Drop Dead Denial

My daughter has just been transported from the county jail, where she has been for nearly a year, to Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka, Alabama, to begin her 20-year sentence imposed for her drug-related crimes.

The Norwegian right-wing Christian extremist who killed nearly 70 young people at a Youth Camp near Oslo is looking at a 21-year sentence.

Tutwiler is a hell hole by anyone’s standards. Julia Tutwiler, an Alabama heroine, would be horrified and repulsed by what Alabamians have allowed to happen and by what Americans have allowed to happen in today’s prisons, while believing they aren’t paying for it.

How do I feel about my daughter’s imprisonment, regardless of how warped the sentencing is?

Relieved.

Why? How could I be relieved? Amy Winehouse. I know what dead is.

I also know that drug addiction is a fatal disease. Americans – huge numbers of them – continue their denial of this fact, despite a huge body of evidence to the contrary. Medical and biological evidence is clear: addition is a disease.

This fact is NOT the same thing as saying, “Calling addition a disease gives addicts a free ride. They don’t have to take responsibility for what they do.”

Addicts don’t have a free ride. Look at Amy Winehouse, the most recent celebrity to die from addiction.

Weird Denial
Denial is a hard, hard concept, one that is difficult to get your mind around. How can you be in denial if you know you’re in denial? Denial is believing you are NOT in denial, that what you think or feel or choose to believe is real, true, correct, accurate. Whatever evidence to the contrary is presented, denial will insist on denying the evidence. How totally weird.

To get out of denial is tantamount to confronting difficult truths, admitting you are wrong. Humans don’t want to do this confronting thing. It is embarrassing; it hurts too bad; it’s a life changer. And it reveals the denier as the worst, most hurtful kind of liar – one who lies to oneself, usually for self-protection, to avoid hurt. Who can fault them?

I can.

Denial works on an individual level and on a societal level. The worst part about denial is that it doesn’t work – not for the short term and not for the long term. There is way too much collateral damage.

Americans are in denial about America’s and its citizens' roles in the current Drug War and how we are enabling the Mexican cartels to do their unspeakable crimes. America supplies the guns. Americans are the highest users of drugs.

Not to believe this, despite all the evidence, is to be in denial.

Dr. Drew Pinsky, who has been a medical director for rehab clinics and who has become a television face, now has a program on Headline News at 9 p.m. (eastern time); he recently reacted to an English policeman’s cautioning people not to speculate on the causes of Amy Winehouse’s death. He took issue with that stance.

He calls the addiction the real cause of death, whether she died of an overdose, alcohol withdrawal, a heart attack or whatever might be reported as the “primary cause.” “Twenty-seven-year-olds don’t just die,” he says.

Too few people know that withdrawing from most drugs won’t kill you, although addicts often wish they were dead during withdrawal. Alcohol withdrawal is different. It can kill. Alcoholics in treatment are withdrawn (detoxed) slowly. Long-term alcoholics who quit drinking abruptly and are not under a doctor’s care can die from the physical effects of the withdrawal when it turns into delirium, tremors, and seizures. The body’s vital functions can simply quit.

So if Amy Winehouse died from abrupt withdrawal from alcohol, as her family appears to think happened, then the addiction to alcohol was the bottom-line cause.

Biology 101
In his 2003 book Cracked: Putting Broken Lives Together Again, Dr. Drew (as he is known) explains the biology to a group of addicts in treatment:
“Why are you addicted? The simple answer is that some people are configured biologically in such a way to respond very positively to substances. . . . What makes you an addict is primarily a change in a tiny region of the brain called the nucleus accumbens.
“This region of your brain has started to mistake the chemical message of survival with the message delivered by drugs. The drive to use becomes confused with the drive to survive. . . . These drives demand gratification with the same life-or-death intensity as taking a breath.”
Neurobiology and brain research more than supports these statements. Not to accept Dr. Drew’s information is to be in denial.

If I want my daughter to live, then I want her in prison. If she were to get back out on the streets, she would die. There’s no denial of death.

Technorati Tags: Julia Tutwiler,Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women,denial,Amy Winehouse,addictions,addict,drug withdrawal,Dr. Drew Pinsky,Cracked: Putting Lives Together Again

Peer Pressure Becomes You: My Thank You Note

In a recent Time magazine article about high school experiences, Annie Murphy Paul quoted Kurt Vonnegut’s retelling what a classmate said about life:
“You all of a sudden realize that you are being ruled by people you went to high school with. . .You all of a sudden catch on that life is nothing but high school.”

I laughed out loud, because I had just gotten back from my 50^th high school reunion.

At Anchorage High School, where I graduated in 1961, I had the English teacher whose reputation preceded him, Mr. Crouch, Wendell Crouch, and I’m thankful I had him. He made us write a lot, and he graded it all. I walked softly and did what he assigned.

One paper I kept for decades, but I can’t find it now. In a lapse, I cleaned up, and I think I finally threw it away. I wish I could remember his wry comments on it, but I think I’ve repressed it. Before I admit what I’m going to reveal about that paper, let me say that because of Mr. Crouch, I placed in a high school poetry contest. I re-read the poem, and believe me, it’s abysmal. High schoolers are, among a lot of things, pretty maudlin, silly creatures. I’m not reprinting it.

The paper I wrote was on friendship; the assignment may have been to write on Aristotle’s ideas about friendship. In any case, that was the angle I took, even though I can’t remember the whole title.
But do I ever remember the first part of the title.

It went, “Fiendship: . . .” I don’t remember the words following the colon. And let me admit here that not once did I ever type the word as anything else but “fiendship.” It was NOT a Freudian slip, only bad, consistent typos, over and over and over.

Unsurprisingly Aristotle has a lot to say about friendship, but most of it now seems very high-minded; his philosophical musings, however, explain why “Fiendship” wasn’t a Freudian slip. A nice, quotable, thing he says in Nicomachaen Ethics asserts that it is necessary for us to have friends, “for without friends no one would choose to live. . . .” He then says, “. . . we praise those who love their friends, and it is thought to be a fine thing to have many friends. . . .”

Yes, I was very lucky to have had a lot of friends – not fiends – in high school. And, no, I don’t sit around reading Aristotle.

Mystery Solved
During the two-year run-up to the June 17, 2011, 50^th Reunion, I worked electronically, -- as did others -- with committee members living in Anchorage and cities across the U.S. Along the way I re-friended some classmates, got re-acquainted with classmates I had known less well, and made new friends with others I had not known. I cruised up the Inside Passage with classmates who had been good friends in high school but whom I had not seen in decades, as well as with little- or not-known classmates.

Why was it so easy to love reconnecting with these long-ago classmates? We hugged, kissed, laughed, and made toasts together; all the while I wondered if they really recognized me. How could they? I didn’t recognize myself.

Toasting ourselves on the cruise ship



That question kept niggling at my mind. What’s the connection with classmates? What is this lure reunions have, so strong that going to them has created this huge business in America?

The answer stared me in my wrinkled face, the one I hardly knew in the mirror: “Hey, self, it’s the FRIENDS, the friendships, stupid.”

But I kept wondering: What made those friendships so strong, so meaningful? Then I remembered a book I had read when I was searching for some explanations for my daughter’s hideous drug addictions that so affected mine and my family’s lives. I had pulled it off the shelf again when our granddaughter, our daughter’s child, became ours to love and raise and I needed information on child development.
I grabbed it again after the reunion: Judith Rich Harris’s The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do.

In it she very convincingly argues her theory: “that children [elementary and junior high ages] identify with a group consisting of their peers, that they tailor their behavior to the norms of their group, and that groups contrast themselves with other groups and adopt different norms.”

Then, BINGO, in high school, as adolescents, we put all we’ve learned from our little peers to use with our big peers. This is how and when teenagers become themselves, who they are and will be. For good or ill, like it or not.

Your peers, your friends, are your biggest influence; they help form who you are then and become later.

The Way We Were is Now

Her theory certainly explains “peer pressure.” It only follows that it’s wanting to do and to behave and to dress and to think and to feel in ways that are meaningful to and help define your group.

Were we different or unusual? As the AHS Senior Class of 1961, probably. We were a huge, diverse group: children of native-born or first generation Alaskans, of U.S. Air Force or U.S. Army personnel, of civilians working with the military, or of adventurers, entrepreneurs, and fortune-seekers; children of the Cold War living with the very real threat of nuclear attack. The DEW Line (Defense Early Warning system of radars), which was the first line of defense against the Soviet threat, drew many families to the state. Most classmates watched Alaska become the 49^th state and perhaps even watched President Dwight D. Eisenhower doff his hat to the crowds at the celebratory parade down 4^th Avenue.

This class marked the transition from the comfort of the 1950s to the upheavals to come in the 1960s. We represented the promise of the future for Anchorage and a new state and what each would become. Then we scattered to places all over the globe.

4th Ave. downtown Anchorage, then and now

Unusual or different as individuals? Maybe, maybe not. The point is, we were our very own peer group; together we tried ourselves on to see who we were; we needed to bounce ourselves off each other – our hair, our shoes, our personalities – to grow up. We needed each other during that critical time.

And so, I thank my AHS Senior Class of ’61 classmates, all of them. I thank my close friends, my re-friends, my new friends, and those I haven’t seen since then – all those I shared that time, the 20^th reunion, the 30^th reunion, and the 50^th reunion with. Thank you. Thank you.

Commence
The Time article’s author said she was flabbergasted when her high school principal invited her to give a recent commencement address to graduating seniors. I don’t think she had a great time back then.
Amazingly, our 1961 AHS principal, Mr. Joe Montgomery, was able, at 93, to attend our reunion’s sock hop. As he spoke to us from his chair, we all felt how special a moment it was.

AHS 1961 principal Mr. Joe Montgomery, at the 50th Reunion Sock Hop

If Mr. Montgomery were to call and ask me to address a commencement, here’s what I would say to the grads:
“Real life is high school. Don’t be hangin’ around with no un-fun, un-interesting group. There’s too much at stake, like your identity. And wanting to come back to your 50^th reunion. Now, throw your caps high, get outta your robes, and get outta here. Thank you.”
Thank you, AHS Senior Class of ’61.

KTVA CBS channel 11 in Anchorage reported on the reunion. View the spot from here; click on the video.

Also on that page is an article I placed in Alaska Airlines Magazine after the AHS Class of ‘61 20th Reunion.

Technorati Tags: Anchorage High School,50th high school reunion,Aristotle on Friendship,high school,high school classmates,Judith Rich Harris,The Nurture Assumption,DEW Line,Senior Class of '61

Miscellany

Joanna Leigh has been in costume most of the morning today. She put on her ballet-lessons digs and then put her nightgown on top of her head, hanging it down her back like the long flowing hair she yearns for.
She then says to me, “Mama Jo, look, I have long princess hair. Isn’t it beautiful? Do you like it?”
Well, it’s her Disney princesses nightgown, after all.
Then she announces that she will be doing this performance on the big stage at her recital. “Is that ok?” she asks.
Her ballet recital was a month ago, while I was cruising the Inside Passage. But in my defense, I had been to ALL the practices and dress rehearsals.
I turn my head in order to roll my eyes. Then I say, “Oh, certainly.” Then I have to watch the performance.
A four-year-old’s imagination: What a magical realm. I need to know more about this. Anyone have any ideas?
More Miscellany
At noon or thereabouts, I finally realized why Rocky Raccoon has been showing up at my door looking for food so early in the afternoon instead of sleeping in a tree like other normal nocturnal animals.

I first wrote about Rocky two years ago here.

Today was an eye-opener. Rocky is actually Rocketta, and she’s got babies somewhere nearby. She’s skinny and scruffy looking. So, as humans stay up all night with new babies, she’s having to stay up all day feeding herself in order to nurse her babies.
Sigh. Now I can’t trap and relocate Rocketta.
All the wry responses to my Facebook announcement of this discovery go something like this:
You had better relocate Rocketta AND her babies! What are you going to do when they ALL start knocking on your door?
And, You had better relocate all of them. Baby raccoons are cute.

Technorati Tags: Rocky Raccoon,raccoon,Spittin Grits