#3-29
verybody Loves a Winner
More quotes from the personal stories of Al-Anon members, from their Conference Approved Literature book ...In All Our Affairs: Making Crises Work for You, so these, also, are supposed to be role models in how to gauge who is personally responsible for what in a marriage with an alkie:
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“Though I once thought I was wronged in my life, I know now that I wronged myself. I took my own rights away from me.”
abels regarding how self-reliant someone is or isn’t, are based on these standards. What seems to constitute one person “depending on,” “providing for,” another, or other presumptions concerning self-reliance and protecting the rights of redbloods, could consist of some pretty extreme sophistry. The whole paragraph from which that Gamblers Anonymous quote came, consisting of one sentence, is, “Because the only real happiness that one can be sure of comes from within, Gam-Anon encourages the member to build on his or her own inner core of spiritual strength and maturity as the best way to live with the gambling problem, rather than to depend solely on their gambling spouses for happiness.” The paragraph before this begins, “‘If the gambler continues to gamble, how could I learn to live with this problem?’,” so the problem isn’t that the spouses aren’t providing enough happiness. Art Schlichter, a former pro football player who gambled away well over a million dollars, was so much fun that he was able to con a lot of money out of people for his gambling. But that isn’t at all what this means; it seems that to depend on the spouse to stop driving the family into bankruptcy constitutes depending on him/her to provide happiness, which, after all, the victims should be able to provide from within no matter what happens in the material world.
Another quote from the same chapter: “Emotionally, the stress takes its toll as the life of the Gam-Anon member [married to an active gambler] seems to crumble and become unmanageable; tensions are aggravated because life, in material terms, is unstable. At any moment the house may be lost or the furniture repossessed. There may not be enough money to put food on the table or clothe the children.” This could be called spiritual, since Jesus said as he was being tempted, “Man shall not live by bread alone.”
In all families, our society would need homeostasis as much as our society would in any other family. If one in a dysfunctional family doesn’t take care of his own problems, that would have to look just as scary as someone in a normal family not taking care of himself.
Anti-Stigma: Do You Know the Facts?, a webpage of the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, says, “An estimated 22 to 23 percent of the U.S. population experience a mental disorder in any given year, but almost half of these individuals do not seek treatment... Do you know that an estimated 44 million Americans experience a mental disorder in any given year?”
When you’ve seen ads and other guides that say things like this, you may have thought, “So how am I supposed to fit in with all this? That is one heck of a set of social problems. Yet since I live in such a society, if I distrusted its norms regarding who is personally responsible for what, I’d seem just as deviant as would anyone else who deviated from his society’s norms. If something is my reality, then that’s what I must deal with as a separate individual. And since my cultural norms will hold me responsible for dealing with that, if I’m not adequate to do this, lose the battle, fail, and come up short with big consequences, I’d seem to be an irresponsible and inadequate, loser and failure with very consequential shortcomings. If I don’t adjust to this, adapt to it, function with it, fit in with it, and feel content with it, I’d seem to be a maladjusted maladaptive and dysfunctional, misfit and malcontent. Though it might seem objective to judge people in terms of whether they’re successes or failures, but subjective to determine who was morally responsible for what, my natural common sense tells me that moral bankruptcy has consequences.”
Sure The Great Wall Street Bailout of 2008 certainly wasn’t a matter of self-determination, but was constantly conveyed as a matter of self-care. On October 3, when California applied to the federal government for an emergency loan of $7,000,000,000.00, Governor Schwarzenegger said, “The federal rescue package is not a bailout of Wall Street tycoons—it is a lifeboat for millions of Americans whose life savings, businesses, retirement plans and jobs are at stake.” We have here the dynamics of, “Don’t find blame. Find a solution.” It doesn’t matter that the tycoons caused such a big problem, only that those with a problem this big had better solve it. If we don’t, then we’d be losers.
On October 3, the day that the bailout passed, the Wall Street Journal ran an article, Uncertainty Over Rescue Intensifies Credit Crisis, by Liz Rappaport, Serena Ng and Peter Lattman, which began,
A slew of new data suggest the effects of the credit crisis are ricocheting around the globe as lenders grow increasingly distrustful of their own customers and each other.
In both the U.S. and Europe, uncertainty about the ability of governments to push through comprehensive financial-system rescue plans continued to weigh on bond and stock markets.So it seems that what’s weighing on the bankers, is uncertainty that governments would push through huge bailouts for them. It seems that they’re entitled to the bailouts! Sure, these labels are very un-self-reliant, but very realistic. The bankers need what they need, and if they don’t get it, their distrust will ruin things for everyone else.
Sure, Nebraska Representative Lee Terry, who voted against the bailout the first time but for it the second, could see more that just don’t find blame; find a solution, since he said, “I now know that to save ourselves we must also save the pigs. Those greedy pigs on Wall Street don’t deserve help from hard-working Americans.” Yet even he’d agree that the pigs were becoming increasingly distrustful of their own customers and each other, so uncertainty about the ability of governments to push through comprehensive financial-system rescue plans continued to weigh on them, and this would cause big problems for everyone else. They’d better be realistic, since they’d be silly if they expected fairness out of the pigs. Paulson said on September 28, “We need confidence and this is about confidence,” and the pigs needed confidence, and we needed the pigs’ confidence in order for ourselves to be functional self-reliant and hard-working. If the pigs aren’t confident, a lot of people who’d want to work hard wouldn’t have the opportunity to, and, therefore, they wouldn’t be hard-working Americans.
Most of the time that this logic is applied more self-reliance the better, and it seems more understanding and realistic to tell the spouses to choose not to take seriously their basic atavistic cravings for a normal life, than it does to tell the gamblers to choose not to take seriously their cravings to gamble. Even if it were possible to prove that a given impulsive gambler’s cravings to gamble weren’t as strong as his/her spouse’s cravings for a normal life, which would mean that the spouse would be more entitled to the sort of understanding that addicts are supposed to get from family members, in the words of the same chapter, “It is doubly important for them to accept the fact that nothing they say or do can change the compulsive gambler,” can change his/her actions, so the gambling would be reality while the spouse couldn’t make what he/she craves into reality, and we all must self-reliantly deal with whatever reality is. That’s why victim correction is called “realism.” Of course, all this hides the fact that most gamblers’ spouses are women. Though what the Polish call hart ducha or “hard spirit,” an individualistic stoicism in which as a form of defiance someone refuses to let what was done to him bother him, is supposed to be largely a male trait, if a book told men en masse that they’re expected to deal with senseless disasters that their wives routinely caused, and if the husbands don’t the problem is that they’d better work on their own spiritual strength and maturity so they won’t be so dependent and “there is no limit” to such personal growth, the book wouldn’t go over too well.
When this sort of personal responsibility would seem untenable it isn’t used, but such exceptions are treated in such a way that William Ryan’s Blaming the Victim, called the “exceptionalist” approach, “The exceptionalist viewpoint is reflected in arrangements that are private, voluntary, remedial, special, local, and exclusive. Such arrangements imply that problems occur to specially-defined categories of persons in an unpredictable manner.” This couldn’t possibly recognize social problems. Since an estimated 22 to 23 percent of the U.S. population experience a mental disorder in any given year, this is certainly not an exceptionalist problem of deviants, yet what seems notable is that almost half of these individuals do not seek a treatment that would treat each person in an exceptionalist fashion.
That was reflected in Barbara Bush’s statement about all the Hurricane Katrina evacuees who wanted to stay in Texas because of the great hospitality they were shown, “Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.… And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.” They wouldn’t have gotten gracious help for their previous underprivileged status. It wouldn’t matter that poverty usually isn’t a matter of choice, that our rate of poverty has gotten worse over the past quarter century, and that this wasn’t because more people had chosen not to do what it takes to build a decent standard of living. Now that the evacuees’ poverty came from the flood, they do seem helpless, so the exceptionalist approach would help them. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before many red-blooded Texans figure that the evacuees had enough time to re-establish their lives, so any poverty that they still have, would be treated as ordinary poverty. When Dubya later said in his address from New Orleans, “And they remind us that we are tied together in this life, in this nation and that the despair of any touches us all,” but that wouldn’t include despair such as those affected by the rampant depression and anxiety disorders, since that isn’t due to anything exceptional. (Unless, of course, it’s to be treated as if it is exceptional, deviant, by simply giving them medication or other treatment.)
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Of course, this means that if you’re personally responsible for changing or accepting whatever you must, then if you aren’t adequate to do this, lose the battle, fail, and come up short with big consequences, you’d seem to be an irresponsible and inadequate, loser and failure with very consequential shortcomings. If you don’t adjust to this, adapt to it, function with it, fit in with it, and feel content with it, you’d seem to be a maladjusted maladaptive and dysfunctional, misfit and malcontent. While self-help proponents would probably insist that they don’t believe in people holding themselves to such unreasonable standards, a self-responsibility that includes those who unambiguously have someone else causing their problems, has to. Whether you like it or not, the entire unredacted Serenity Prayer as originally written by Reinhold Niebuhr says, “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it; Trusting that You will make all things right if I surrender to Your will; So that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with You forever in the next—Amen,” which means that you’ll simply have to deal with whatever hardship and/or others’ sinfulness, impacts your life.
Going back to that Al-Anon Conference Approved Literature for Alateen,
as well as what Gambler’s Anonymous’ handbook has to say about how pathological gamblers’ family members simply must deal with their own realities, how the Al-Anon Conference-Approved book In All Our Affairs: Making Crises Work for You, says that alkies’ wives are simply supposed to deal with their crises, etc., in this exemplary self-help literature you could see self-empowerment being all-important. Sure, for an exemplary alkie’s kid who looks like Archie, to preach, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, should seem wryly Kafkaesque. Instead, it seems very pragmatic and honorable, since what matters is that the members follow instructions such as those in their books, to become as successful as they could under the circumstances.
Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary (Page 1)
