I am a madman. I’ve always known that I am mad. I became aware of it when I was 10-years-old.
I still remember the day I learned I was mad. I was walking on a busy downtown street with my father, both of us munching on succulent hotdogs with “the whole works” while we chatted. With condiments dripping through the side of the hotdog buns and smearing my face with onions and mustard, I halted my steps to wipe off my messy face with my bare forearm. Suddenly, the sight of human misery, which I’d seen many times in the past but never really noticed until that day, captured my attention as if I were seeing it for the first time. A few yards away from me a ragged and barefooted elderly lady scavenged a trashcan in front of a snazzy eatery in search of her daily nourishment. Looking at her as she devoured the pieces and bits of throwaway food she managed to find, all of a sudden my hotdog became tasteless. As I stared at her in awe, I realized that something had happened to me at that moment: it was the first pangs of the birth of the awareness of my madness.
“What’s the matter?” My father asked me with his eyes shifting between me and the direction of my fixation. I didn’t reply. Obviously there was something that mattered; and yet, it seemed to be as oblivious to him as it was to the many people who walked by utterly indifferent to what seemed to me an unacceptable human condition. Staring at her agape, my child heart was overwhelmed with empathy while my innocent mind was flummoxed with a perplexing sight I could not comprehend. Something was not right in the grownup world. And if that was the social model that awaited me in adulthood, then I was definitely an eccentric child doomed to grow up to be a madman.
From that day on, I realized that my puerile experience of reality had changed forever. I began noticing the loud cacophony of city noises, the crowded sidewalks, and the noxious fumes of motorized vehicles that scratched my throat, burned my eyes, and congested my lungs with poisonous carbon monoxide. I became aware of the tall buildings that hid the mid-afternoon Sun while casting ill-omened shadows in the boulevards. Everything around me looked and felt threateningly strange. I felt as though the innocence of my childhood had been plucked out of my heart without a moment’s notice. But nothing was more shocking to my child’s eyes than the sight of abject poverty that was seemingly perceived as an integral part of normal society: the long stretch of tents crowding the underpasses in the intersections of busy and noisy highways; the tattered people sleeping on makeshift cardboard beds on the sidewalks; the panhandling dejected folks whose faces cried out for help and compassion; all of it struck me as insane as it was unacceptable. In my innocent 10-year-old state of being, I could not fathom why adults didn’t do anything about that social travesty. How could they tolerate such a state of affairs? How could it possibly be normal? Did they know what they were doing?—or not doing for that matter. The more I wondered the more disenchanted, bewildered, and concerned I became with the prospect of becoming an adult. Because of the way I felt, I feared becoming a social pariah by reason of insanity. Nevertheless, I came to terms with the possibility that, most likely, I was an abnormal child who would grow up struggling to fit in a normal world.
By the time I reached puberty, the symptoms of my madness were significantly exacerbated. Besides the hormonal changes that were wreaking havoc in my body, in my mind I was perplexed with the emerging awareness of what I perceived to be an illogical reality, albeit professed to be the normal standards. I began questioning whether it would be possible to sustain the continuous sprawling growth of urban centers and the populations inhabiting them. For Pete’s sake, even a young madman knows that there’s only so much space and resources to go around—and at the current rate of consumption, they will run out in a foreseeable future. Despite this obvious fact, unremitting economic expansion is the unavoidable necessity of the way of life I was being molded to fit in. Although the idea of unfettered growth made no sense to me, I had no choice but to accept it. As a psychological palliative to my disturbed awareness, I found refuge in my own madness.
By my late teens I realized that my mental health state was deteriorating faster than the ozone layer. There was one day in particular, a Sunday when I was reading the newspaper, that I came across a story that convinced me that I was a madman in the normal civilized world. It was the day I learned about the model for peace in the years of my youth. It was called détente. I thought it was the most bizarre approach to peace that any sensible intelligent human being could formulate. It was a principle based on fear of mutual self-destruction. Two nations bearing the imposing title of superpower, aimed numerous nuclear weapons at each other and their respective allies, which generated unbearable stressful terror to daily living. Any minute increase in the tension between the deadly rival parties maximized the already high anxiety level—a classic illustration of major mental health crisis. However, as oddly as I deemed détente to be, it was the fear of mutual annihilation that preserved the tenuous peace in the world. And if such an irrational approach were not asinine enough, they continued escalating an arms race that could wipe life out of the planet many times over. They claimed, however, that it was the only leverage with which to prevent any reckless impulse to initiate what would be a global catastrophe. Ironically, this outlandish peacekeeping tactic was dubbed MAD (mutually assured destruction).
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