Where is the bottom?

A Question of Pain and Morality.

Allow me to tell you about a guy who has profound insight into human change and how it relates to the current state of America.

This guy is someone I worked with at a county jail day reporting program a few years ago. I was a civilian tasked with helping inmates find the services and resources they needed to make changes in their lives. He was a correctional officer with no formal background in psychology. Yet, he was the best psychologist in the county, better than any licensed therapist at the Behavioral Health Department when it came to working with inmates. He read every book, watched every educational video, and attended every training he could fit into his schedule.

But mostly, he had experience.

I think there were four of us in the office that day discussing strategies and tactics for helping inmates. He said people change when they hit rock bottom, and the definition of rock bottom is different for everyone. He went on to say the most important part, “When the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change, a person will make the change.”

So, my question is when will the pain of having a criminal enterprise running our county cause us enough pain that we will make the change? I could go through a list of government transgressions, but I’ll just ask about one that should be all it takes for any person with a moral and ethical compass.

Is watching innocent, hardworking people, many of whom are legal immigrants and even some citizens, rounded up and abused like animals by cowardly mask-wearing government thugs and then packed into detention centers painful enough? Is that enough of an affront to our collective conscience?

If not, what is enough? When will the pain be enough to make the change?

On a side note, as I was finishing this short piece, Disturbed’s version of The Sound of Silence began to play. It seemed so damned fitting. Why not read the piece a second time while listening to Disturbed?