Hemispheric Healing
Uncle Sam is bifurcated. At least that is what I think I’m being told to feel. Our governing parties are all like the hemispheres of our brain — right and left. This brain is having grand mal seizures — the hemispheres are overly excitable and are not communicating properly together. They cannot coordinate action and the entire corpus, the United States, is seizing in intense inaction in an aimless tension. The body is looking towards the head for some sign of coherence and a signal to act upon. All that is felt is the prodome — the impending sense that a seizure is going to happen, correctly anticipated before it happens.
When it comes to dealing with grand mal seizures the Western medical community has several prescriptions. One, lobotomy. If you separate left and right. The seizure can no longer travel along the aisle and seize the brain. The hemispheres, now separate from themselves, start to act somewhat independently, and the seizures subside. But oddities arise, and an incapacity to understand the goings-on of the neighboring hemisphere, and the behaviors under its command, lead to a strange alienation within oneself, as if two individuals now share the skin of one body. Who is to say those two individuals won’t find conflict with each other.
Two, the use of anticonvulsant drugs. There is a diversity to the method of action for anticonvulsants, but they typically work by either downregulating an excitatory agent or upregulating a depressing (inhibitory) agent. In so doing they stabilize an overexcitable nervous system. To me, this is the ‘take a chill pill’ strategy and is akin to calming down the channels of communication within our nation. In the human nervous system, under certain conditions, excess excitability presents itself as systemic noise that disrupts the normal functioning of the nervous system. There are many channels between our governing branches, our figurative brain, and the populace, our body. The conceptual monolith that is the ‘media’, whether ‘social’ or otherwise, is what I view to be the neuronal axes that communicate signals from body to brain and brain to body along a distance. There is a fuck ton of noise in our media, so much so that the signals the brain and body receive are almost incomprehensible to either side. Perhaps it’s time we take a chill-pill and work to reduce the amount of ‘noise’ we burden the national nervous system with.
Three, stimulation of the body’s “rest and digest” parasympathetic nervous system through myriad means– Vagus nerve, deep brain regions, etc. The idea here is to calm everyone the fuck down by activating those aspects of our culture that are responsible for our ‘slowing down’. Areas like contemplation, sleep, meditation, prayer, deep conversation — all these are micro-vehicles for pressing the brakes on an overactive culture. Much like an undisciplined mind, our collective mind attaches to every wit and whim that passes its awareness. There is no reason to give unnecessary power to unnecessary thought. As a culture it may do us well to sit in nonattachment as we witness the ‘headlines’ and ‘breaking news’ — whether true or false, useful or useless — scurry across our collective mental space.
We can do more as two hemispheres acting in concert than as separate entities. An unbridled right and unbridled left are less healthy when separate than when together. Too much orthodoxy and conservatism lead to dryness, stagnation, and outdatedness; too much liberalism leads to destruction and chaos and all of its dangers, but harmony between both allows for stable growth. We are married, and for good reason, we are better off together than apart. We’ll have our problems and differences, but let’s work through our differences and remind ourselves of the reason for our union in the first place.
