Update Our Medicine, Update Our Rights // One Nation, Under Illness

Little word about keeping guns out of the hands of the "mentally ill" -- I'm sorry to break the bad news, but everyone is mentally ill.

You are mentally ill.

I am mentally ill.

Our president is mentally ill.

Treating the stock market as a magical barometer of national health is mental illness.

Feeding pigs candy and raising birds in cages is mental illness.

Shitting in clean water is mental illness.

Not drug testing a cop who has shot an unarmed citizen is mental illness.

Destroying wildlife to exploit poisonous fuel when we have everything we need to shift toward clean energy is mental illness.

Allowing families to go bankrupt over health care and job training is mental illness.

Villainizing an entire race, class, or religion is mental illness.

Making people work when they are sick or grieving or recovering from birth is mental illness.

Believing borders are more real than people is mental illness.

Expecting kids to be peaceful when our entire economy is based on creating debt, selling weapons, imprisoning the neglected, selling ad time between horrific stories, and escalating terrorism is mental illness.

Not pulling out the drawing board when a self-governing country has clearly been bought and sold by professional lobbyists is mental illness.

Patriarchy is mental illness.

IT DOES NOT WORK. IT MAKES NO SENSE.

I basically don't know anyone who isn't suffering from either apathy, depression, denial, warped logic, unprocessed trauma, ego-inflation, addiction, workaholicism, materialism, imposter syndrome, chronic projection or emotional fatigue. I don't know anyone whose heart isn't essentially broken. And if your heart is broken, your mind has no flux capacitor; it can't take you anywhere new. It too is broken. It too is ill.

And that's the scariest thing, that we have forgotten what mental WELLNESS should be. We don't even realize how good we're supposed to feel, being alive on the most magical planet maybe ever in all of Time-Space, with the ability to self-express, marvel, and co-create. We ignore the wisdom of ancient and modern day medicine women who, from indigenous cultures around the globe, plead with us to revisit the basic tenets of harmonious living before we get all fancy legislating our repressed, excessive, short-sighted civilizations.

They tell us that a healthy mind is motivated to assist the species in evolution. It should make us feel empowered, discerning, receptive, creative, proactive, and cooperative -- these have always been our super powers. Mental wellness is so much more than simply going to your job without crying, or not shooting into a crowd of kids.

Yes we need to talk about gun control, duh.

But we also URGENTLY need to recognize the type of mental illness that allows us to be ruled by a government that sabotages our holistic thriving --

a government that is fine with keeping us alive on corn syrup produced from nutrient-stripped top soil and keeping us hooked on pills so we don't notice how shitty that makes us feel; a government that fails to charge the self-esteem battery of its non-white, newly-arriving, and lower-income citizens by offering them anti-protection under the law; a government so obsessed with its "economy" it's willing to deprive us the time necessary to maintain stable families and fulfilling relationships with each other, our passions, our conscience, our habitat, God/The Source -- AKA the ingredients of our happiness, which we're entitled to pursue. REMEMBER?? We've been here before, y'all.

And we're all in this together because we are so frickin' crackerjacks we don't even see it, which is pretty much the definition of crazy. But the writing is on the wall even if it's not in the DSM-V, cuz the shit we accept and perpetuate is textbook INSANE.

Now I know there must be people out there I'm missing -- a few rare souls who have healed themselves, who feel oriented in this era of history. You -- especially women, especially mothers: please, PLEASE, P-P-P-PLEASE stop being shy; rise up, lead, hatch the eggheads in this cuckoo nest so we can fly the fuck out of it. We need you!! Remind us we deserve better! Remind us of our inalienable rights! UPDATE THOSE RIGHTS to UPDATE THE MEDICINE we need right now, not what we may have needed x-hundred years ago.

UPDATE OUR RIGHTS

UPDATE OUR MEDICINE

UPDATE OUR RIGHTS

UPDATE OUR MEDICINE

UPDATE OUR RIGHTS

UPDATE OUR MEDICINE

Let this be our mantra. Only once we do that will cures to these epidemic tragedies become clear as common sense.

Zaeli Kane is a gender fluid mother, stand up comic, and collaboration artist living in Austin, Texas. Sign up for her newsletter here