Keep It Coming

Dear UTW: If there is one thing for which Ted Rall deserves credit, it is his penchant for bringing out the best responses to his misguided arguments. How Rall can advocate expanding the government monopolization of the current public education system is beyond rational, as Todd Kreigh clearly delineated in a recent letter to the editor (See: “Love Letters, hate mail,” July 5-11, vil. 22, no. 1). The only thing to add; please do not stop running Rall’s columns. One of the best ways to understand the illogic of the liberal-left ideology is to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. —Thomas Klein

Another Chance

(Re: “Felons Apply Here,” July 12-18, vol. 22, no. 2)

Dear UTW As a daughter of an inmate that has been incarcerated for 28 years and counting, I believe this is the best thing I’ve heard! Felons are people, they made a mistake and it cost them their freedom. If people actually got caught in what they engage in, then the prisons would be more over crowded than they are now. Thank God for programs like this. My mother is 64yrs old, being released w/in the year and with being her age and her “crime”, it will be very hard for her to get employment. One stipulation of release from a penial institution is to obtain employment upon release or w/in 2 weeks, which is very difficult for certain crimes and bearing their age. This gives my family hope that when she comes home, she will have hope of “getting” a job that she already has training in and can be productive in soceity. May God bless your efforts in employing the “unemployable” so to speak and giving them a “new” chance at life. —Arelia Pendergrass

Not Just in Aurora

[mage-1] Dear UTW: Look for the damage from the Aurora shootings to spread way beyond its borders, affecting those who are vulnerable. I don’t know about other people, but when 9-11 happened, I hadn’t been able to feel for other people for years, due to other traumas, like getting maimed by a drinking driver and cut open looking for cancer. Nor had I been able to get any help for it. But every time those survivors told their stories on TV, I cried. I think those emotional changes probably contributed to losing the job I had at the time. I can tell you that getting help for such things is chancy. Much of psychiatry is humiliating, coercive and punitive. No one wants to get automatically profiled and locked up for having god-awful thoughts about god-awful events. In a 2009 issue of Schizophrenic Bulletin (35:4(661-663)), Dr. Benjamin Gray relates experiences from inside schizophrenia about hearing voices and compulsory treatment. He points out that fear of misinterpretation out of context, followed by punishment and forced medication, keeps many from fully discussing their problems and experiences with anyone, much less the psychiatrists dishing out the pain. Nor can you get much help from a society that says, “You just can’t think like that! You’re only going to hurt yourself.” To my mind, that stupidity in the field of psychiatry, which enables psychiatrists to dominate patients like it’s a BDSM game, contributes to such shootings. The shooters aren’t people who suddenly went bad, just because they had access to firearms. Whatever brought them to that violence built up over time. BDSM psychiatry, like that practiced by the State of Oklahoma, cuts them off from alternatives and healing. And for vast majority of those with mental illnesses, who aren’t ever going to shoot anyone, both the lack of decent and compassionate psychiatry, and violent attacks that lack never touches, add to the ignorant and unreasoning fear and stigma in the rest of society that cuts such people off from valued and productive lives. Perhaps for most of us with mental illnesses, BDSM is not an option. It would only make us relive horrors. But one has to wonder if for some, who might otherwise become violent, practicing BDSM with restraint in a controlled and safe setting, so as to defuse certain emotions, might be better than the law-backed and judicially-enabled BDSM humiliation and coercion that so often passes for psychiatry.

—Don Baker