FEELING PAIN

Physical pain for most young people in the U.S. is not easy to "believe," for the excellent reason that it is no longer present in their lives. Technological anaesthesia fends off almost all explicit physical ordeal. Ether balms a visit to the surgeon's office. Music and carpets quiet and absorb the panic of the pediatric office. The built-in auto air-conditioner refrigerates our minds and cools our bodies as we speed across the desert of New Mexico at sixty-five polite degrees. Terror and longing, in the aftermath of devastation at the loss of someone that we love, are calmed and quieted by a ten-grain capsule (Librium): half-black, half-green. The sharpest pain that many millions of young people in this nation ever undergo is the brief incision of the Novocain needle that arrests all further pain. It is an ideal metaphor. No one wishes to see children placed within a field of needless pain: manufactured sickness, fever, panic, devastation. Yet it is true that lifelong technological insulation-unbroken barriers of self-protection from the taste of terror-do benumb our power to fathom, and our capability to feel. The man or woman who never has known pain is oftentimes incapable of pity. This is the case. above all, when there is an excellent reason to be grateful for the barrier of self-protection. "If I feel nothing," Robert Lifton has observed, "then death is not taking place. . . . If I feel nothing, I cannot be threatened by the death all around me. . . . If I feel nothing, then I am not responsible for you or for your death."