The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

Something occurs to me this Sunday morning. After witnessing the selfish and hateful responses to the U.S. Supreme Court decision on the health care law, it appears there are 10 signs that American society has reached the first stages of collective Alzheimer’s disease.

As educated readers will recognize, this is an extrapolation of an individual psychological condition to a larger social problem, a new field of enquiry for which I have a particular and specialized interest. I am watching on a daily basis a person who is undergoing a transformation to individual Alzheimer’s, and I am watching as this society seems to come apart at the seams in a similar way.

Here are the 10 warning signs of Alzheimer’s on the personal and societal level.

The first sign of Alzheimer’s is memory loss that disrupts daily life. According to the medical literature, this applies to a patient forgetting recently learned information, important dates or events, asking for the same information over and over, and increasingly needing to rely on memory aides such as reminder notes, electronic devices or family members for things they used to handle on their own.

As a society, we seem to have no collective memory even about events that just recently happened in the news, and this even seems to apply to the mainstream print and broadcast news media itself. With the Web and the Internet, we can quickly conduct a little Google research and provide links to background information related to an ongoing story and act as a memory aide — at least for those who will get online and take advantage of it.

But it is becoming increasingly clear that social networking programs such as Facebook, while they could be used to help people remember, are often just used for people to say incredibly ignorant things in the comments as fast as they can type and before they think about an issue long enough to remember how it relates to what has happened in the past and put it into context of the big picture.

As I previously reported, scientists are already researching whether social networking is bad for us.

The second warning sign of Alzheimer’s involves challenges in planning or solving problems. Some people may experience changes in their ability to develop and follow a plan or work with numbers, have trouble following a familiar recipe or keeping track of monthly bills. They may have difficulty concentrating and take much longer to do things than they did before.

We literally seem to have nearly completely lost our collective ability to plan and solve problems. Individuals in our society constantly seize on one number they can relate to, like how much their health care insurance costs them, but they don’t seem to have the ability to grasp how much rising health care prices have been costing us all and relate that to how much it costs them. They don’t want to face the fact that there must be a government plan, because the private markets’ only plan is to make a profit.

The insurance companies are not going to get together and figure out how to reduce the cost of health care or how to cover the 50 million uninsured people in this country who are a burden to the entire system. The corporations only care about quarterly profits. We don’t seem to have the collective ability to concentrate for any length of time on one pressing problem, so the debate drags out for decades and nothing gets done.

The third warning sign of Alzheimer’s involves difficulty completing familiar tasks at home, at work or at leisure. People with Alzheimer’s often find it hard to complete daily tasks like driving to a familiar location, managing a budget or remembering the rules of a favorite game.

We have certainly lost our ability to deal with a budget. Just look at the national debt and deficit. Individuals who want to believe that the problem is caused by Democrats blame President Obama, while individuals who want to blame the Republicans blame President Bush.

No matter what side you are on in the social wars between Republicans and Democrats, there is one fact we should all be able to agree upon, but we can’t for partisan reasons. When Bill Clinton left office, we had a national budget surplus, but it took all eight years of his presidency and a booming economy fueled by the computer revolution and rising productivity to do it.

The laissez faire policies of the Bush regime destroyed that. This insane idea that all it takes to fix the economy is deregulation and to let corporations do anything they want without having to pay taxes is clearly a disastrous way to go, and many of the European countries are now realizing an economic reality that economists have known for decades — the government is the inevitable lender and spender of last resort, and only government spending to stimulate the economy will reverse a Great Recession like the one caused by the Bush administration.

Anybody who is still arguing the opposite of that might want to check themselves into the hospital and see if they can get on the Alzheimer’s drug. If you have relatives who continue to spout this nonsense, get them to a clinic quickly. They are infecting all of our abilities to solve our economic problems as a nation.

The fourth warming sign of Alzheimer’s involves confusion with time or place. People with Alzheimer’s can lose track of dates, seasons and the passage of time. They may have trouble understanding something if it is not happening immediately. Sometimes they may forget where they are or how they got there.

The people who voted for Rick Santorum in the Republican primary earlier this year might want to get themselves checked out. Somehow they think we can all back in time to the 1920s, or even further back to before the American Revolution. They have clearly either forgotten how we got to be a modern democratic republic — or they never learned in the first place.

The fifth warning sign of Alzheimer’s involves trouble understanding visual images and spatial relationships. For some people, having vision problems is a sign of Alzheimer’s. They may have difficulty reading, judging distance and determining color or contrast, which may cause problems with driving.

Social networking may be exacerbating this problem in our society. Social scientists are documenting a trend toward less reading by people on a mass scale.

The sixth warning sign of Alzheimer’s involves new problems with words in speaking or writing. People with Alzheimer’s may have trouble following or joining a conversation, stop in the middle of a conversation and have no idea how to continue, or repeat themselves over and over. They may struggle with vocabulary, have problems finding the right word or call things by the wrong name.

Hello. Have you seen the comments on some blogs and Facebook lately? It’s the same nonsense over, and over, and over again. Same on talk radio and cable television. Would somebody hit the pause button and get these people some facts?

The seventh warning sign of Alzheimer’s involves misplacing things and losing the ability to retrace steps. A person with Alzheimer’s disease may put things in unusual places. They may lose things and be unable to go back over their steps to find them again. Sometimes, they may accuse others of stealing. This may occur more frequently over time.

I am seeing more and more of this in the person I am watching on a daily basis, and I am seeing it on the societal level as well. Christian Republicans, especially, seem unable to see the forest for the trees and want to put people in jail who disagree with their uninformed views about how things should work. This is especially true of tea party Republicans in Alabama, who literally think all Mexicans and blacks belong in jail.

This also seems true for the local news media who they rely upon for information, so perhaps the people themselves should not be blamed entirely. But it does seem to be increasingly true that these people can’t even remember the teachings of their own savior, who stood up for the sick and the poor.

The eighth warning sign of Alzheimer’s involves decreased judgment or poor judgment. People with Alzheimer’s may experience changes in judgment or decision-making. For example, they may use poor judgment when dealing with money, giving large amounts to telemarketers, especially televangelists. They may pay less attention to grooming or keeping themselves clean, in spite of the old cliche, “cleanliness is next to godliness.”

What makes more sense to solve a budget problem to you? Giving your money to a church? Or maybe starting a state lottery to fund higher education? The churches don’t pay taxes, but maybe some of them should. If they want to engage in political activities on behalf of the Republican Party, maybe they should give up their tax exempt status. It’s obvious no politician, Republican or Democrat, will ever have the guts to tackle this major problem in our society. Maybe churches should do this voluntarily?

The ninth warning sign of Alzheimer’s involves withdrawal from work or social activities. A person with Alzheimer’s may start to remove themselves from hobbies, social activities, work projects or sports, for example. They may have trouble keeping up with a favorite sports team or remembering how to complete a favorite hobby. They may also avoid being social because of the changes they have experienced.

While many people in my home state obsess over sports to the exclusion of almost all other forms of news, they appear to be increasingly removed from public political activities and a majority of them will not use this new technology to try to inform themselves on the facts.

While 43 percent of the U.S. population is now signed up for Facebook, for example, only 33 percent of people in Alabama are on Facebook. And a large percentage of those who are online simply parrot what they hear on talk radio and cable television in blog and Facebook comments and seem totally unable to think for themselves. Is this possibly a sign of disease?

The 10th warning sign of Alzheimer’s involves changes in mood and personality. People with Alzheimer’s often become confused, suspicious, depressed, anxious or fearful. They may be easily upset with friends, for example, even Facebook friends.

Hello. Are you not seeing many of your friends become confused, suspicious, depressed and fearful? Maybe we can trace ours back to September 11, 2001, but for a variety of reasons, we now live in a society that suffers many of these symptoms.

I have no cure to prescribe today, but as with any malady, psychological or sociological, recognition of a problem is the first step in trying to come up with a solution.

Like Huey Lewis sang, maybe we need a new drug, one that won’t make us sick or cost too much, one that does what it should.

In the absence of that, we just need better information and a way to get it into the most peoples’ hands. If they won’t take the medicine, there is not much we can do about that. But at least we tried.

© 2012, Glynn Wilson. All rights reserved.