American columnist/author , Chris Hedges, who has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for the Christian Science Monitor , National Public Radio , the Dallas Morning News and the New York Times , for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years , has written a startling article about the current state of the world with the heading THE IMPLOSION OF CAPITALISM: WELCOME TO THE ASYLUM, which first appeared in Truthdig.com. April 30. It opens with the following gripping statement -
When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft.
Hedges later writes : It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum. [Truthdig probes beneath the headlines and provides a different perspective to much of the mush served up by conventional media.]
