Faces of Manipulation: Addiction – The acceptable plague

I remember back in 2009 when we called the Swine Flu h1n1 a pandemic in the United States.  It was a horrible state of affairs, I knew of professors at my university who died, I had friends who came down with it, and the atmosphere of my employment and school completely changed.  We suddenly cared about people being sick and getting them the care they needed because this virus was so dangerous.  In the end according to the CDC from April 2009 to April 2010 according to mid-range estimations 61 million people caught the virus, 274,000 people were hospitalized because of the virus, and 12,740 people died from the virus.  When you consider US NEWS estimates of the population were around 305 million people living in the United States it becomes clear why people were worried,  that's some pretty scary numbers.  But everyone takes a collective sigh of relief that we lost no more than 18,300 people to it.  That's less than a small city.  It wasn't that bad.  I was one of those who thought that way, until I realized that one out of every five people contracted the virus.  It got me thinking about the pandemics which have been taking lives for centuries and effecting even more people world wide than H1N1 even began to touch in a single year.  The pandemic, or rather plague, I'm talking about is addiction.

Now I like to think about addiction in much wider terms than just alcohol and drugs, because this pandemic has arms that are much longer and more dangerous than that.  An addiction is a pathological relationship with any mood-altering experience that has life-threatening consequences.  So what kinds of things can be considers mood altering experiences?  Alcohol, drugs (illegal and prescription), co-dependency, video games, and sex are only a few kinds of addiction.  Each one gives to the addict a different emotional experience that strengthens a relationship with the addiction and weakens the relationship they have with themselves.  And therein is the danger of addiction, because the addict loses themselves within their addiction which makes the addict capable of things that in a healthy state of mind they would never do.

Now you may ask why someone would seek out some experience or substance to make themselves feel better.  John Bradshaw describes addiction as "an outer reach for an inner security."  In other words addiction is an exterior symptom of a inward condition.  So when you see the alcoholic with their vodka, or the drug addict with their lines, there is a hole in their life that they are trying to fill with the drinking or cocaine.  The hole in my life is self acceptance.  My mind was broken during my childhood and I struggle with being able to see myself as a good person.

I've tried to fill that hole with being uber religious.  I've tried to fill that hole with numbing myself with video games.  I've tried to fill that hole through being co-dependent with others.  And each drug has only stripped me further of the acceptance I needed for myself.  God's acceptance never penetrated my resentment.  When I numbed my resentment I couldn't give of myself sincerely.  And I when I returned to helping others I overextended myself and grew more resentful.  Which sent me back to God asking for him to expel the anger and resentment from my heart.  But none of these things helped.

And I didn't get how they related to me, until in my group therapy they showed us this diagram.  Those places I tried to fill the hole with were unhealthy roles that removed me from who I really was.  As the uber religious person (Persecutor) I tried to force myself to God.  When I felt I was worthless (Victim) I played video games to make myself numb to my own pain.  And as when I went out to help people (Rescuer) I over extended myself frequently and found myself resenting the situation, the people, or myself.  And because I refused to directly channel that angry energy towards anyone I would just continue the cycle.  Does that sound healthy?

Every addict deals with these same roles in a different way.  Yet how many really have the education as how to deal with the addiction in such a way that they can begin to reclaim their identity?  Let's count.  According to the COA seventy six million Americans have been exposed to Alcoholism in their family.  Almost one in five adult Americans (18%) lived with an alcoholic while growing up.  And roughly one in eight American adult drinkers is an alcoholic or experiences problems due to the use of alcohol.  Worst of all is the cost to society which is in excess of $166 billion per year.  Shouldn't that mean the AA groups and Al-anon should be overflowing with people wanting help?  Or that perhaps our government should address this addiction problem more directly?  The scary part to me is that's just the alcoholics.  I haven't even addressed the co-dependents like myself, the drug addicts, the sex addicts, or the myriad of different addicts out there.  I would wager that every home in America has been affected by the actions of addicts in one way or another.  And we called h1n1 a pandemic?

It is up to each of us to take the time to learn about this plague and do what we can to establish having healthy identities of our own, and to teach our children to have healthy identities of their own.  There are groups like Alcoholics Anonymous for some.  Others need groups like LifeStar.  Rehab is a solution for some, but that's expensive and they don't always help you find your real identity.  They just keep you clean long enough that you think you're healed.  And the truth of it is, addiction is a life-long disease.  You can manage it, but you'll never be cured.

My wife is with me on my journey of healing right now.  Because she has been harmed by my self harm.  She has learned things that she has to unlearn to be able to be whole for herself.  Addicts never harm only themselves, they always leave victims in their wake.  Whether the victim is the child ignored for the addict's isolation, the spouse the addict beat to control, or the woman in the casket the addict hit when they drove drunk.  And we as a society must learn enough to help addicts seek the help they need without hating them for their weakness.  Because hatred will not heal our homes or the addicts either.

I'm an addict in recovery.  You might wonder what that means.  It means I work daily towards seeing myself in healthy vision.  I find seek out healthy ways to cope with my pain.  And I recognize that I will always be an addict.  But it doesn't define who I am.  My boundaries, my hobbies, and how I help others do define me.  The lion in my mirror can either be the shame and repulsion of self that eats at me because I'm not living up to who I can be, or he can be my potential and the image I work towards being with each day.  I choose potential.

I am Jayrod Garrett, the First OG, and it is my sincere hope that we as a nation can start to address these real problems in our society.  Addiction is only one of many.  Not only a face of manipulation, but a mirror of the society that we are embracing.  What other problems do you see in the mirror?

Proposition Eight and Marriage

At the risk of sharing a bit too much of myself with my audience today I decided, instead of posting about the unjust story of Rumpelstiltskin, I would talk about a current issue.  That is gay rights.  First before anything else I would like you to know that I fully support gay rights.  I think that we as law abiding citizens should all share the same rights as other people.  There should be no discrimination between people in matters of employment, rearing a family, or privileges and rights offered by the government to a person.  However there is a place where I draw my line.  It is in religion.

As I mentioned in another post recently I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (in other words a Mormon).  And as many of you know in the Proposition Eight controversy many members of my church donated money to the cause of seeing Gay Marriage blocked in the state of California.  In 2010 it was overturned and then people appealed it.  And yesterday that decision was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California.  Which means it is finally truly legal for homosexuals to marry in California.  The entire issue of Proposition Eight has caused a great deal of challenges in the homes of many Mormons.  Even in my home.  My wife entirely believes that gays should have the right to marry.  I don't.

Most of the difficulty of the issue comes from the idea of whether or not marriage is a religious term or a legal term.  Because if it is meant to be a legal term then, of course gays need to have the right to marry and you cannot deny them that.  It would be a gross violation of civil rights.  And this is exactly where my wife and many people in the LGBT (or Lesbian-Gay-Bi-sexual-Transgendered) community are.  Because it is a legal term to deny them the right isn't only unconstitutional, but it sends us back to hundreds of years in our treatment of people in our nation.

I believe that marriage is supposed to be between a man and a woman who are joined in a holy union before God.  It is a religious ceremony and I would prefer it to remain that way.  However because of the nature of how our country was founded and has grown, it is no longer simply a religious ceremony as I would like.  It is so riddled with political and legal rules that it cannot ever be simply a religious ceremony of the union between a man and a woman again.

Do not misunderstand me, I do not mean to say if a church decides they desire to endorse a man and man or a woman and woman relationship that it is wrong.  I am saying that I personally don't believe in that.  There is a huge difference between those two concepts.

So now with all of this legal mumbo-jumbo concerning marriage and civil unions, I find myself wondering how in the world do we make this just?  How do we make this fair?  Gays can't get married in every state, and civil unions aren't accepted universally to my knowledge either.  And because I want the world to be a place where we can accept the diversity and uniqueness of everyone in the world, I need to have a solution to this current problem.

So I decided that we should abolish the legal function of marriage and instead institute civil unions throughout all those who are currently married.  This would do several things.  It would have all the companies who have their current laws set up to help only those who are married rewrite their rules and laws for their companies in such a way that it would have to include all those who are currently in civil unions.  It would also remove marriage which is a religious term from the vocabulary of politics.  It would return the power of declaring what marriage is and is not to the individual churches and religions themselves.

Personally I wouldn't mind what I am in being known as a civil union legally and a marriage religiously.  It wouldn't change how I feel about my wife.  It wouldn't change my rights or privileges.  It wouldn't make me any less of an Iraqi veteran.  It would enable people who love each other to have legal rights to their children with their partner, to change the way people see the LGBT community in their neighborhood, and perhaps most important teach us as a nation that each of us has an individual worth and value.  That we shouldn't hate each other so much, nor should we fight against each other so much, and instead we should seek to find how we can envelop the entire human family within the bounds of respect, truth, and love.  And I now stand by the overturn of Proposition Eight, grateful that the people of California spoke for what they wanted for themselves.

I chose this as my subject because during my writing today I was writing about a young female warrior who has PTSD (or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) in my story.  And it got me thinking about how sometimes people are so misunderstood and especially in that community.  Speaking of communities, perhaps I should share my goals now.

My ROW Goals for the week are now as follows:
1. Finishing a Scene of "Crimes of the Umbramancer" each day.
     I've been searching for a job lately and the same time that is dedicated to the job search is often shared with writing, so I'm behind.  I plan on catching up by this evening however though.  (For the record I got an interview coming up this Monday, which I'm super excited about.  Hopefully this will work out for the best.)
2. Comment on ten blogs in ROW80:
     I've been working hard on this goal.  I'm starting to retweet blogs of things I find important and also comment as much as possible.  I've commented on nobody's ROW80 posts for this week, but a lot of their regular blogs.  I'll take care of this tonight when I post however.
3. No more than twelve hours of video games per week.
     I haven't played anything this week at all.  I'm pretty proud of myself.
4. Bedtime between 11PM and Midnight each day so I can be up at six or seven to take advantage of the early hours to write.
     Of seven days I got about four.  Much better than last week.  But I think I still can do a lot better than that.
5. Walking at least a mile five times a week.
     I've probably gotten to this honestly about three out of five days this week.  I'm kinda bummed about that.  Being so busy with various obligations has made it difficult to find the time.  But I'm hoping this upcoming week will be better.
6. Finding a new job in the upcoming month.
    This past weekend I had a conversation with an Amir Jackson, the Founder of a Nurture the Creative Mind and perhaps I might be able to work with his organization and bring some of my talents to helping the minds and talents of local youth grow.  And as recent as this afternoon I spoke with a woman at a local Junior High about being able to work in a program at their school to help them out.  So things may be looking up in terms of jobs.  I worry only because I need to find enough employment to support my wife and I.  I am ever hopeful though.

You might also notice that I recently changed the design of my blog slightly.  I am working on branding myself and I wanted colors that represented me as well as something I could have in my twitter profile also.  I chose the topic today, because part of who I am, is about being fair and just as best as I can see how.  I might be wrong, but part of taking a stand for what you believe in is taking the chance that you could be wrong.  And I would love to hear you tell me why I'm wrong, or why I'm right, or what you liked about this.  Please comment below and I'll make certain to get back to you as soon as I can.  I sincerely enjoy responding to everyone's comments.


Here's the links to other ROW80 blogs.  Hopefully you find interesting comments there too.  Happy reading!

Freedom: Do we actually know what it is anymore?

I often find myself asking people, what is freedom.  The responses to this question are interesting and range from: being able to do whatever I want, to being able to live however I want.  And it really is true.  In our republic today we have people who have taken freedom to concepts that thirty years ago we would never have been able to imagine.  The fight for LGBT rights, gun control, and healthcare have been incredible to watch.  But why are we fighting for anything if we are truly free?

So in any question I ask I turn to the dictionary to get definitions.  According to Merriam Webster freedom is defined as:

A: the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action.

B: liberation from slavery or restraint or from power of another: independence.

C: the quality or state of being exempt or released usually from something onerous (freedom from care)

H: unrestricted use (gave him the freedom of their home)

I’ve always found this definition to be lacking because in the dictionary you find the technical meaning, but you miss the spiritual meaning of the word.  Freedom cannot be separated from responsibility and anytime they are parted you have no freedom, instead you have suffering.

For instance if there were the dictionary’s definition of freedom in gun control then the only person who would have “freedom” is the person who had the best gun and gun skills around.  They would make the law according as they saw fit for they would have the power necessary to do so.

So freedom for one equals slavery for others.  This is otherwise known as lawlessness.  We have laws in place to protect our individual rights so that we are not taken over by the man with the big gun.

Well what happens when the society themselves adopts the guns for themselves for protection to the point that nobody can really do anything with the gun?  They barely can protect themselves or their rights?  Or they simply elect that nobody can have the guns anymore?  This is known as slavery.  

Slavery and lawlessness are two heads of the same coin of unrestricted freedom.  And as a result these forces tend to destroy not just people, but societies, and worst of all worlds.  We can see it in the very struggles for freedom within America.  Gay rights are not about a woman marrying a woman or a man marrying a man, but being treated as every other citizen is to be respectfully treated.  Gun control shouldn’t be about disarming the people who want to protect themselves, but about teaching people about how to thoughtfully handle a weapon.  And we need a healthcare system in place so that we may have peace of mind about our families.

Liberty without Security is lawlessness,

Security without liberty is slavery,

Only when both are balanced and in harmony can there be freedom.

So please ask yourselves as you read this, what do you really want for freedom?  Are you trying to create the world you want to live in, or a world for all of us to live in?  I for one want a world with as much diversity and beauty as there can be.  A world where freedom is unrestricted because the people care too much about each other to live without law or enslave another.  Is that too much to ask?  Probably, but if we don’t ask for it, how can we ever achieve it?

You might wonder why I’m writing this when I’m reporting about my writing goals.  It has to do with an addiction I have to video games.  If I start playing the right one I have a very hard time stopping even to do things that I want to do, such as write.  I’ve spent most of this week playing The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and it has been awesome.  But my writing has suffered to the point of having written nothing for goals since Wednesday.  So in order to free myself from the self imposed bondage I’ve put myself into, I’m staying away from playing it for the duration of today and making a new ROW80 goal.  I will only play video games up to twelve hours a week from now on.  Perhaps this doesn’t seem like it is working for that goal of the world I want, but that world begins inside of me.  If I am not unfettered of what powers I allow to enslave me, how can my writing ever help anyone to free themselves?

My other goal is to catch up on what I have missed out on writing by the time of the next check in.  Which is not only possible, but exactly what will happen.  That I promise.

Thanks for reading.  Feel free to leave your comments below.  I love reading them and enjoy the opportunity to communicate with our community.  Peace.

SOPA/PIPA the end of the internet as we know it

This evening as I sit down to write my blog I thought there was no message more important than sharing about the plague that is spreading through the House of Representatives known and SOPA/PIPA (The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act).  Most of the time I'm not a voice for politics, but in this case it would seem best to say something because this could actually change the way the internet functions worldwide.  I'm not saying such a change would be a bad thing, but for it to be changed this way would.

Censorship is a major concern in my eyes and that is really what this is about.  Folks in the entertainment industry would like to be able to stop losing money and so they are willing to censor what access we have to the internet in other countries to be able to do that.  Most of online piracy takes place by other countries because they are not restricted by our law here in the United States.  I know this because I have been overseas and been in stores where there is pirated material sold.

Now SOPA and PIPA are focused on Censoring what content you can get from other countries, but there are unintended effects that will also take place.  Because as a natural consequence, we would soon begin censoring what material we have access from folks in the United States.  And when we realize that the folks of the entertainment industry might begin suing companies that have brought people together such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google + because of the content that folks might put up there that might break a copyright law even vaguely.  It is at this point that it becomes a problem.


Now I'm not going to say that I know everything about these laws and their issues, but I figured the best thing I could do was to get you in contact with a few folks who would know more about what is going on.


These Websites Are Going Dark to Protest SOPA Wednesday


How you can Help Block PIPA & SOPA (Detailed Instructions) by Peter G. McDermott.

Informative video about what SOPA/PIPA will do to the internet and our ability to surf the web freely.

The Day the LOLCats died is a funny song about the dangers of SOPA.

This is your Internet after Congress passes new censorship laws.

Hopefully the few folks who come here might see this and realize what danger our freedom our potential knowledge is in.  Please become informed and contact you Senator about SOPA/PIPA.  Tell them to vote it down.  Please let me know what you think of this possible future in the comments below.  Thanks for reading.

P.S. In other news I managed to accomplish all of my goals concerning finishing a scene a day for several days now.  I have had to sometimes do my scenes all in a single day to catch up, but I am managing to keep up with my goal.