Say No to the Voices

A woman was arrested this week after witness’ say they saw her driving her car into the ocean with her kids in the the car; the children begging the strangers for help. After some type of police action and some media commotion, the woman was subdued and arrested.

At the station the police questioned the woman as to why she took the actions she did and all she could say was that she heard voices that were telling her to do so.

Stories every year on people who commit atrocities because a voice told them to do so are becoming all too commonplace in our news rooms. From the woman who claimed that Satan himself was telling her that she had to drown her babies in a tub to the man who went on a shooting spree at a naval yard in DC claiming that the government was penetrating his skull with sound-waves with voices only he could hear and back to the old guy whom was lost by some elderly facility and is described as being “slightly demented and hearing voices”.

I can accept the fact that some people, for whatever the reason may be, hear voices that no one else can hear. Is it a chemical imbalance in the brain? Is it the government messing with certain people’s head? Or is it a more sinister plot by demonic entities to get into a person’s psyche? I can’t presume or assume to know. What I do know, however, is that I never understood people who follow the orders of voices telling them to kill.

Why not say “No, voice in my head! I will not murder people for you!” 

How weak must your mind be in order to give in to a voice? 

To be fair, I can come to the conclusion that we all hear voices in our head. We all have some sort of conscious mechanism that allows us to think and, in my case, the voice in my head sounds very similar to what my own voice sounds like to me. 

In that case then I, too, hear voices in my head. Sometimes the voice tells me to make sandwiches because; hunger. Sometimes the voice in my head tells me “Chill Jonmicol…no need to be angry at the guy who cut you in line at CVS.” 

Sometimes, however, the voice in my head says “You should punch this motherfucker in the neck for being disrespectful!” at which point I say “NO!” to my own voice in my own head. 

All your life you are taught to say no to things. Say no to drugs. Say no to violence. Say no to strangers with puppies and candies in the back of a van. So why don’t these people know to say ‘no’ to the voices in their heads?

TWITTER: @Jonmicol