folks, is why the spewing of so much crazy has been so toxic to American democracy. You get folks like Lush Limpdingy and Man Colter spewing crazy 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and it makes crazy seem normal. If we somehow could remove all that crazy, people would decompress and say, “whoa, I did WHAT? I said WHAT?” and realize just how crazy they sounded and go back to normal. But with all this crazy spewing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from the right wing noise machine… how can they? You can’t get away from it! Well, unless you live like a hermit, which is pretty much my solution, but … (shrug).

– Badtux the Crazification Penguin