{"id":4609,"date":"2011-01-10T19:36:30","date_gmt":"2011-01-11T00:36:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=4609"},"modified":"2011-01-15T23:14:48","modified_gmt":"2011-01-16T04:14:48","slug":"ask-an-expert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2011\/01\/10\/ask-an-expert\/","title":{"rendered":"ask an expert…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Staying up late awaiting the end of the world [Snow in Georgia], I thought a lot about the Arizona shooting and decided to weigh in this morning. I tried to keep my mouth shut, but psychotic communication has long been an interest of mine from my early days as a hospital Psychiatrist, so I jumped in [ignoring it just doesn’t work…<\/a><\/strong>]. I try to keep from clogging the Internet with such posts, but the fact that Jared Loughner wasn’t put in a hospital along the way is a part of a modern tragedy – the unfunding of our mental health system – so I said what I said. This morning, I saw the picture of the "Occult Shrine<\/a><\/strong>" in the NY Daily News, but could make no sense of it. It didn’t look like the production of a psychotic person to me. <\/p>\n

Later, friend Carl <\/strong>sent me a link that lead me to a link [etc] and I ended up at the site below. Apparently, I’m not the only person cabin-bound in the snowy mountains of North Georgia. Star Foster who lives up the road weighed in on the "Shrine" with a very sensible comment. She’s a Wiccan blogger and she knows of what she speaks: <\/div>\n
\n
Tragedy in AZ: Candles and Oranges Do Not An Occultist Make<\/a>
Pantheon:
The Pagan Blog At Patheos<\/strong>
by Star Foster
January 10, 2011<\/div>\n

I thought the worst news I would hear this morning would be that the power is out. Since Georgia is bogged down in Snowpocalypse 2011 I was prepared for that inconvenience. Power is humming away and phones\/internet is on. I switched on my laptop and read the news. My mistake. It’s bad enough ordinary citizens are taking their speculation to the extremes but the NY Daily News<\/a><\/strong> has decided to jump to conclusions ahead of it’s readers.<\/sup><\/p>\n

Now there’s a lot of speculation on Jared Lee Loughner’s motives. Is he a Communist? A Socialist? A member of the Tea Party? A disgruntled liberal? A Nazi? Did he have a psychotic break? I think the only question about him that I haven’t seen debated is whether or not he wears boxers or briefs.<\/sup><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The NY Daily News<\/a><\/strong> managed to sneak into Loughner’s backyard and take a picture of an odd grouping of items. Obviously it must be a shrine because no one reading this has any odd group of items tucked away in their backyard, do they? In a shed or on a patio? I know my back deck features an antler-less moose, a wingback chair and a kiddie pool. So the question is, does a bag of potting soil, a pot of rotten oranges, a fake skull [looks like the plastic kind they sell at Halloween] and some old candles make a shrine? According to the NY Daily News:<\/sup><\/div>\n
    \n
    Experts on Sunday said the elements are featured in the ceremonies of a number of occult groups.<\/em><\/sup><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n
    Well the four elements<\/em> [earth, air, water and fire] are<\/strong> featured in occult ceremonies, but then occult ceremonies are mindful things. The nook is dirty and unkempt. The candles are shoved to one side, there’s debris and dirt clinging to items [indicating they haven’t been used or handled recently or regularly], and there are utilitarian items like plastic pots and potting soil on the “shrine”. The so-called “ceremonial” candles are plain white novenas that they sell at the dollar store and are used for both religious and utilitarian purposes. I’ve both used them on my altar and as emergency lighting in bad weather. The skull and oranges likely have mundane origins as well. It appears to me that someone set a bowl of oranges with decorative skull here from Halloween and forgot about it, just like they set the utilitarian white candles here and potting soil and never gave them a second thought. I don’t see a shrine. I see the remnants of summer forgotten in deep winter, like you might see in any backyard.<\/sup><\/div>\n

    <\/p>\n

    If this had actually been an occult shrine it would be cleaner, more orderly and show signs of intentional use. Which it doesn’t. The skull, described by the NY Daily News as “sinister”, looks sad and forgotten. Likely bought off the shelf of a discount store, it’s just another hunk of plastic discarded. As a Witch, as a Pagan and as an occultist, I see nothing of the occult in this. Only sadness. Mainly sadness because we are so prone to try to paint this murderer in shades of “the other” so we don’t have to contemplate any way he might be similar to us.<\/sup><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
    A discarded Haloween decoration sure fits. Her final comment is poignant, "we are so prone to try to paint this murderer in shades of ‘the other’ so we don’t have to contemplate any way he might be similar to us.<\/em>" It reminds me that in the 19th century, doctors with my profession [Psychiatry] were called "Alienists<\/font><\/strong>" because the Mentally Ill are so different from the rest of us when they are in the midst of their illnesses. That’s part of the tragedy of this case. Jared Loughner is a very sick guy, not a monster, even though what he did was, indeed, monsterous. In a world with readily available resources, I think it is likely that he would have been picked up by some system before it came to this. It’s very easy to see the involuntarily hospitalization of psychotic people who are dangerous as "the Evil State" interfering with people’s civil liberties – and that power has definitely been abused in the past. But now we’re on the other side of things, and the problem is not the mental health laws which are heavily weighted in favor of civil liberties. The problem is that there’s no solid system of care for people that need it, so psychotic people are simply shunned as aliens<\/font><\/strong> like Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech and Jared Loughner in Arizona. As Star says, it is very sad…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Staying up late awaiting the end of the world [Snow in Georgia], I thought a lot about the Arizona shooting and decided to weigh in this morning. I tried to keep my mouth shut, but psychotic communication has long been an interest of mine from my early days as a hospital Psychiatrist, so I jumped […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4609\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}