‘Roid’ rage
MIAMI – At almost every pharmacy in Miami you can find substances to detect steroids in the blood. They are advertised as a solution for parents who are concerned about their children’s health.
The steroids business is not legal and the federal government is not eager for an increase in health problems, but the culture in which we live promotes steroid use by constantly presenting a muscular masculine figure as ideal, even if the muscles look artificial.
Steroids not only cause sudden hair loss, infertility and irreversible liver damage but also create changes in human behavior. It is not rare for their transitory potency to escape from the gym and explode on the streets in the form of violence.
Although the Greek word “gymnasio” means “a place to be naked,” it is rather on Miami Beach that bodybuilders like to display the effects of steroids. They attract many to a fatal descent into a sick culture that pays exaggerated homage to physical attractiveness.
Plastic surgeons also are denaturalizing the feminine figure, but apparently musclebound women are not popular so artificial “enhancement” is limited to silicone implants.
Logically, firearms, steroids and frustrated individuals do not mix. Some days ago in Hialeah, a Cuban man with employment problems who told his friends that he wanted to go to Cuba “to fight for freedom” started shooting everyone around him.
Apparently, an accumulation of frustrations, mixed with love for firearms and large doses of synthetic hormones in his bloodstream, turned this man into a killing machine that took the lives of six neighbors.
Anabolic steroids can cause paranoia, jealousy, depression and an explosive behavior known as “roid rage.”
If a child plays with overly muscular toy soldiers and then, as a teenager, plays video games that show heroes that look similarly overdeveloped, the normal effect will be that he’ll be unhappy if he doesn’t resemble them in appearance.
From there, it is only one step to consuming steroids without the parents’ knowledge. The responsibility lies, to a great degree, on the local media, which should inform and guide their communities.
The scandals caused by the use of artificial hormones at all levels of society, especially in sports, are very common in South Florida. Although the conservative press does not investigate the economic and social roots of a phenomenon so detrimental to bourgeois morals, it often draws people’s attention to its morbid and sensationalist aspects, leaving the impression that only a few extravagant citizens become addicted to steroids.
In reality, what is spreading deep inside Dade County public schools is an epidemic.
The truth is that there is little to hope in a culture where, from Superman to Batman, the ideal male is an individual hero who struggles alone, aided only by his supernatural musculature.
