Silent Treatment.

You probably don't read obituaries.

Most people don't.

Many people mock me for reading them. 

Somehow they find the practice morbid.

But obituaries aren't about death. 

They are studies of lives. 

And if the obituary has made a prominent national or international newspaper, there's a good chance the subject of the obituary has led a life we can learn from.

As Alexander Pope wrote almost three-hundred years ago in his "Essay on Man" [meaning mankind, not the gender, so spare me and Mr. Pope the rebuke] "The proper study of mankind is man." ie focus on self-knowledge and understanding of human nature. The ad industry, the Spirit Airlines of it that remains, would do well to have remembered that. The remnants however are too interested in algorithms, trends and awards.

All that is a prelude to an obituary my wife sent me last night at 2:16 AM. Like me, L is afflicted also by Dame Insomnia. She fought it last night, as she often does, by reading the approximately eleven-percent of the New York Times that's not about recipes, Hollywood gossip, or myriad other banalities of, at most, transitory consequence.

The subject of the obituary was Semyon Gluzman, a psychiatrist who refused to abide the lies of the Soviet states and declare people who disagree with the state or speak out against the state "insane." You can read the short piece here. 

Here's a small portion--a lemon-zest of flavor that I hope whets your curiosity--if curiosity itself hasn't been homogenized out of you.

When police arrived at Gluzman's Kyiv apartment in 1972 to arrest him, the Times writes, "Officially, he was charged with spreading 'anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.' But his real crime, the one officials did not want publicized, was questioning the Soviet Union’s widespread use of psychiatry as a tool of oppression — and being the first doctor to do so.

One hundred and a handful of years earlier, another dissident against the prevailing power of the day, Abraham Lincoln said, "To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men." That quotation was on a poster in my high-school library. I remember it from about 1972, when I read in the library instead of going to class, the same time Gluzman was first arrested.

The phrase that pays in the obituary is just eleven words long. “Psychiatry is a branch of medicine and not of penal law.” This seemingly reasonable stance earned him seven years of hard labor and three years of exile in Siberia.

As amerika's current felon-in-chief calls "democrats crazy," and says "they are destroying our country," [see three-minute excerpt from the felon's state of the union here] we as humans--and I assume my readers are still functioning humans--would do well to remember how dominant powers demonize not just dissent but anything different. Ad absurdam (which is really ad realitum) those protesting ice-incursions into amerika's cities were called "domestic terrorists." Many were imprisoned. Some were killed. 

We see dissent labelled as "deranged," "unpatriotic," and "insane" from almost every precinct of the current criminal power structure.

Of course, there's a larger point here. 

At least I hope there is.

In any oligarchy--where control of power is held by a few giant entities that often work together to enforce the dominant complacency--raising a hand and saying "why," is a behavior to be squashed.

From the trillions of dollars of AI hype we're being fed, to ballrooms being crammed down the tax-payers' wallets, to businesses and agency holding companies that eliminate staff and replace them almost-wholly with easier to over-power freelancers, those who bark are treated like dogs.

Years ago I learned something.

Any bad behavior at work was ok and tolerated but one. Once you're labeled "hard to work with," your career is over.

That's why, like Gluzman, we have to keep our voices. Even if they're nothing more than a blog no one reads.

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BTW, the Times' obituary, mentioned a 22-page manual, Gluzman co-wrote while imprisoned on "how to avoid being declared mentally ill during an interrogation by a Soviet psychiatrist." I found it online. It's pasted below.

At the very least, show up 77-seconds late to your next zoom and read page one here: