For the second time since the Wall Street debacle really got rolling down the excrement slicked slope, I read about a family found dead in their home.  The first time, they were due to be evicted for lack of paying on the mortgage; this time the parents didn’t wait that long.  Both parents had been fired from their job at a health care giant and they went home, planned to kill their children and themselves.  And they did it. Seven bodies and emailed murder-suicide notes.

I am sure some parts of America would like to think it is just a Southern California phenomenon…..that is where both of these tragedies unfolded.  I am sure millions take comfort from the psycho-babble in the news articles: “Americans tend to over-identify with their jobs; they don’t develop other parts of their personalities and when the job goes, they go with it.”  Really?

I call that kind of thing “whistling in the dark” and it is effective as putting a band-aide on a severed artery.  People might kill themselves out of that kind of imbalanced identification with corporate dronedom, but parents don’t murder their children because they had to turn in their logo polo shirt.  I am not a mental health professional, nor do I play one online, but I have more than a passing acqauintaince with suicidal thoughts and people.  My father committed suicide.  My brother attempted suicide.  In my youth, it was my “ace in the hole” for if my life was too untenable.  It was my connection to other people and to job and duty that pulled me from that edge.

Losing the jobs didn’t put me back there, either.  I suggest that the reality is, these parents DID develop other sides of the personality.  They developed the “My children won’t suffer and do without.” side, for instance.  They developed the “Surely there is help for us, we won’t be on the streets.” side, too.  But this latest family worked for a big health care corporation and doubtless saw people lose homes over medical bills.  They came to know that no, in fact, there really isn’t any help out there.  The states are so financially strapped that they routinely deny unemployment for the vaguest reasons, possibly even falsifying data to justify saying no. (My son, first denied unemployment because he was “imprudent” about taking a day for religious reasons, has now been told he is still denied because he is a full time student and “unavailable to work.”  Except, you see, he IS not a student—he can’t pay the tuition.)  Most families are either wide-spread, or so hard-pressed that they cannot be a safety net either.  The infrastructure is frayed and tattered, if not broken completely and America began largely espousing “If you are poor it is your own fault” when churches became more interested in contributions to pay for Mercedes for the preachers.  So the typical three sources of aid are useless: government, church, family.  I do believe a sense of failure wraps these tragic families in a constrictive grip a python would envy.

Here is what I see as the hard and bitter truth: We are alone in the dark.  There is no help but ourselves and any change coming from Washington above is going to take a very long time to trickle down.  We won’t stop family murder-suicides by branding it as a bad identification with job issue; label it correctly—desperation and despair!  And the next sunshine enema idiot whistling in my presence is going to get a chop in the chops!

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