Curtis Dahlgren
Dysfunctional families (where the big bucks are)
By Curtis Dahlgren
"Depression is simply anger without enthusiasm." — author unknown
[this is an excerpt from the column I posted July 19, 2008]
TO COMPLETELY SUPPRESS ANGER IS TO SUPPRESS GRIEF (and everyone knows that's not a good thing to do). The "Dictionary of Word Origins" says that "the original notion contained in ['anger'] was of 'distress' or 'affliction'; 'rage' did not begin to enter the picture until the 13th century." Furthermore: the English language acquired it from the Old Norse word ANGR — which meant "grief."
John Ayto goes on to say that anger "is connected with a group of words which contain connotations of 'constriction': German and Dutch eng (and Old English enge) mean 'narrow' and Greek ankhein meant 'squeeze, strangle' (English gets angina from it), and Latin 'angustus' (source of English anguish) also meant 'narrow.'" [from entry "anger"]
It should not surprise anyone that where there is "anger" there is "sorrow," because they originally meant the same thing! The tricky part is in preventing the grief/anger from causing more of the same in an unbroken cycle. The Bible says, "Be angry but sin not. Let not the sun go down on your anger."
SOME DAYS THE SUN JUST SEEMS TO GO DOWN TOO FAST. But "seriously folks," the Bible is the Creator's operator's manual for man (it's not just a coffee table book there for looks)! As the title of this column suggests, however, there are BIG BUCKS that can be made "treating" the after-effects of failing to follow the Creator's instructions. We treat the symptoms and not the disease.
Today I stopped by the library to look for a few factoids from the Milwaukee yellow pages. The only issue that was available was the 2002-03 "One Book." Here are the cold, hard statistics:
- Lawyers: 84 1/2 pages worth of them
- Doctors: 54 pages, including psychiatrists (others "treat" psychosomatic illnesses, too)
-Psychologists: 3 1/2 pages worth
-Mental health servies: 2 1/2 pages
-Licensed counselors: 2/3 of one page
-Crisis intervention: 1/4 of a page
-Process servers: 1/2 of a page
-Bondsmen: 1/8 of one page
-Debt couselors: 1/4 of a page
-Mediation services: 1/2 of a page
-Court reporting services: 1/4 of a page
-Private Investigators: 3/4 of a page
-Police Departments and police equipment: 3/4 of a page
THAT'S NEARLY 150 PAGES (for services relating to problems that hardly existed three generations ago when men were men, women were women, and Government wasn't Santa Claus)!
The 2002-03 Milwaukee "One Book" does have 14 1/2 pages of listings for churches, but it is my theory that if those churches were more faithfully utilized, there would be little if any need for all those other services. Those 150 pages don't even begin to hint at the cost of county, state, and federal 'correctional facilities,' prison guards, prison chaplains, or parole and probation personnel — not to mention social workers, tutors, or remedial education personnel. And I haven't even mentioned yet the cost to society of college and university instruction in "law enforcement" and in the trades mentioned above.
During Fonzi's "Happy Days" of the 1950s, I lived in a county that had, as far as I can recall, ZERO MURDERS during the whole decade. Now well into my seventh decade of life, I can vouch for the fact that something has gone terribly wrong with America's "culture." Despite the millions of millions of dollars our country spends on education and law enforcement and 'human services,' conditions are only getting worse. I can't count on two hands the number of people I've known of who have been murdered (even though the proportion of guns-to-people was probably greater in the 1950s than today.
I had 8 very close friends killed in a shooting (7 victims, plus the shooter); this year there was another shooting right across the street (3 dead). I used to know a guy from my home town who was later shot dead working at a gas station in Milwaukee; there have even been murders in the county I now live in (which is more like Mayberry USA than Peyton Place or Chicago or Washington DC).
There have been well over 30 mass shootings in the USA since Columbine. The cultural revolutionaries got God and the Bible out of the public schools, but they
replaced them with WHAT? GRIEF COUNSELORS? It's time to get mad (at the criminals and their enablers, not the guns). What this country needs is a good 5-cent cigar and some enthusiasm with our depression!
P.S. Chuck Norris once wrote, "Why would the Left want to change public education? It is producing exactly the kind of product they have wanted to produce for decades!"
Big Bird was a major issue in the 2012 election campaign. So was the "47 percent" and the "top 2 percent." But did you ever once hear the subject of homocide brought up? NAY!
There is one murder in the U.S. every 36 minutes. If you add the homocide deaths and suicide deaths, they total about 50,000. That doesn't include drug over-doses, or traffic fatalites caused by drugs or alcohol.
IN CONCLUSION, we're losing more citizens every year as were killed in Vietnam or Korea, but neither candidate for President even addressed the subject of crime. If we lost that many in Afghanistan every year, there'd be hell to pay.
© Curtis Dahlgren
December 9, 2012
"Depression is simply anger without enthusiasm." — author unknown
[this is an excerpt from the column I posted July 19, 2008]
TO COMPLETELY SUPPRESS ANGER IS TO SUPPRESS GRIEF (and everyone knows that's not a good thing to do). The "Dictionary of Word Origins" says that "the original notion contained in ['anger'] was of 'distress' or 'affliction'; 'rage' did not begin to enter the picture until the 13th century." Furthermore: the English language acquired it from the Old Norse word ANGR — which meant "grief."
John Ayto goes on to say that anger "is connected with a group of words which contain connotations of 'constriction': German and Dutch eng (and Old English enge) mean 'narrow' and Greek ankhein meant 'squeeze, strangle' (English gets angina from it), and Latin 'angustus' (source of English anguish) also meant 'narrow.'" [from entry "anger"]
It should not surprise anyone that where there is "anger" there is "sorrow," because they originally meant the same thing! The tricky part is in preventing the grief/anger from causing more of the same in an unbroken cycle. The Bible says, "Be angry but sin not. Let not the sun go down on your anger."
SOME DAYS THE SUN JUST SEEMS TO GO DOWN TOO FAST. But "seriously folks," the Bible is the Creator's operator's manual for man (it's not just a coffee table book there for looks)! As the title of this column suggests, however, there are BIG BUCKS that can be made "treating" the after-effects of failing to follow the Creator's instructions. We treat the symptoms and not the disease.
Today I stopped by the library to look for a few factoids from the Milwaukee yellow pages. The only issue that was available was the 2002-03 "One Book." Here are the cold, hard statistics:
- Lawyers: 84 1/2 pages worth of them
- Doctors: 54 pages, including psychiatrists (others "treat" psychosomatic illnesses, too)
-Psychologists: 3 1/2 pages worth
-Mental health servies: 2 1/2 pages
-Licensed counselors: 2/3 of one page
-Crisis intervention: 1/4 of a page
-Process servers: 1/2 of a page
-Bondsmen: 1/8 of one page
-Debt couselors: 1/4 of a page
-Mediation services: 1/2 of a page
-Court reporting services: 1/4 of a page
-Private Investigators: 3/4 of a page
-Police Departments and police equipment: 3/4 of a page
THAT'S NEARLY 150 PAGES (for services relating to problems that hardly existed three generations ago when men were men, women were women, and Government wasn't Santa Claus)!
The 2002-03 Milwaukee "One Book" does have 14 1/2 pages of listings for churches, but it is my theory that if those churches were more faithfully utilized, there would be little if any need for all those other services. Those 150 pages don't even begin to hint at the cost of county, state, and federal 'correctional facilities,' prison guards, prison chaplains, or parole and probation personnel — not to mention social workers, tutors, or remedial education personnel. And I haven't even mentioned yet the cost to society of college and university instruction in "law enforcement" and in the trades mentioned above.
During Fonzi's "Happy Days" of the 1950s, I lived in a county that had, as far as I can recall, ZERO MURDERS during the whole decade. Now well into my seventh decade of life, I can vouch for the fact that something has gone terribly wrong with America's "culture." Despite the millions of millions of dollars our country spends on education and law enforcement and 'human services,' conditions are only getting worse. I can't count on two hands the number of people I've known of who have been murdered (even though the proportion of guns-to-people was probably greater in the 1950s than today.
I had 8 very close friends killed in a shooting (7 victims, plus the shooter); this year there was another shooting right across the street (3 dead). I used to know a guy from my home town who was later shot dead working at a gas station in Milwaukee; there have even been murders in the county I now live in (which is more like Mayberry USA than Peyton Place or Chicago or Washington DC).
There have been well over 30 mass shootings in the USA since Columbine. The cultural revolutionaries got God and the Bible out of the public schools, but they
replaced them with WHAT? GRIEF COUNSELORS? It's time to get mad (at the criminals and their enablers, not the guns). What this country needs is a good 5-cent cigar and some enthusiasm with our depression!
P.S. Chuck Norris once wrote, "Why would the Left want to change public education? It is producing exactly the kind of product they have wanted to produce for decades!"
Big Bird was a major issue in the 2012 election campaign. So was the "47 percent" and the "top 2 percent." But did you ever once hear the subject of homocide brought up? NAY!
There is one murder in the U.S. every 36 minutes. If you add the homocide deaths and suicide deaths, they total about 50,000. That doesn't include drug over-doses, or traffic fatalites caused by drugs or alcohol.
IN CONCLUSION, we're losing more citizens every year as were killed in Vietnam or Korea, but neither candidate for President even addressed the subject of crime. If we lost that many in Afghanistan every year, there'd be hell to pay.
© Curtis Dahlgren
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