Getting comfortable with being depressed
Joe:
I have just finished reading your essay "The Audacity of Depression" and I want say thanks for helping me put a new and uplifting slant on the visceral unease I've been feeling. Your comments on the state of the world, particularly the USA, align closely with my own thoughts.
I'm struggling, recently, with trying to offer my three grown children some hope for their future -- and I find that I can't. Hope for the future is something I can't honestly offer them. Does that make me depressed? You bet it does! Being 64 and recently retired from a 30-year nursing career, my instincts are to "make it all better". But, I can't. Any information or education I send my kids ends up sounding like a condemnation of their lives, which are very successful and deeply rooted in the current delusion.
So, the days roll on and I'm getting more comfortable with being depressed. I think depression only makes you crazy or kills you if you can't understand there might be a reason for it and you have a right to those feelings, given the current picture.
Thanks, again, for the thoughts. I'm just getting acquainted with your work, but feel like I've found a friend. Being Buddhist, I try to stick close to my cushion and practice. It helps.
Peace,
Bob
Tennessee
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Bob,
I've come to realize that the "depression" we suffer as Western people is simply that part of the nature of the world we have managed to avoid. Billions wake each day in the full understanding that there is no universal promise of a better life, either for them or their children. While they by no means are free of the pain that accompanies human existence, they are not affluent or self-deluding enough to suffer depression as we know it.
In my humble opinion, our current depression is simply the shadow cart by our national mass hallucination. Like you, I have come to be as comfortable in that shadow as in the light of what is good in this world. It's rather like walking a wooded path, partly shaded and partly sunlit. But mostly it's just walking forward on the path before us, with no illusions about where it ultimately ends.
Joe
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What they're saying about Joe's book
Here are some comments about Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War.
"Joe Bageant is a brilliant writer. He evokes working class America like no one else. The account of his revisit to his Virginia roots is sobering, poignant, and instructive."
-- HOWARD ZINN, author of A People's History of the United States
"This book is righteous, self-righteous, exhilarating, and aggravating. By God, it's a raging, hilarious, and profane love song to the great American redneck. As a blue state man with a red state childhood, I have been waiting for this book for years. We ignore its message at our peril."
-- SHERMAN ALEXIE, author of Reservation Blues
"This fine book sheds a devastating light on Bush & Co.'s notorious 'base,' i.e. America's white working class, whose members have been ravaged by the very party that purports to take their side. Meanwhile, the left has largely turned them out, or even laughed at their predicament. Of their degraded state -- and, therefore, ours -- Joe Bageant writes like an avenging angel."
-- MARK CRISPIN MILLER, author of Fooled Again: The Real Case for Election Reform
"Joe Bageant is the Sartre of Appalachia. His white-hot bourbon-fuelled prose shreds through the lies of our times like a weed-whacker in overdrive. Deer Hunting with Jesus is a deliciously vicious and wickedly funny chronicle of a thinking man's life in God's own backwoods."
-- JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, author of Grand Theft Pentagon and co-editor of CounterPunch
"This recounting of lost lives -- of white have-nots in one of our most have-not states -- has the power of an old-time Scottish Border ballad. It is maddening and provocative that the true believers in 'American exceptionalism' and ersatz machismo side with those stepping all over them. Bagaent's writing is as lyrical as Nelson Algren's, and if there's a semblance of hope, it's that he catches on with new readers thanks to the alternative media."
-- STUDS TERKEL
"Deer Hunting with Jesus is one of those rare books that is colorful, depressing, hilarious, and biting all at the same time. Joe Bageant has given us a glimpse into the vicious class war that is too often ignored or hidden by those happily perpetrating this war."
-- DAVID SIROTA, author of Hostile Takeover
"Dead serious and damn funny ... Bageant writes with the ghosts of Hunter S. Thompson, Will Rogers, and Frank Zappa kibitzing over his shoulder ... Takes Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas, to the next level."
—- MOTHER JONES
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War is now available at all major bookstores and online at Amazon.com. CLICK HERE.
