Pain Can Impact Mental Function

I have been struggling with a concept that most everyone will have to confront at one point or another. What is the nature and meaning of being "responsible". Last night i had a major strssor in my physical body. A rib popped from where it belongs, basically out of joint. Anyone who has ever boned a chicken knows what bones, removed from their joints look like, but inside a living person, especially if it is like that for a while, bruising and tissue damage around the bone head takes place. Rather than make you wretch from the imagery, I am just stating this as a simple fact, to illustrate my point. I was not thinking clearly after my injury, because the pain pathways and the attendant brain function that would normally go to awareness of my surroundings, listening perhaps, or my normal language function was interrupted, or at least compromised. Several people asked me questions that seemed difficult to answer, many of them very simple questions. In my mind, all I could think about was lying down and finding the one spot I thought I might be able to sleep in. This overwhelmed my thought processes so much that I could not imagine how many jouncy spots in the road and inevitable potholes filled the streets, roads and bridges between where I work and where I live.

When we begin to think about issues such as "responsibility", there is a quickness that we resort to in an attempt to assign responsibility "out of hand" or in hasty or brief moments that seem directed by our media stimulation campaigns. Hostility, anger and the urge to brand others with our judgements of them seem to thrive as a mix rather than any one aspect "straight up" or "head on". In fact, our responses are so convoluted that I assert most of us will never know to what extent we are crippled by our self validating awareness, our ego, our justifiable angst. Often this develops into a world view in which we think that we know what is best in every case for every other person on the planet. (The idea that what I have just written is hyperbole is just proof of that fact)how else can you explain the rush to judgement and the snap decisions about who is to blame in every case, no matter how much we have heard about it.

I have seen people react, make this rush to judgement and begin to run with the ball, before they have fully taken hold of what is going on around them, or securing the idea to which they are claiming to grasp. I hate to use football (American football)terms and analogies, but it is like turning your head to run before you make a catch. Not every injury is, perhaps, as drastic as popping out a rib, but we are each a repository of aches and pains at one point or another we will all bear these scars, but for those who hastily ascribe responsibility, this creates a difficult scenario to decipher. I left my food in the refrigerator at work, even though I knew that I wanted to take it with me. My mind grasped that I wanted to take it, but the idea of getting my backpack to my car overwhelmed my ability to think about carrying one more thing in my other hand. Even asking for help escaped my consciousness as an option for getting things to my car. The pain was indeed overwhelming. In fact, when I was asked point blank, are you okay to drive, my head swirled and again, the only thing I could think of was lying down to try to find the perfect position to make the pain go away and I said ,"Yes.", more out of desperation than any relation to fact.

Driving, while trying to keep an ice pack in position on your back is nearly impossible if you have full function and range of motion and as I had neither, it was, well, complicated to say the least. I was glad to be driving at a time when police are not yet patrolling for the after bar crowd, on a relatively deserted highway. The case could easily be made that I was irresponsible getting behind the wheel. My judgement was at least as poor as it probably had been in my most drunken state, but it was from pain. In a very important way, it was probably one of the most invisible pains and that leads me to the deeper end of this pool. Swim free with me if you will...

If we are all suffering the slings and arrows of a culture out of balance, the extractive oppression of capitalism, the soul-crushing reality of oligarchy and serfs, tiny factions of power and control freaks wielding their privilege, in decidedly harmful ways, over peaceful loving people who happen to be the majority, all of these things are causing pain! Untold amounts across the entire planet! Oppression in any form causes psychic pain at least and a great many physical, mental and emotional pain and scars as well. A great friend describes the process of the oppressor thus. They name us, claim us and tame us. This process leads to institutional racism, it leads to institutionalized class-ism, institutionalized sex-ism, every discreet oppression has roots in the same inhumanity to other humans. What would we see, realize and understand if the burden of pain were to be lifted? Who bears the ultimate responsibility for our bad choices, foggy ideation and lack of ability to focus? How can we reclaim our birthright?