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Random
Thoughts
Mark Palermo, Professor NECC
01/04/07
 The good
old days where I grew up weren’t always so good. In
the late 1960’s Lawrence earned a well-deserved
reputation (along with Beverly and Springfield) for
having the highest percentage of junkies in the state.
Junkies were so common in Lawrence’s old
neighborhoods, there even existed a certain “junkie
chic.” Users had a style of dress and behavior.
Pushers strutted around with pride and self-satisfaction,
as if they were successful entrepreneurs or rock stars. I
knew beautiful girls that were attracted to junkies and
sought them out. It seems incredible now that this
loathsome, diabolical habit was cool; but it was a
statement of disenfranchised youth.
Thinking back to that time, a popular song by Curtis
Mayfield called “Freddie’s Dead” resonated
with me; it portrayed my own feelings about the everyday
lives I observed and the dissolution of the inner life of
the old mill city.
This could be such a beautiful world
With a wonderful girl...
Why can’t we be brothers?
Protect one another?
No one’s serious,
And it makes me furious,
Another Freddie’s on the corner now...
If you wanna be a junkie, why?
Remember Freddie’s dead...
Why are drugs so seductive? Even the happiest, most
well-balanced person can feel existential loneliness,
even on the happiest day of their life. What do I mean by
existential loneliness? I have always remembered an old
“Star Trek” episode from several years ago
where, an alien in spirit form, came to the earth on some
sort of mission to satisfy his curiosity. He wanted to
inhabit a human body to see what it was like. Somebody on
the Enterprise crew let him enter their body. Once he
found himself inside, he started too weep
uncontrollably.
When he came back out of out the body, he was overcome
with sorrow for human beings: he had not been able to
feel the beauty, mystery and active participation in the
universe. Existential loneliness is the default ground of
people’s being, the place they live inside
themselves which is debased from their natural higher
selves.
It doesn’t matter that this feeling of separateness
and isolation from the universe itself is illusory. The
philosopher Alan Watts says, “In the same way an
apple tree ‘apples,’ the universe ‘peoples’.”
We are indeed active participants and truly
connected, we just can’t feel it. And herein lies
the problem.
Pain is the human condition. We must all- sooner or
later- face separation, sickness, loss of friends and
family, old age, and we all have to die. Philosopher and
guru Ram Dass once said that suffering existed even
inside the Playboy mansion- he had stayed there.
But suffering itself is not nearly as much of a problem
as the lack of meaning that modern people experience in
their lives.
I used to ask some of my old doper friends what heroin
feels like. The answer was inevitably something to do
with heaven. One guy actually told me he felt like “God’s
son.” He had found something to fill his
existential separateness, and he assured me that heroin
does this very well- even better than sex. No
wonder then that people steal from friends and family,
sell their bodies and destroy their lives for it.
If life is sad at times, if we are filled with doubt, or
paralyzed with fear, the way is forward. Viktor Frankyl
addressed the question of meaning after he survived
the Holocaust, during which he experienced the murder of
his family. In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning,”
he used the Holocaust as an existential laboratory to
examine the reactions of people under the most wretched
and brutal conditions imaginable. He told the world that
even under these conditions, some people were
nevertheless able to find a sense of meaning .
The Bible tells us there is nothing new under the sun. In
the old days, heroin and meth were the epedemic. In the
1980’s it was coke. Now it’s heroin and
cocaine, with meth use accelerating. But even the worst
hard-core dopers I knew from the old days- people whose
whole life was getting high- had a fearful respect for
crystal meth. And with good reason. It may be the worst
drug of all.
If you want to see what they saw. If you want to impress
upon your kids the dangers of this drug, go to a website
called “faces of meth.” Here you can show kids
what meth is capable of. Here you can see unretouched
“before and after” photos of beautiful, healthy
girls turned into toothless, wasted hags. Young men in
the prime of their lives that look like starved refugees.
When I gaze at these pictures, I hear Curtis Mayfield’s
lyrics, “If you want to be a junkie, why?”
We all must find our own way home. And there is much to
be learned during our brief visit on this planet. In the
words of Viktor Frankyl, “The door to life opens
outwards.”
Mark Palermo is a professor at Northern Essex Community
College in Haverhill and is the past vice-president of
the faculty union. You can email him at markpalermo@lycos.com.
*Send your questions comments to ValleyPatriot@aol.com
The January 2007 Edition
of the Valley Patriot
The Valley Patriot is a Monthly
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All Contents (C) 2007, Valley Patriot, Inc.
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