We Are All Nuts

By Jonathan Bert
The Extreme Moderate

February 3, 2008

An eight-year-old girl answers the door to greet Santa Clause, and gets shot in the face. She soon dies. Santa proceeds to kill eight more, then himself. A three-year-old goes missing, is found dead months later. She was murdered, presumably by her own mother. A man in Australia throws his four-year-old daughter off a bridge; she plunges 190 feet to her death. A Vice-President and his puppet use falsified intelligence to get the country into a war we have no business fighting, killing hundreds of thousands of people, including 5,000 of our own. Millions of Americans are consuming tons of drugs and gallons of alcohol to feel good when feeling good is tough to do. I could go on and on forever, these are just a few sad examples.

Are these people criminal or insane? Everybody tries to draw a line between the two, and courts try to make a legal definition that still relies on the opinion of “experts.” The problem is that the Human species has not developed sanity. I don’t think we ever will. We are all nuts, some just a little crazy, and some totally whacko; it’s just a matter of degree. Murder is considered the most heinous crime; anyone that commits murder has to be playing with less than a full deck. Nazis are some of history’s most notorious murderers, did they impress anyone as being fully rational? They were consumed by hatred, twisted, boiling hatred. They were hanged, and they deserved it. Or did they? Maybe they should’ve gotten treatment. Hell no. It’s too bad we couldn’t hang the devils twice.

One thing that might help crazy people is to let them know they are far from alone. Anybody that claims that they never wanted to wring somebody’s neck is most likely lying. Nothing causes stress and despair like feeling alone. If somebody says something crazy, don’t make as if they have an incurable disease, talk them down, tell them they don’t have to do what the dog says. Tell them how you deal with your own crazy thoughts. If you think none of your thoughts are crazy, you have a problem, and need immediate help. If you take anything Rush Limbaugh says seriously, for example, you need to be permanently incarcerated.

Instead of a system of prisons and mental institutions, with “experts” determining who goes where, we need prisons, prisons with the ability to deal with mental health issues. Judges would set a minimum sentence, with the condition that the offender be declared “safe” before release.

So let’s not try to make a distinction between criminal and insane. Treat them all like criminals, or treat them all like nuts. Anybody can shop around and find an “expert” that will declare them insane, and prosecutors can find “experts” that will declare them sane. Psychiatry is not a precise art, simply because the difference between a sound mind and one that isn’t so sound is a very gray area. So relax, have a drink, maybe smoke a joint, and tell the dog he’s talking shit.