Being Imperfect and Mentally Ill

EVERYBODY IS MENTALLY ILL. This conclusion, which sounds much more shocking and profound than it probably really is, was reached near the entrance to a Wal Mart super center just inside the main door, near a greeter, if memory serves, where I happend to run into an old friend. Wal Mart, to give credit where due, is among America's best places to encounter purely by accident people you enjoy seeing, but otherwise would not, ever, owing to our societal tendency towards isolation and remote control. Thanks to Wal Mart, we see and briefly chat with people we like, but would otherwse never see. I can't even remember how the conversation started and, got to that point, but I recall we mentioned a few mutual friends, one in paritcular with whom we are both well acquainted, a friend I had not and still have not seen in years, becasue he is a hard core fervant Trump supporter. It may be along time yet until I see and renew friendships with my Trump supporting former friends, if I ever do. I would like to claim exclusive credit for this seminal assertion, but in all honesty cannot. It was arrived at mutually, at Wal Mart. It is this: We are all mentally ill. I'll go first. My mental illnesses include paranoia,submerged anger,I suspect, and maybe a touch of several others. One of the many mental illnesses afflicting American society generally is that we have great compassion for physically ill people, but none whatsoever for the mentally ill, still. In our lingering stigmatic attitudes towards maladies of the mind, our regarding mental illenss as somehow being a sin, or personal shortcoming, or moral failure is in and of itself a societal illness. These sickening, perverted attitudes are of course lingering holdovers from less enlightened times, ancient times, the middle ages, and the nineteen fifties. My father was raised by a women who was born in 1890, my grandmother, whom he described as a harridan, a women who never wore a dress above her ankles, went to church constantly, consigned anybody who didn't to eternal damnation, and, according to my father, had sex three times in her entire life, once for each of her three children, of whom my father was one. My father hated his mother like nobody ever hated anybody. He suffered from severe despression, and was institutionalized because of it for two years, then underwent years of psychotherapy. That he managed to be a kind, loving father still amazes and impresses me; I am still grateful for it. Let's again stipulate that everyone is mentally ill in some way or another. Just as nobody enjoys perfect physical health, nobody enjoys perfect mental health. Perfect health is an ideal, which we never truly attain, then, we die. And yet, here we are, having undergone billions of years of painstaking haphazard evolution, the most recent but unfinished product of a million natural forces, and the one great force, nature, aka the universe, aka God. Goethe once said: "Know thysef?". If I knew myself I would probably try to run away". Goethe was a romanitc poet, quite content to live a life shrouded in mystery. For him, the point was trying, not necessarily succeeding. We should accept our imperfect selves as we are, mental illneses and all. We all agree that if we were all perfect, we would all be bored. Our great eternal quest for self and societal improvement includes the sacred blessed caveat, a law of nature, that neither we nor our society can ever achieve perfection, and for that we whould thank either our lucky stars, evolution by natural selection, or whatever or whomever put the whole wonderful crazy process in motion in the first place.