Pained generation

“Demand for painkillers is feeding pharmacy thefts.”

This title belongs to a South Bend Tribune article published June 27, which details the murder of four people at a pharmacy in New York.

The gunman was in search of what is becoming a more and more lucrative product:
narcotic pills.

Narcotics, the article explains, are highly addictive. The number of overdoses across the country is exploding, as is the number of victims of robberies for the
pain-numbing medicines.

Something to kill the pain.

“These people are depraved. They’ll kill you,” a pharmacist in Staten Island, who had been held up, said.

He is right. But he is also forgetting something.

On Black Friday every year, people line up outside stores to buy Christmas gifts.
The day after Thanksgiving is the official start of the holiday season.

Frantic and wild, shoppers on this day injure and even kill store keepers in their rush.
In 2008, it happened in New York.

These people are depraved. They’ll kill you.

Pain, we want to murder it at any cost. We do it with Oxycodone or with a Tickle Me Elmo.

This age, like any other, demands meaning for the pain of life, or at least something with which to dull it.

The thieves at drug stores are not unique, nor are they so different from the Dionysian crowds on Black Friday.

Try disallowing iPods or Facebook on campus. Then you will see “depraved.”
We need our distractions, our escapes from thinking about ourselves, each other and the universe.

Our generation is not equipped to examine these things because they are uncomfortable, yet ultimately hopeful.

Instead we look for comfort, for mindlessness. We’ll even kill you for it.

The existential crisis that comes with real contemplation of self is so intense, we will stop at nothing to prevent it.

We are afraid of the questions we might ask and perhaps of the answers we might find.

Silence is a dangerous thing. So is sobriety. Without our televisions and Vicodin, we would be left with only ourselves.

Maybe we would be less violent, less frenzied, if we would sit. Sit and wait, sit and listen.

Pull out the ear plugs, un-pop the pill, switch off the television and log off Facebook.

Escapes are easy, plentiful and the stuff of which the American economy is built.
 
It is in the interest of the GDP that we remain ready to kill someone for a bargain.

The economic system is never called depraved, nor is its arrangement ever called into question.

It seems to me, however, that those who stole pills and trampled people to death were following our pleasure-seeking culture through to its logical conclusion.

Most of us will never rob a store or trample someone. Most of us are silently “depraved,” ready to do what we can to ease our own discomfort and dissatisfaction.

­— Mthomas5@indiana.edu