On your last one, I have a lot of personal friend level experience of seeing how differently things work in the US as opposed to the UK and Canada. I always think about two friends of mine, both people with severe ADHD, to the point where it interferes with their ability to work and earn money, both of an age where they couldn't get treated until well into adulthood, both men, both fans. The British one could in the late eighties and throughout the nineties survive on welfare and his parents occasional help. The US one couldn't, and was reduced to borrowing from friends and in the end abusing their kindness. The ability to get medicated came along at the turn of the century, and the UK one got ritalin, did a Masters and PhD and is now a productive member of society. Also, he still has all his friends. (He got loans for the degrees -- he was starting from zero, not from debt.) The US one bounces from medicated to unmedicated with available money and is so far in the debt hole he can't imagine seeing out of it. He has also lost a lot of friends, because he's like they type example of how to wear out your welcome.
I think there's this thing where we are trying to live our lives and our lives naturally fall into those village patterns of trust, rather than monetary patterns, and yet we're doing it within the wider structure of society and expectations, and the wider structure affects what's possible to us.
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Date: 2012-08-26 12:10 pm (UTC)On your last one, I have a lot of personal friend level experience of seeing how differently things work in the US as opposed to the UK and Canada. I always think about two friends of mine, both people with severe ADHD, to the point where it interferes with their ability to work and earn money, both of an age where they couldn't get treated until well into adulthood, both men, both fans. The British one could in the late eighties and throughout the nineties survive on welfare and his parents occasional help. The US one couldn't, and was reduced to borrowing from friends and in the end abusing their kindness. The ability to get medicated came along at the turn of the century, and the UK one got ritalin, did a Masters and PhD and is now a productive member of society. Also, he still has all his friends. (He got loans for the degrees -- he was starting from zero, not from debt.) The US one bounces from medicated to unmedicated with available money and is so far in the debt hole he can't imagine seeing out of it. He has also lost a lot of friends, because he's like they type example of how to wear out your welcome.
I think there's this thing where we are trying to live our lives and our lives naturally fall into those village patterns of trust, rather than monetary patterns, and yet we're doing it within the wider structure of society and expectations, and the wider structure affects what's possible to us.