Letters to the Editor
AJCalhoun
Published Letters: 964 Editor's Choice: 127
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It's Not This Complicated!
[Read the article: I am depressed, but that's not really the problem, is it?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Dear writer of the letter: you say you have been "a depressive person" all your life. Have you been diagnosed as suffering from depression? Perhaps you are just downbeat or maybe a little bit dysthymic. Many of us function OK like that, but we are more inclined to prolonged sadness. Then again, so is anyone who has been subjected to a traumatic event. That is a normal response to abnormal events! You don't need to convert to any religion, be it Jewish or Catholic, for the love of God! You need just to talk to someone! Part of my responsibility in the field of Emergency Medical Services is to use my training in the area of Critical Incident Stress debriefing. This is not an expensive calling - trust me. Usually it is free. I've seen some well-intended advice here, one or two bits even being sound, but I've also read some insane responses. First, correct, depression is not the problem, because it is totally appropriate to feel bummed by the loss of a dear friend, the breakup of a marriage (let me talk to YOU for a few minutes!), the unexpected (or even expected) loss of a parent, etc. Jesus, my man, you have been through a few things! It would be sick if you DIDN'T feel a considerable amount of sadness!
What now? Well what gives meaning to our lives? Not other people, but our memories and the making of those memories. Look for your own soul. You don't need a rabbi or a priest to show it to you, and if you truly cannot afford a mental health professional or find a free counselor to just talk to, start talking to your self. There is something almost holy and pure in your suffering - it is what brings us down to nothing so that we can be re-made. You say all your misfortunes are caused by you. Clearly you didn't kill your mother or your friend, and even your wife had to have some responsibility for the ultimate breakup of your marriage. Life's like that - and yet it is wonderful. I write this to you two weeks after learning my wife of two years, my THIRD wife, is leaving me. And it's OK! No, I'm not happy about it, but I didn't DO it, she's doing it, and it's OK! She didn't say she was going to murder me in my sleep - she just needs to not be with me. I don't suck because she got a wild hair up her ass. It was a gamble. I am very sad about it, but I get to live! I'm not being sent to the ovens! Life is not all about being happy! It is about being. Period.
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Beelzebubba Speaks
[Read the article: "The Da Vinci Code"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]OK, they've all weighed in now: the vaguely disturbed Catholics, the highly agitated Christians, the armchair critics and the real critics (the only difference being the rate of pay), and, of course, the agonizingly hip. I mean, it wouldn't even be Salon without them.
The conclusion? It seems to be that, once again, religion, like politics, makes strange bedfellows. One thing everyone seems to agree upon is that the "Code" is bad. Either it is bad in spirit and intent, maybe even sinful or blasphemous (Christians), bad in writing (hip armchair critics), boring as a movie (real live critics, if in fact any of them are actually alive), anti-Catholic or just too good a story to be true, one that still demands some sort of belief in something important having happened off-campus, be that campus Harvard or Berkeley. Well screw everybody. The religion we have been handed has never made a lot of sense, yet it carries with it something of such great symbolic import that none can escape having been touched by it. Whether attracted or repelled, there is no middle ground, and the feelings are always powerful. Whatever it is that causes this reaction (and I'm not here to drop a treatise on it, although I have my thoughts on the matter) it is worthy of deeper contemplation than either blind alegience or summary dismissal. And that's what our world had been locked in over the issue, that black-or-white, either/or idiocy that has made "countless thousands mourn" over the milennia.
Now comes a novelist, Dan Brown, whose style can be picked to pieces, but when were YOU last published, Bubba? And comes Brown with a competently-written (ie: meets journalistic standards for holding the attention of at least a 12-year-old reader) novel which stirs the ashes of discontent about all the non-sequiturs of not only Catholicism, not only Christianity but, if one would but think before tossing the book back on the shelf at Borders with a sneer, one would soon realize it stirs those ashes created by ALL organized religion, using the Catholic Church (one of the more successful enterprises in human history) as its fall guy. Well why the hell not? And if it has got more people thinking and, better yet, talking out loud, about what they believe is the reason they are even here and thinking and talking, then Brown has done the world a service beyond any price, and Ron Howard, by making it into even a tolerably interesting movie, has multiplied that gift to the world. If one is not entertained, then perhaps one will at least be perplexed. This would be enough!
For the Christians out there, especially the Catholic ones, hey, it can only last so long, the currently popular deception. And for the hipper-than-thou who apparently were waiting for Sartre to rise from the dead, go fuck yourselves. It's a movie, it provokes thought in those who need most to be thinking, and it is part of a far grander scheme to overthrow not only religion as we know it, but also the existential living death in which state many of you regulars out there reside.
I, for one, will sit still for the movie. I'm not that much better than my fellow humans.