By J.D. Alt
Many years ago, I had occasion to spend a long weekend at Ramuda Ranch in Arizona—a rehab facility where young women are helped to learn how to want to eat food again. Anyone who has had a personal encounter with Anorexia Nervosa knows what a mystifying and frightening experience it is. The young women I saw there—all of them well above average intelligence-wise, many of them stunningly beautiful in a physical sense—all suffered from the same delusion: they had convinced themselves that eating, taking nourishment into their bodies, was pathological. The delusion had variations: some of the adolescent girls looked into the mirror and—in spite of the fact they were five feet eight inches tall and weighed only 75 pounds—SAW a body that was grotesquely over-weight and fat. Others seemed to have a disconnected relationship with their bodies, as if they personally were one thing and their body another—and the “other” was something that, for complex, obscure, and compelling reasons, deserved punishment and starvation. For those of us who were visitors, observing this irrational and self-destructing behavior in young women, who otherwise seemed perfectly normal and healthy, was perplexing and painful.
I was reminded of Ramuda Ranch last Friday as I watched our nation’s leaders explain to the American people why America must now impose a new austerity upon itself. By what process, I wondered, have we convinced ourselves that we do not have enough U.S. Dollars to pay ourselves to create the goods and services we need to prosper as a society? What exactly is the “fiscal crisis” that we see when we look in the mirror? How is it that we view our national community with such detachment that we can knowingly impose upon it a painful—and unnecessary—deprivation? How can it be that we view the spending of our OWN sovereign currency to create public goods and services—the essential nourishment of our private economy—as creating a “deficit” that we must somehow repay to someone in the future? How have we bought into this massive delusion? And where is the rehab center, the clinical psychologists and counselors, who will help us overcome it?
