WHAT IS THE COST OF INSANITY?

When did it happen? At what moment did we cross the line? When did we realize that our minds felt like a glob of mush — that we often could not remember where we laid our keys, whether we had all the ingredients to make our favorite soup? Did we feed the dog? When did we start holding in our stomachs to zip our pants? Where did those extra twenty pounds come from? The scale must surely be broken. Or was it us who were broken? Too much to worry about. Too much to do. Too much stress. Not enough sleep. Exhausted all the time. Then we notice another wrinkle, a few more grey hairs. Insanity. Surely there must be a pill.

We turn on the television to our favorite programs armed with our bags of potato chips and beer or wine. After all we deserve these treats after the day we just had. Tomorrow we will pay more attention. Start a diet. Pop some pills to speed up the process. Go for a walk if we have the energy. We could be happy like all those people in the commercials prescribed medications we have never heard of — can’t even pronounce. A miracle in a bottle. We ignore the possible side effects. The list is too long.

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again

and expecting different results.”

Albert Einstein

Maybe Mr. Einstein was right. Over seventy years ago, after all in 1950 the biggest killers of man were heart disease and cancer. In 2021 the biggest killers of man were still heart disease and cancer. What happened to progress? Well, that all depends on how we define progress. There must first be a goal. A well-defined goal. It is instead a rather vague one. The Search for a Cure. For Heart Disease. For Breast Cancer. For Pancreatic Cancer. Etc. Etc. We hope these diseases will be wiped out before we succumb to them. Then another pesky disease pops up. Little or no notice. A killer disease. More vicious than cancer or heart disease. In fact, we are bombarded with commercials that promise hope. A new pill. A new treatment. Cancer and heart disease are losing ground but growing faster than ever.

Did you know that the U.S. and New Zealand are the only

two countries where direct consumer advertisements of

prescription drugs are legal?

We now pay more attention to the commercials for Covid has become a household word. We have seen, right before our eyes just how vicious it is yet seldom, if ever do we hear the word prevention as we watch family, friends diagnosed not just with Covid but with any number of auto-immune disorders — where the cells of our bodies literally attack themselves. Is Covid one of them? How the hell do we even pronounce these disorders, where did they come from? Are we next? We blame our genetics, the environment, animals which we have been told are the major culprits of disease. And we feel out of control. The cost of insanity is high. We continue to do what we have always done — eat a quick snack for breakfast, gobble down a sandwich and fries for lunch, and a pizza for dinner. We have no energy left to cook and we grow fatter along with Big Pharma now more susceptible to disease, the old and the new lingering somewhere in our future.

We wonder — could it be we are nothing more than Guiana pigs — part of a big experiment. For we are pressured to take pills, to get immunizations, hormones, antibiotics, to go in for still more tests. Our bodies are confused. They retaliate. They attack us. The enemy. Have we not learned? Doing the same things over and over again do not produce different results but we continue on more isolated, more frightened, more vulnerable. Insane.