Research exercise/ other

Exercise for class, Deviant human behavior

Ship of Fools

“The End is Coming! Obama is the devil! Christ will return!” These are all signs and phrases that can be found on a few individuals in large public spots. While visiting New York I came to the conclusion that it was their Mecca.In the recent years there has been an increase in the rhetoric. While visiting it was easy to spot them. Some wore special robes, others were just dirty. The best were the ones that dressed up and were polite, they didn’t force the apocalypse down your throat with singing or screaming. The more coherent ones, if possible, hand out pamphlets with a smile while hiding there message inside the writing.
These people don’t really scare me, even though Law and Order is trying hard to get me to.The one thing they really do is bring up questions. The one in mind is, is this normal human behavior? Ive heard about Rome falling and people thinking it was all over, but that was before Facebook and The Daily Show. We have many media formats that can tell us if the end is coming, but what about these public speakers? In the past they were called lunatics after the belief that the full moon changed them into someone else. But this is the modern world, and yes they may have mental problems but what lead them to believe the end was coming?
According to text books there are five different models that could help explain this odd behavior. Biological,Pyschodynamic,Behavioral,Cognitive, and humanistic. The problem with the models is that there is no line that divides "Us from them." It was easy in the past, you just looked up and blamed it on the moon. If they were really annoying you shipped them off to sea, problem solved. Again we are in the modern world and psychology has helped us treat them.
The thing that scares me the most is those who go undiagnosed. Could those people Ive seen just avoided being diagnosed and become worse. The reason I'm a attracted to odd human behavior is that I can see it any where. Those bums, and protesters, and Apocalypse spewers all seem to be an extreme and a sever case of what ever they have. Ive met many people that can fall between crazy and sane but I have never actually met a healthy sane person. It makes me think that politics, religion, war, and everything in our everyday lives is just an attempt at sanity. Its scary to think that with any little social or emotional problem we could all go crazy, but we can always blame it on Obama.
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Writing exercise, find something that no one pays attention too. Shoes hanging from a telephone wire, trash on the street, or something a little more complex. Person walking in traffic, squirrel chasing another squirrel, people waiting fora bus. Examine, study, understand, and maybe if possible become it?



Insanity/madness/Lunatics the crazies. People we dismiss on the street

I can slowly feel it. Its like a drift of voices when walking in a city. You can hear everything people say and the noises from the street. All of it you can control because you know what they are. But there are some noises, some feelings that come over you that penetrate you. You don’t know where they come from or what made them but you know they come from the direction of the streets. They are unwanted and unwelcomed. I imagine this is how madness slowly begins. You begin fine but then as life goes on you are given circumstances less favorable. You deal with them knowing that they are unfair and their origins are of a nature created by intentions not understood. You fight it, you try to keep your sanity while you push through it but the mind becomes irrational with the poison slowly spreading. It becomes exhausting but knowing you haven’t succumbed to it makes you keep going. Then there are the temptations. You see the crazies on the street and you seem them in the news. You wonder what its like to live with a life unquestioned, one where everything you do is just done and no rational is needed. Is it freedom? Nothing to worry about but nothing is yours, no home, or food, but freedom from thought. How long till the madness consumed them and they surrendered. Is it worth it, by then you wont even care, should we just surrender? Or is sanity worth fighting for? What do we win form keeping our sanity? What do we gain form letting everything go?