The Final Dying of the Dead Gods and Waking to a New Morning:

Responsible Personal Freedom

This is the first poem from The Husbanding of Katharine's Life: A
Series of Poem
Our tree of life was consciousness.
We cut the branch and fell.
Genes revealed the sacred
lust.
My darling it is true,
You cured myself of me
And I cured you of you.
From death's ground we
grew.
Bound to trust, freely,
Love, we came to care.
What matters is the mind
we shared.
As long as truth could
tell,
The god we gathered was us.
Our Love stands for the good of all.
We understood and lived the Fall.
These are the last two poems of the series written about a year after my Other Half,
Katharine, died in 1996:
My love we made
Love to the end.
We brought the death
In your body
To be borne by your
life.
Consciously we
completed
The circuit from you
to me,
And from birth to
death.
*
My love, I find you inside of everyone I ask out.
You gave me your death as your final gift and I will
Continue to open it with the best of my life.
***

The Poet makes and the Philosopher understands. I am fortunate to be both. From
the Love of Wisdom I came to the Wisdom of Love. I grew up through learning to
love another and you can too. It is not easy to grow up be Responsible for your
Freedom and often we seem to only do so through learning the lesson of loss. But
it is entirely possible to become mature ripen into understanding the Human
Condition and, finally, it is absolutely necessary to do so if we are to survive and
thrive as we can do if we so choose.
***
Out grow the ZOMBIES of GODS & GOVERNMENTS!
You do not need them to exist but they need you. Let
them die for they are truly dead. They will go back to
nothing when you become something. Grow up!
Learn to take care of yourself and others too.
PERSONS US! need each other. That is the obvious
but startling truth. As James J. Lynch wrote: Our
common plight is that it is becoming increasingly
difficult to share the most basic of all human truths: that
people desperately need each other, that we really our dependent on one another.
Our magnificently complex and terribly petty obsession with WANTING MONEY has
come with our refusal to recognize what we really, simply NEED is EACH OTHER.
We have allowed our MEANS to become our END and our end ourselves, persons
has become meaningless and mean. We are living beyond our means and meaning
and are drowning in debt. We are dying killing ourselves when we try to live
without that which carries our meaning: our caring for our selves and each other.
Real wealth is productivity: the creation of useful things that
benefit all persons who produce and consume them through
free trade in a free market without the coercive commands of
GOVERNMENTS & GODS those thoroughly UNNECESSARY
EVILS we as immature, adulterated adults have created out of
our LONELY NIGHTMARES (the AMERICAN DREAM we
screamingly awaken from) to hunt and haunt us as the
ZOMBIES we allow to feed on our fears of being
PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE for our FREEDOM.
This is your choice now: grow up into the caring and careful
Human Animal we potentially can be or remain the uncaring
and careless Animal Human we currently, and adolescently, are.
The Race to be Human is won or lost as YOU. Join the Human Race by choosing to
take complete RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR FREEDOM and create a WIN-WIN
WORLD of Free Persons freely trading their creative and created values to achieve
an ever increasingly interdependent, prolific, and peaceful prosperity.
2

JacKath, March 22, 2014

***
Here are a few excerpts from a favorite book, The Broken Heart by
James J. Lynch, published in 1977 that I read in the early 90s:
The reality is that all relationships inevitably will be dissolved and
broken. The ultimate price exacted for commitment to other human
beings rests in the inescapable fact that loss and pain will be
experienced when they are gone...It is a toll that no one can escape,
and a price that everyone will be forced to pay repeatedly. A
prescription to nourish human companionship is, therefore, a
unique type of health tonic. Part of the inescapable human dilemma
is that the same companionship that keeps people healthy can also
seriously threaten their health when it is taken away.
Our society has refined a response to human loneliness that can be described as a
cultural pact of ignorance. We live in a society where King Loneliness has no
clothing, yet, because everyone believes he is the only one who feels lonely, we tell
ourselves that loneliness must be a mirage. Our common plight is that it is becoming
increasingly difficult to share the most basic of all human truths: that people
desperately need each other, that we really are dependent on one another. To need
someone else is viewed as a sign of weakness, a social sin. The free spirit it appears,
should not relate with someone else out of necessity, but only out of choice. To be
unattached and independent of everyone else is, according to this definition, to be
truly free, truly liberated. In this context, loneliness is currently being packaged in
an entirely new wayas the price of freedom.
Since our mass media now continually suggest that it is good to become
independent of other humans, many enthusiastically try to construct a world free of
the tyranny of human bonds. The search for interpersonal freedom and the
resultant loneliness appear in many forms. One of the more fashionable forms to
emerge...is the identity crisis, which involves knowing who you are, doing your
own thing, and doing it your own way. The most important goal is to become a
real person. The search for ones own identity cannot be found with somebody
else; it is a private, solitary, and lonely struggle.
Where then can people seek their identities, if not with other people? That is the
crisis question, and many resolve it by equating their identity with their careers.
There are...far more subtle loneliness traps in our society. Not every lonely person is
trapped by interest in a career, pursuit of independence, or a love-seeking belief
system. Many readily admit that they would give anything if only they could find the
right person...And yet they still find themselves enmeshed in isolation. Part of the
problem is that we have very few formal institutions that deal specifically with
human loneliness. This is a particularly glaring weakness when one considers that
there are formal institutions for practically every other human problem.
3

Dialogue is the essential element of every social interaction, it is the elixir of life.
The wasting away of children, the broken hearts of adults, the proportionately
higher death rates of single, widowed and divorced individualscommon to all
these situations, I believe, is a breakdown in dialogue. The elixir of life somehow
dries up, and without it people begin to wither away and die. Real dialogue is a
process...No material substitute can fill the human need for dialogue. When a child
goos or smiles, it is vitally important that someone elsesomeone alivesay ga
or smile back. Someone must respond. Someone has to care. The dialogue process is
not exclusively in you or in the other person, but rather between people as a
reciprocal, spontaneous, and mutually flowing process. While we are alive,
therefore, what we have to give to each other is at one and the same time the
simplest yet most sublime giftourselves.
Here is a review of a later book by James J. Lynch, A Cry Unheard, published in 2000
that continues the themes of his earlier book quoted above:
We're a lonely society. Twenty-five percent of American
households consist of one person living alone; 50 percent
of American marriages end in divorce (affecting more
than a million children); 30 percent of American births in
1991 were to unmarried women. These factors are
linked to an increased risk of premature death, according
to loneliness specialist James J. Lynch, Ph.D., who has
spent almost four decades clarifying how loneliness
contributes to a marked increased risk of developing
premature coronary heart disease. Mortality rates in the
United States for all causes of death, and not just for heart
disease, are consistently higher for divorced, single, and
widowed individuals of both sexes and all races, writes
Lynch in A Cry Unheard: New Insights into the Medical
Consequences of Loneliness. An important point in this book is that loneliness in
childhood has a significant impact on the incidence of serious disease and
premature death decades later in adulthood. School failure is a major contributor to
this problem. Children who fail in school are socially isolated and deficient in the
language and communications skills that could help them overcome their isolation.
Lynch also explores the links between loneliness and premature death, and
describes the biological power of human dialogue--which, he says, is more intimate
than sexual intercourse, because dialogue involves the heart, not just the body. This
is not a fluffy, feel-good book. There are no quick tips, no instant relief from
loneliness, no do now lists of activities. This book is for readers willing to delve into
the subject of loneliness and health risk. Lynch wants you to understand the
magnitude of the problem, which he presents in a style that is both academic (with
plenty of statistics and graphs) and accessible. He also wants you to understand the
complex solution: contact, companionship, and communication. --Joan Price,
Amazon book review

And here is a synopsis of A Cry Unheard from Kobobooks:

It is one of the most perplexing paradoxes of modern life. As technology
dramatically expands our ways of communicating, loneliness has become one of the
leading causes of premature death in all technologically advanced nations. The
medical toll is made heavier by powerful social forces-school failure, family and
communal disintegration, divorce, the loss of loved ones. And while loneliness, the
lack of human companionship, the absence of face-to-face dialogue, and the
"disembodiment" of human dialogue have all been linked to virtually every major
disease-from cancer to Alzheimer's disease, from tuberculosis to mental illness-the
link is particularly marked in the case of heart disease, the nation's leading killer.
Every year, millions die prematurely, lonely and brokenhearted, no longer able to
communicate with their fellow human being. In our modern-day world, writes
Lynch, telephones talk, and radios talk, and computers talk, and televisions talk, yet
"no-body" is there. Human speech, he asserts, has literally disappeared from its own
biological home-the human heart. He outlines and explains recent medical and
scientific discoveries about school failure, divorce, and living alone, and goes on to
demonstrate how childhood experiences with "toxic talk"-adults' use of language to
hurt, control, and manipulate rather than to reach out and listen-contribute to an
unbearable type of loneliness that, in the end, breaks our hearts ten to forty years
later. Hailed by many of our Nation's leading medical experts as a pioneer and
visionary, as well as THE expert in "affairs of the heart," Dr. Lynch predicts that
"communicative disease will be as major a health threat as communicable disease"
in the new millenium. His path-breaking research-from showing how greatly human
touch affects the hearts of patients in intensive care units (as well as the hearts of
animals in laboratory settings), to his discovery that during even the most ordinary
conversations, blood pressure can rise far more than it does during maximal
physical exercise-are but a few pieces of the fascinating health mosaic he assembles
in this seminal work. With that rare combination of poet and scientist, he describes
in moving terms the "vascular see-saw of all human dialogue." Blood pressure rises
when we speak to others, yet falls below baseline levels whenever we listen to
others, relate to companion animals, or attend to the rest of the natural world. No
wonder Lynch admonishes us that "exercises to improve communicative health"
must be undertaken with the same seriousness and commitment as "exercises on
treadmills to improve physical health." Echoing time-honored Biblical truths and
wisdom, he seeds this landmark book with two ominous observations: that
loneliness is a lethal human poison, and that failure to act as our "brother's keepers"
forces us into communicative exile and premature death. Ultimately, though, he
concludes with optimism. Heartfelt dialogue, writes Lynch, can be, and indeed must
be, the true elixir of modern life.

Interview with James Lynch

James J. Lynch, Ph.D., a psychologist, researcher, and

author, is a pioneer in the field of the health implications of

human loneliness and social isolation. His three books on the topic include The Broken
Heart: The Medical Consequences of Loneliness (1976), The Language of the Heart:
The Human Body in Dialogue (1985) and A Cry Unheard: New Insights into the
Medical Consequences of Loneliness (2000). He has also authored fifteen chapters in
medical textbooks and over 100 articles in peer reviewed medical journals.
What's a common health-related mistake you see your patients or clients
making, and how can they avoid it?
Lynch: The most common mistakes people make is to take their relationships for
granted, and to accept the mechanistic model of disease. Every (heart) patient I see
has just had stents put in, has just had surgery, and the whole model is hydraulic.
When they first see me, they're angry at the cardiologist. Why do they have to see a
shrink? Then when I show them how their blood pressure changes more when they
talk than it did when they were on a treadmill, and how their blood pressure
changes when they listen, they see the logic in it.
So the most common mistakes are to trivialize communication and to trivialize
relationships. I go nuts when I hear people say they've got to save nature, as if all
humans aren't part of nature! We have to save ourselves. So there are very profound
spiritual implications (of not communicating). I won't dance around the issue of
spirituality. I think that's really the most important thing.
***

Growing the Adult Within:

Self-Control as Responsible Personal Freedom
To the extent you choose not to control yourself, someone else, sooner or later,
will. Jack
There is only one political sin: independence; and only one political virtue:
obedience. To put it differently, there is only one offense against authority: selfcontrol; and only one obeisance to it: submission to control by authority. Why is
self-control, autonomy, such a threat to authority? Because the person who controls
himself, who is his own master, has no need for an authority to be his master. This,
then, renders authority unemployed. Thomas Szasz
You can either be treated as an adult, responsible for your behavior; or, you can be
treated as a childmadmancriminalsick, physically or mentally, or badall of
which means, you are not held responsible for your behavior, for controlling
yourselftherefore, others can and WILL control you instead of you doing it for
yourself; and they will usually claim to do it for the Public Good, or for your own
safetybut do it they will.
Ask yourself:

WHY should ANYONEgovernment or gangster (there is a difference?)claim they

can control youfor ANY reason other than that you have physically aggressed
against someone? WHY should you NOT BE FREE to be RESPONSIBLE for your
actions?
WHY should anyone claim to order you around as long as you are not physically
hurting another person or his property?
Is there any JUST CAUSE for ANYONE to assume CONTROL OVER YOU?
The only non-reason a person assumes they can and should control you is that they
justify using MIGHT rather than reasoning RIGHT.
It does NOT matter what end or goal you justify initiating violence to obtain, it is
WRONG, it is IMMORAL, it is MIGHT not MORAL RIGHT.
How will you answer the above questions? Your answers will tell me to what degree
you live a life of Responsible Personal Freedom and allow others to do the same.