America’s (and the world's) ‘learned helplessness’

Jerry Mazza: Take charge, realize your power to respond to challenge, and don’t give up. You will be rewarded with an incalculable pleasure for every obstacle, for every political lie, social miasma, you cut through. You will be your own person, not their couch potato. You will realize what power you have. If I’m sounding too much like Dr. Deepak Chopra, slap me. But do unlearn the helplessness produced from the last eight years or more, or even your entire life, and learn the activist path, the “I can do” path to problem solving: financial, environmental, political, personal, parental, economic, on and on . . .

clipped from onlinejournal.com Wikipedia describes ‘learned helplessness’ as “a psychological condition in which a human being or an animal has learned to act or behave helpless in a particular situation, even when it has the power to change its unpleasant or even harmful circumstance.” Sound familiar? “Learned helplessness theory is the view that clinical depression and related mental illness result from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation (Seligman, 1975).” Does any of that remind you of living in America for the last eight years through various rigged elections, 9/11, the War on Terror, water-boarding, Abu Ghraib, financial philandering, etc.? Raise your hands. If helplessness can be learned, so can activism, personal, social, globally . . . that, too, can be learned. And we can, as the Beatles sang, “Come together.”