Macwriter

Mac kills PC in so many areas. I find that my workflow crashes to a halt when I have to go into the office and use their Windows systems. I hesitated in downloading any Microsoft programs onto my Mac because I don’t like anything about them, how they are organized. Even using Excel, which is still far more substantial than Apple’s Numbers program, I am quick to get in and get out. The one shining Microsoft program out there is Livewriter. It is great. I does everything that a blogger needs and wants. It has two-way communication with accounts and one can write, post, and draw from with ease.

So I am trying out MacJournal. I am hoping that the latest update will address some of the workflow problems that I had. We’ll see. A big problem for me was the lack of tag support. Not that the program doesn’t use tags, it does. But that it doesn’t draw from the list of tags one has already started on an external server. Livewriter does this well. But other programs, not so much. Instead of a seamless work environment I am forced to print out a list of tags and hang it on the wall. This. is. stupid. Either that or I am stupid and I cannot figure out a workaround.

From Lady Liberty to Her Troops

See you over the horizon there

storm clouds trouble skies once fair.

With faith in heart, sword in hand

you carry our prayers to distant lands.

Flanders Field, Montezuma’s Hall,

ever have you answered the call

to defend the weak, protect the small,

extending Justice and Liberty equally for all.

Though these ideals from higher be,

they must be earned, are never free.

The blood of patriots too often spilled

in cold, lonely, and desolate fields.

Yet cast your eyes to this torch held high

a beacon of freedom in the sky

our tribute to you is more than tears

nor huddle we from our fears

but grateful hearts and lives lived free

from purple mountains to shining sea

to you our love on winds shall fly

for country, family, and corps,

Semper Fi.

(March 6, 2003)

Someone had a boyfriend over in Iraq and asked me to write a poem on the spur of the moment.  So with pen and bar napkin I wrote this.

Remembering the cost

It was a drill weekend.  I had four hours of sleep on Thursday night, and for Friday night I did not sleep at all and got fifty minutes in the parking lot before formation Saturday morning.  Come Saturday afternoon I was wasted tired, mentally slow and fuzzy, and not running on all cylinders.

I have two more months on this six year enlistment in the Oregon National Guard.  I am out in May.  Yet for the last two months that I have I will also give a 2 1/2 week period in order to train soldiers in infantry skills.  I’ll do that and then turn my gear in and leave the military.  My life is taking me in another direction.  I’ve given my time, done my tours, and carry the weight with me today.  I am a veteran.  I am forever changed.

Yet there are other costs.  Drill weekend and I was staying in the barracks overnight.  I needed some mundane items, notably a running shirt as I am training to run another marathon.  Though I am very tired I was determined to get a run in before I went to sleep for the night.  I went out to a store in the small town of Monmouth, Oregon, still wearing my uniform.  Immediately upon entering a store I scanned the room for the items I was looking for and turned toward it.  I heard a small voice behind me calling for me.  ”Sir… sir” she said.  I turned to see an elderly woman moving toward me.  She stopped in front of me and asked me if I was in the National Guard.  I told her that I was.  She then asked me if I knew a particular soldier.  I did not recognize the name.  She then told me that he had been killed in Iraq this past summer.  I could tell that she had wanted to somehow relive her grandson’s  memory with someone who knew him.  I could tell she was crestfallen, though she tried to hide it.

I assured her that I was new to the unit and that I might know him if I saw a picture.  She opened her purse and pulled out a collection of pictures and showed them to me.  I told her what a good looking young boy he was in one picture, and what a fine looking man he was in another one.  She told me of his getting hit by a roadside bomb and then she thanked me for being in the guard.  I wanted to reach out and to hug this dear woman, but I would let her move to me if she wanted.  I sensed her fortifications against her emotion.  A hug may be too much and could bring it down.  I offered her my hand, she took it, and I took her’s with both of my hands.  My mind, fuzzy and not working well from lack of sleep, used all it had to focus on this woman’s emotions.  I strained myself as much as I could to make a connection with her and to let her feel that I loved her and that I understood her, that she was not alone.

She thanked me, blessed me as grandmothers do, and turned and walked away.  I turned and stoically walked to a nearby corner of the store, the electronics department, and pretended to look at some uninteresting equipment in the corner.  Inside my heart ached for this woman and her loss and her pain and I cried four brief tears for her before shutting down my emotions.  I was in uniform.

Gods bless the families of our fallen soldiers.  Give them peace.

trauma- masculinity and war

I did some reading from Chapter 3 Disconnection  of the book Trauma and Recovery and had to get up and go out for a walk.  Too much to sit still I had to allow myself some sort of anchor when dealing with the themes of this book. In talking about symptoms of PTSD and veterans of the Vietnam War a study was cited which stated Years after their return form the war, the most symptomatic men were those who had witnessed or participated in abusive violence. (p. 54)

Elsewhere it described a veteran who was very sensitive to unjust actions to others around him.  Whenever he witnessed someone doing some hard to someone else he became very protective.  Consequentially he had also became very pugnacious toward his own family and wanted to die.

The contradictory nature of this man’s relationships is common to traumatized people.  Because of their difficulty in modulating intense anger, survivors oscillate between uncontrolled expressions of rage and intolerance of aggression in any form.  Thus, on the one hand, this man felt compassionate and protective toward others and could not stand the thought of anyone being harmed, while on the other hand, he was explosively angry and irritable toward his family.  His own inconsistency was one of the sources of his torment. (p. 56)

Further on the book states with severe enough traumatic exposure, no person is immune (p. 57).  Earlier in the book was this; the violation of human connection, and consequently the risk of a post-traumatic disorder, is highest of all when the survivor has been not merely a passive witness but also an active participant in violent death or atrocity (p. 54)

Of great interest is that the book cites resiliency in people, roughly 1 in 10 as having an internal locus of control in an adverse environment.  The children studied (and followed for years) showed to be highly social, thoughtful and active coping styles, a strong perception of their abilities, and unusual sociability and a strong sense of being able to communicate with others.  The book cites a study of people lost at sea and who later developed PTSD.  Very low on developing PTSD were survivors that cooperated with other and by contrast those who had dissociated tended to become more symptomatic later.  It also lists “Rambo” types, men who plunged into impulsive isolated action and hat not affiliated with others as becoming highly symptomatic as well. 

The book cites a study of ten Vietnam War veterans who did not develop PTSD in spite of heavy combat exposure.  They were said to have active, task-oriented coping, strong sociability, and internal locus of control.  They also accepted fear in themselves and others but worked to overcome it and avoided giving in to rage.  In the book Deep Survival the survivors were ones who did not expect the world/cosmos/universe/god to rescue them.  But instead took the responsibility onto themselves.  Also, they did not try to fit the world around them to fit their expectations of how the world is, but matched their thinking to the world around them.  The world owes you nothing.  It will eat you in a heartbeat and ants will feast on your flesh while nobody knows what happened to your body.  It is no tragedy in the history of the word that a hiker falls off a cliff and dies.  That is a tragedy in the life of the hiker, the life of friends and family.  But in the world it just is. 

I have a line of thought that I want to investigate.  In the first book there are discussions of rape trauma.  There are also instances of combat trauma that is mixed into the discussion.  From a physicalism perspective I am curious if the features of both are similar in the brain (barring other questions which would naturally come up here philosophically).  But my thinking, as I walked in the park reading this book, was that the act of penis in vagina itself did not cause trauma.  Because rape shares this feature characteristic along with prostitution it has been said by some in arguments against legalizing prostitution that it is akin to rape, in the subjection of the humanity of the individual as a means to an end (that is, a tool).  This same reason against, that one becomes a means to an end, is familiar with anyone who has read The Communist Manifesto as a critique against the Bourgeois use of the working class for their labor.  On a side note I think that Marx hit the nail on the head here, and which socialists today will say, that it is a lie that business says it wishes to creates jobs.  Business wishes to become more efficient (read: cut jobs) and the worker is only as good/useful/worth the labor/manhours that can be sold.  Anyone who’s been downsized at a job should identify with this feeling readily. 

Back to the point, being a tool.  I might say that I’ve met far too many women and friends of mine who have been raped.  I mean this that this occurs far too often.  I also have a lot of love for them and respect for their growth and dealing with their histories and resilience.  It isn’t the physical qualia of the act itself but the context that causes the trauma.  This context has many sides to it, much of which resides in the mind of the person experiencing the trauma.  The mind has many defense mechanism to deal with such trauma (see Peter Levine’s book “Awakening the Tiger. Healing Trauma”.  As mentioned above, there are attitudes and coping styles utilized by people experiencing a trauma that mitigate their developing symptom of PTSD later.  Again, the point here is that simple penis in vagina is not itself conducive to trauma.

There is another form of trauma such as when a person experiences a natural disaster or a plane crash.  My thinking here (I’ve got more reading to do in this area) is that this is something that severely shakes one’s belief in a just world.  The person that develops PTSD in this instance had a view of the world that was most unrealistic, that it could not happen to him/her, that the universe/god/gods/karma/justice/cosmic-fairness would eventually win out and they would come out.  This self serving bias has us believing that “I never thought it could happen to me” and the person might still be in denial while they slowly starve out in the wilderness, expecting a plane to spot them any minute now.  Again, see the book Deep Survival.  Those that are able to muster strength and survive typify a saying that we pagans often say to each other, that the gods help those who help themselves.  Again, see the book reference.

Is combat trauma different in this respect?  There is one side that wonders how a just-god/cosmic-law-of-truth-and-justice/karma could have a war where innocent people die.  While some religious faiths would have us believe that such things as AIDS and cancer and hurricanes are some form of punishment by a vengeful, shallow, petty god against the wicked, while at the same time saying that ‘the lord works in mysterious ways’ when it is pointed out the good people that have suffered by such ‘judgments’ as well.  But still the question lingers, how can a loving-god/cosmic-justice have such evil/hate/violence/destruction/pettiness/pain/strife as is exhibited in war?

This is a problem if one hold the view that order is above chaos as is often the case with many monotheistic religions and New Age religions.  Among many others, indigenous people, Earth-centered, and some pagan views, order is on equal footing with chaos.  Creativity is the partner of destruction.  Neither is ‘above’ the other.  Both are sacred.  Among the Northern Traditions (such as The Eddas) the world was a place of danger and beauty.  One had to be aware of both to be alive.  This same attention to the present is found among combat soldiers in theater.  They are equally aware of the hazards around them, constantly scanning for danger, yet they also savor sunsets and playful children and letters from home. 

But the question that I held in my mind, of which I’ve prepped for five paragraphs, is this: does the act of killing another person bring about trauma to the killer’s mind?  Aside from all contextual issues, of defense or aggression, of necessity or hate, just the bare bones action itself.  Just as penis in vagina does not entail trauma or specialness (a different statement than intimacy, there IS intimacy.  There is also intimacy in domestic violence), does a combat action, such as knife in heart or bullet in head entail trauma to the person perpetuating the action?

It is the case that a number of researchers in psychology are academics.  No big surprise, it takes time in going to college and graduate school to become such.  Yet it also seems the case to me that in the humanist academics, such as psychology, there seems to be a large skewedness to the worth of the individual.  Again, nothing shocking here.  It is easy for us to affirm the worth of the individual and to show care and concern for such.  But in this academic stance of the left liberal humanities it seems a given fact that the taking of another person’s life, just the action of it, creates a trauma/damaging effect upon the perpetrator’s mind.  That the only one’s who do not undergo any transformation are sociopaths.  However, philosophy would have no sacred cows and will question even such a thing as the worth of the individual.  I’ve wavered back and forth on if the act of killing, the action itself aside from context, imparts trauma.  A few hours ago I would have said yes.  A wonderful mind, when I posed my thoughts to her, asked the question of doctors and euthanasia.  Would they feel trauma?  I posed to her the link and she responded with a host of questions suitable for its own entry and thoughts. 

My current belief is that no, just the action of killing does not entail trauma.  However, here is the kicker.  Save for instances of big time dissociation, there can not be no context.  That is, we always have our world-view/social-laws/philosophical-outlooks/spiritual-beliefs on the nature of our identity and the meaning(s) of the cosmos/universe/reality/existence.  This is important. For it is becoming vogue to create war dramas where the soldier/veteran has psychological issues simply from the fact of having been in combat/killed-others.  This message is mixed in easily with pacifist morality.  They are hard to disentangle and to casually tell apart.  Much like right-wing-hate groups and decent church goers, or the Taliban and moderate Muslims.  Recall, it was an Islamic mystic, a sufi named Rumi that gave us such beautiful poems of love. 

In the writings above there are instances of individuals that did go to combat and performed heroically and did not suffer from PTSD.  This is a line of thought that can easily be mistaken or took the wrong way.  Our ‘man culture’ (and by extension our military culture) is very male/domination/aggression/controlling and the way to keep things together, to be a man is to win, control, dominate.  What else is a man but that which is opposite woman (in our limited understanding).  And when you think of women, do the terms nurture, soft, collective, warm, gentle come to mind?  Can a warrior (read: man) exhibit any of these traits?  Is it just testosterone?  Are men just naturally violent?  Or can we shape the context of our movement in this world.  That is, initiate ourselves into different ways of being?  In the book King Warrior Magician Lover  one page says it wonderfully.

We call these phenomena pseudo-events (gang initiations, and possibly some military conscription, and others) for two reasons.  For one thing, with the possible exception of military initiation, these processes, though sometimes highly ritualized (especially within city gangs), more often than not initiate the boy into a kind of masculinity that is skewed, stunted, and false.  It is a patriarchal “manhood”, one that is abusive of others, and often of self.  Sometimes a ritual murder is required of the would-be initiate… But these pseudo-initiations will not produce men, because real men are not wantonly violent or hostile.  Boy psychology… is charged with the struggle for dominance of others, in some form or another… it is sadomasochistic.  Man psychology is always the opposite.  It is nurturing and generative, not wounding and destructive.

How often has it been written that men are nurturing and generative?  This is where we can make a huge impact on future warriors.  It isn’t a war issue, for that is a separate political issue dealing with American interests, empire, consumerism, capitalism, trade, strategic interests, and so on.  For this I would wish for a better informed society that reads, pays attention to the issues (not listen to talking idiots on t.v.) and voted with an informed conscience.  That is, an active citizenry.  Aside from this, it is likely that warriors will still be needed.  We need warriors that can fight.  That means kill.  But this, again, isn’t a warrior issue, it is a man issue.  Some sergeants that I know went on a snatch/grab mission here in Oregon to get an AWOL soldier.  He was a ‘troublemaker’ and without any self direction and control.  His parents were somewhat glad to see the four sergeants on their doorstep to pick up the young man.  They had surrounded the house for possible attempts of fleeing (he did) in order to catch him (they did).  The mother, relieved, lamented to the soldiers “I was hoping that when he joined the Army that you’d make him into a man” to which one of the sergeants quipped “Our job is to train him to be a soldier.  It was YOUR job to make him a man”.  This statement is telling and is at odds with the notion that the military bootcamp is a ritual into manhood.  It is almost.  But it isn’t a ritual into manhood… but into soldierhood.  We are sending still boys who are very good soldiers off into a war where they can survive physically but to survive psychologically they ought to be men before hand.  This is in opposition to the needs of the military that must have eager soldiers ready to kill, to charge up the mountain without hesitancy.  It is easier to get a young 19 year old to accept this as his purpose than it is a 30 year old.  And yet the rates of suicide of soldiers coming back are highest in the 18-25 year old age brackets. 

We, as a society, do not understand what a ‘man’ is supposed to be.  It is alien for us to consider man as having traits of nurturing in its constellation.  We do not consider that perhaps nurturing is a word given to ‘human’ of which man is but one type.  Unknowing of what man is we are also unable to give our boys initiations into any sort of manhood.  Our initiations from boyhood are high school football, prom night and the first time at sex, the first job. 

Feminism has had three waves of philosophy and activism.  Men in this country (and the world) need a wave, a true wave, that grips us.  Not a wave where we try to lessen our masculinity into some watered down version.  But a reimagining of what it means to be man and the roles and responsibilities that this bring with it. 

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Thoughts on masculinity and love of violence

Rethinking Masculinity, 2nd Edition: Philosophical Explorations in Light of Feminism (New Feminist Perspectives Series)

 

I’ve read two essays from this book since I bought it yesterday. One essay, on war and aggression, was okay but patchy and with a rambling quality to it.  Believe me, I know rambling.  Yet another one on violence was a good read but I came away with the same thing that I do many times when exposed to notions of ‘consciousness raising’ in men, and that is exactly how to do it.  There are boatloads of writers, male and female, telling us that men need to have have some consciousness awareness, or probe their emotions, or share their feelings, or any number of other things.  They all are likely to say that it is hard to do, unlikely for many to try, and there is generally a pessimistic quality in their writing.  At least that is how I perceive it. 

It is late and I’ve had a long weekend after a long week with a long week stretching before me.  I am unlikely to uncover gold at this late hour.  Yet I wanted to get some thoughts out of my headspace and onto ‘paper’ before bed lest my thoughts keep me awake longer than I desire. 

One of the things that came up in the article was articulated in the section Anger, Fear and Violence.  This connection cannot be understated and is, I believe, a key component in understanding male violence.  In talking with and listening to many male military veterans from different areas I hear this phrase come up so often as to be something of a religious mantra.  I  was disrespected.  This reason/excuse to propagate violence is the trump card carried by these men.  When all other reasons are systematically shown to be of no importance, the male aggressor will pull out this trump card with all the satisfaction we might imagine a UFO believer on providing an actual UFO complete with living aliens inside it to a reporter.  When we try to tackle the validity of this disrespect as a legitimate reason for violence we often times might as well be talking to a wall.  The male offers such staunch resistance to ANY attempt of investigating the logic behind this statement as to render the conversation deeply frustrating.  Men, who are quick to logically point out emotional failures and beliefs in others (notably ‘non-men’, a category for women, gay men, and men who are not as tough as they ought to be) is ignored when this last defense of violence is questioned.

A paragraph in the essay (Masculinity and Violence, Victor Seidler) is telling:

Masculinity is never something you can feel at ease with.  It is always something that you have to be ready to defend and prove.  You have to prove that you are as much a man as everyone else.  Often this means putting others down, especially girls.  It is because feelings of softness, vulnerability and need are so peculiarly threatening to our very sense of ourselves as men, that we fight them off so strongly, but this can give us an ambiguous relation to our anger, especially if we do not feel the confidence of being able to defend ourselves physically.  I was scared of getting involved in physical fights.  This meant that I could not feel confident in my anger.

In the next section the author opens up with the sentence I did not really want to know that I was angry because this was threatening.  I learned to suppress my angry feelings, but I was constantly aware of the threat of physical violence. The last portion focuses the author’s experience of this on growing up as a ‘thin boy’ in a school where boys will hit each other.  But it says a lot about current male veterans dealing with aggression and anger.  At least it does for me. 

Many times I’ve been supremely annoyed at someone around me.  Whether a rude person at a bookstore, the loud talker/cell phone texter sitting behind me in a movie theater, or any number of inconsequential people that I meet day to day.  I’ve noticed that many people, while irritating the living hell out of me, were beyond my ability to be angry with.  I was angry ‘at’ them (and myself) but not ‘with’ them.  That is, I never confronted them.  In nearly all of the instances I was able to recognize that the incident was of small importance in the universe.  Because of this the nuclear bomb of destruction that I carried within me was not something I could bring out.  I was walking hellfire and fury, strife and death, and the options that I had before me were to seriously injure someone or to let it go.  I had no confidence in my anger.  I knew no other ground (a middle way) though it is true that I’ve been in various fights and easily enough choked out the other person and calmly dragged them out the door.  But this calmness is more alien now.  There was always as a kid the greater fear of being shamed in losing than the actual physical pain.  I think this holds for many men still.  However now many of us carry the shame of losing our control and going over the edge.  It is as though our fear of being shamed has an unholy alliance with our feelings of a love of violence.  I have noticed a quicker pathway to over the top aggression… a love for it that at times troubles me.  I told someone recently try to imagine doing something terrible to people, causing pain and hardship.  She understood and rationalized it but I shook my head, stopping her and telling her to ‘try to imagine doing this and loving doing it. 

If you are someone, male or female, and you cannot understand or feel how one could love hurting another person, you do not fully grasp the problem that lies in understanding masculinity and violence.  You will be selling snake oil and pipe dreams.  It is easy for someone to say ‘just give up the values of the male culture’ or ‘I’m a woman and I’m every bit as competitive and goal driven as men and I abhor war and violence’.  If you do (abhor war), you are not ‘every bit’ as competitive as those that don’t abhor war.

What grander scale of proof is there than war to weigh our masculinities against?  Yet this brings with it an odd paradox.  For while war is (perhaps) the greatest theater of the masculine tragedy of proving one’s manliness, it still exposes the man to the heartbreaks and pain that is found in war.  What experience, what imagery, what tortured landscape of the external war-torn land is mirrored in the landscapes of our hearts!  We, men, are still, after all, human.  And being stunted and confined in how to relate to our own selves, our own bodies, each other, in asking for consolance, for empathy, for understanding, for emotional connection, in being tender with others (all things that are not allowed in our training to be ‘masculine’ as boys and perpetuated later as men in society) we are unable to handle the pains of war.  The only ones who seem (to us masculine men at least) war are the greatest men, the men who have effectively rid themselves of emotion and have become embodied gods of direction, purpose, and action.  It is like learning that to be a better swimmer one could amputee various body parts that are non-essential to swimming.  Likewise, to be a ‘better man’ we amputee parts of our hearts and minds.  Or we try to.  Most of us end up repressing these aspects that then become our shadow.  Jung wrote much on the destructive nature of the shadow self on our lives.  The more we ignore it, the more it pervades everything around us to the point that it becomes, as Jung said, ‘Fate’. 

Earlier I noted that few people offer any real advice on how to get beyond this pessimistic detailing of the masculine ideal.  I am afraid that I am no different.  Save one.  If there is to be any change it must, or can only, come from men.  While courage is not a virtue to be found only in men, it is a virtue that no-one calling himself a man would do without.  It is one of the key identifiers for us in trying to live up to this image.  So in courage I see other men stand up and speak their histories and stories.  I see men come out and say ‘there is another way to voice disagreement over an issue than violence’.  I see men come out and proclaim a gay identity.  Talk about courage!  I see men come out and say, whether they are anti-war activists, or current soldiers ready to fight again, that their experiences were painful and heartbreaking.  What sacrifice, to admit to this pain and yet to selflessly shoulder it again.  Again… talk about courage! 

If courage is something that no ‘self respecting man’ can do without… then it is courage that I call men out on.  To show courage and to stand up and proclaim your frailties and weakness, your hopes and fears, and more.  Tell your friends, your wives, your fellow soldiers, of your weaknesses.  This is supremely hard to do and take a great amount of courage.  As I’ve said to my own therapist MANY times in the past… I would rather fight ten men by myself than address my insecurities with my partner. 

I hope that I can, someday, learn at the levels of the heart the things that I am learning at the levels of my mind.  They both learn and adapt at different speeds.

Spem semper habemus (we always have hope)

Thank you

A couple of days ago I went for a walk in the park.  It was late afternoon and the weather was warm.  Not warm in the sun but actually warm.  I had my binos with me and my prayer beads in my hand.  I was taking my time.  I looked over to the hawk’s nest with my binos and could see one of the adults on the edge of the nest looking down into it.  No visual confirmation of any young.  I’ll keep checking.  I looked for the hooded mergansers, the mourning doves, the red-winged blackbirds, and others.  Nothing.  Although I did hear the beautiful chirp of blackbirds in the distance.

Nearby I heard a wonderful song of a bird and I couldn’t place it.  I scanned the trees in the direction of song and could make no sighting.  I crept up closer, scan, crept closer, scan.  Nothing yet.  The solitary bird was making a lot of song.  I suddenly became self aware and that I was at ease in the world around me.  If I had been asked at any time prior chances are I would not have said that I was anxious or worried about possible threats.  While I do scan my environment, I am aware that I do so and I let it go.  It is as a troublesome thought in meditation… just let it go.  But if you had asked me if I was anxious or anything at all about my environment I would have said no.  The thought of danger lurking in the world around me doesn’t surface in my conscious, waking life.

Yet here I was, happily stalking a chirping bird, and I became aware of my peace in the world around me, of being at ease.  I was overcome with an exhuberent contentment (if that makes any sense) and it felt as though it were the first time (it’s not, but it’s been a long time coming).

I sighted the bird.  It was the common American Robin.  I had not registered such a melodic song as this one sang from this species before.

Taking out my special prayer beads that I made, three groups of three with a darker colored bead seperating each group, all together repeated three times, giving me a total number of beads of 108.  My mantra, as I moved along from bead to bead, was simply “thank you”.  I gave out my gratitude to the gods and goddesses and spirits and ancestors and everything around me.  I gave it to my Self.  I walked along trails, watching and listening for birds, while clicking each bead in due time after a silently held thank you in my heart.

—-

It is a few days later and I have gone to two days of the Western Psychological Conference with two more days to go.  I have been as a kid in a candy store.  So many people and ideas swirling around me.  I have had a wonderful time.  No matter what I’ve sat in on I’ve seen a parallel or connection to something I am reading up on.  With each person I talk to I am jazzed all the more and ideas of further research, more questions to ask, concepts to test, come to my mind and I am giddy from thinking about it all.  Rarely have I been so happy as when I took a break, walked outside into the sunshine and sat in the waterfront park, cup of black coffee in one hand, notes from a lecture in another, with ideas about possible research to formulate in my mind while texting a colleague about them.

Today I sat in on some paper presentations about emotional regulation and its effects on stress and happiness as well as predictors of stress and depression.  Thinking of this and an earlier lecture on descriptive social norms and reciprocity theory, along with earlier lectures on communications between science practicioners and non-profits, I have questions to look at about theoretical connections.  Find the lynchpin.  Find the fulcrum.  And in my mind I can imagine possible interventions of mutal benefit to veterans and their families (and by extension the communities they live in and the state).  I allow myself to fantasize and imagine a future date where the statistics of sucicides in the state veterans population are released and there is a significant drop.  I can almost taste that joy.  It is like a warm blanket that I can wrap myself up in.  What a wonderful dream.  This convention has been wonderful for me because I’ve been able to connect to people in my field.  I’ve talked with brain researchers and social psychologists, cogntive specialists and others and I’ve followed along with them, seen applications of their work in my own, and have seen in the horizons of my mind taking them further to bring health, resiliency, and happiness to the veterans population.  I feel capable in that there is, somewhere within me, a path or a light or a way of finding this, that I can indeed make a difference in the suicide rates.  For the first time I’ve felt like I can look at my brothers in arms in the eye and let them go to war without me, knowing not only that I have a task here on this side of the pond, but that I am up to the challenge and could possibly do it.

My one hope for the coming year… that I am able to actualize the things I am connecting in my mind, the theories, the research, bridging various entities, and that the lives of the veterans in this state are impacted for the better.

Gods guides me

It’s hard not to deploy again

I came home from work and turned on the t.v.  The wonderful movie "We Were Soldiers" was on and I watched part of it before turning it off for some reading in bed with some tea.  I was greatly moved at scenes of the men preparing to go to war and their soaking up the last night home with their wives.  I remember my "last night" in Eugene until the twenty-odd members of the backfill assembled at the National Guard Armory the wee hours of the night.  Though there were only a handful of us arriving with a handful of family, the tension, the fear, the uncertainty was thick in the air.

I wrote in my ‘open letter from a soldier‘ that knowing that my former squad was going back overseas without me felt like "my guts are being ripped out".  I’ve mentioned to a few, here and there, that I respect or love, that I’ve been close to jumping ont he deployment.  I’ve said that should a decent breeze hit me just right I’ll start down that path that’ll put me back in Iraq.  It’d be so easy to back.  It is harder to stay here.  It fucking hurts to stay here.  Whenever I’ve brought it up, even a little, I’ve gotten the same reaction from everyone.  That I have important work here to do, that what I am doing matters, that I have an opportunity to save a greater number of lives.

It doesn’t help.  I know there is a good that I can do here and I can almost taste it.  At times it is like the pieces of the Universe fall together in a way that I’ve not seen, that I am in the right spot to make some sort of difference.  I cannot help but feel that should I focus myself, still myself, hear my center… something, that the momentum would take me, that processes bigger than I am will use me as a force for change and healing.  But while at times I can feel it… like the pressure change before a tornado hits… there are times when I can’t imagine it… like imagining the warmth of the summer sun on a cold winter’s day.

And who is to say that I am that healer?  I’ve done well in my own healing, it is true, but I’ve continued to do disastrously in others.  There are times when I am not the person I want to be and it is as though I view my life from within a thick, glass, sound-proof cage.  On the outside the weeds are growing, the house is in disarray, on the inside I am banging everything I can find against the glass, trying to break it to no avail.

Even now I am teetering on the resolve to stay here.  It would be so easy for me to go with my comrades.  There is no fight that I won’t go with them in, it is my nature to be the protector, the guardian.  It is a core part of who I am.  Yet in Oregon, over the last 72 months we’ve lost 1066 veterans to suicide.  That’s 3.4 per week.  Every other day….  

Oh how I feel the ache in Whitman’s poem… "What good amid these, oh me, oh life?"  Were that it was as easy as facing an enemy charge alone.  Were that it was something out there that I could manuver with, use tactics on, employ weapons against.  But it isn’t.  And what good, amid "the struggle ever renewed" am I?

Oh gods that I could split myself in two and do both.  I am keenly interested in the emotional basis of morality, as being much stronger and far more essential to it’s very existence than our rational intellect.  And what a crushing feeling I have as I sit home as others go out to fight.  While the movie 300 was great in some respects, it did not convey clearly enough the sorrow that must have surely been in the heart of the Spartan that was told the fight and go tell their countrymen what occured.  This guilt is crushing.

I am reading a book of archetypes for men, well done book.  It tells of a side of Ares that is not shown, or brought to light much.  Ares was bloodthirsty in war.  He was pure action and brutal destruction, to be sure.  But in looking that the myths of Ares he is often stirred to action in defense of those he loves, of his family.  If you want more than you can handle… mess with Ares’ family and get ready for a fight.  Its coming.

But Ares is a god of war, and the best warriors are not always rushing to the front.  While I play on XBOX 360 online a game called Bad Company  and, like everyone else, I’ve grabbed and assault rifle and hauled ass forward to the objective to collect the gold, much like the Trojans fighting the Greeks in the Iliad over a fallen warrior’s armor, my kill/death ratio is low.  Too much John Wayne running around without teamwork.  Squad tactics people!  But I switched over to a recon mode, using the sniper rifle to support the assault team, taking their flank and popping enemy as they try to flank my assault element (in essence I out flank the flankers) and my kill/death ratio is much better.  Long tangent, but the point is that I’ll grab a stick and fight with someone in any fight, what would I do really well in right now?  I don’t help the blue team any at all if I am always getting killed, but I am frustrating as hell to the red team as their assault elements keep getting killed from afar as they are trying to maneuver.  

As I think of my strengths and capabilities the heavy weight of guilt subsides.  There is important work for me to do here.  I just need to find my path.  An example of what may be the beginnings of the path was two weeks ago.  I stayed up all night, till five in the morning, working (again, again, again, again) on my powerpoint presentation about PTSD.  I am incorporating more positive and resiliency messages into the presentation.  I got up to go to work after two hours of sleep and worked the first part of the day, then I drove three hours to Bend and arrived in time to set up and present to a large group, at least fifty people, while I was recorded.  Then some of us went out to eat, I had one beer (and it hit me hard!) and talked with great people.  I was sooooo tired.  My body, being worked up and storing energy for the presentation, used all my fuel for the talk.  After my talk it started to shut down.  But food and a beer helped.  I had plenty of offers for places to sleep for the night, it now being close to midnight, and I had orginally planned to get a hotel room.  But I decided to drive back home.  This time I took the windy road through the mountains instead of around them.  That mean snow.  I used the danger element to keep me focused and awake.  It did.  By the time I got home I was very tired and I crashed in the bed for a good long while. But what a day!  I gave a great talk and I am awaiting a copy of the video to be sent to me.  The question now is, what to do with it?  How can I use it to set up more talks?  What else can I do?  I open myself to potentiality, to be an instrument.  

I am calmer now.  I needed to write some things out.  Now I can go to bed and grab some shuteye.  

Virtue

I am ready for the term to be over with.  There are too many things I need to read and think about that I can’t do while school is in session.  

Some thoughts crossed my mind, one of a zillion, while driving to work the other day. Thankfully I have downloaded a new voice memo recording program for my iPhone.

I was thinking of virtue as a philosopher.  Taking a philosophy class again has reminded me, again (I keep forgetting it seems) the benefits of philosophy… that is… questioning.  In this regards I am a philosopher for I am always questioning.   Yet, as of the last couple of weeks, I am in another of my distant phases.  I am away from people, I am disconnected to everything and everybody, and emotionally flat…. well… except for irritation at people on the street that cannot drive.  

I was thinking of Socrates (rather of Plato’s depiction of Socrates) and how he always came upon someone who thought they knew something and, by use of the Socratic method, would be shown to know nothing at all.  I can’t recall the specific lines of thought well enough to impress a professor, yet I do recall Socrates coming upon some military men and asking them what courage was (and, again, showing them they were ignorant).  

The point here, in my mind, wasn’t that I was trying to remember what Socrates said exactly, only that there is this bias within some philosophers that the intellectual, rational understanding of things is of supreme importance.  That is, to truly know what virtue is, or justice, one must be able to define one’s terms.  That is, one must have a philosophy.  

Now, I draw the line here that one’spersonal philosophy must be both sound and valid.  These two requirements are not the same and, sadly, they are lacking in a great many of ‘philosophies’ that are spread around.  Yet this isn’t a post to investigate the faults of individual outlooks on life.  Instead I have a question as to my own (and by extension, others, and by such a means to render help and healing).

As I wrote, philosophers would have our outlook be of sound and valid logic.  We would have our actions defined as just according to a good system of ideas.  It is easy, for a variety of good reasons, why emotion ought to be distrusted in defining what justice is.  That is, justice ought be have qualities and characteristics that allow us to easily define it, or understand it, in a variety of ways that might approximate universality.  What is justice if it is not, at some level, universal?  If our understanding of it is purely at the relativistic, what then is the superordinate drive for it?  Yet can we understand justice universally?  Rather, it might be more meaninful to say, can we apply justice universally?  Or do we apply it specifically?  This is no easy chasm to cross.  It may be, I dare to say, that the problems of Christianity (or some within the sect) to be that they understand justice and mercy as universals but cannot apply  them universally (for when one does one will run into problems) and that by applying them individually they believe that they lose the universality.  Could it be that this is one of the mysteries of their god and that they, as Christians, ought to not try to be universal in application of such values, but instead focus on the individual opportunities?  I’m no bible scholar, but I think he said that he came for the world and that you ought to love your neighbor.  In other words, he’ll take care of the universals and you take care of the individual application.  Of course if this were true it would be antithesis to fundamentalism… and fundamentalism (of all religions) seeks to gain and hold power.  I am anti-fundamentalist.  

Love your neighbor, damn it.

Back to my point.  Suppose that one does approach values as a philosopher.  That is, one has a system of beliefs and if there is shown evidence a point being either not sound or not valid it is redressed and fixed.  However, we are not all philosophers.  Truth is, most people make emotional decisions about something (people, ethical decisions, beliefs, schemas, etc…) at some deep level and this postive/negative affect bubbles upward and it meshes into our thinking. If this thinking in our forebrain doesn’t match the affect we have ‘in our bones’ our brains tweak our thinking.  If the emotional load is enough we’ll jump through hoops intellectually to rationalize our thoughts to align with the emotional feelings coming up.

This is one reason why racism cannot be fought with guilt ads.  It doesn’t adequately address the emotional fears against an out group.  Such in-group, out-group delineations are natural and will occur.  Pretending that they do not will not make them go away.  It can be either IT versus Sales, Blacks vs Whites, Cubs fans versus White Sox fans, or whatever.  Education helps, but it is a more complex issue and playing pattie cake and being politically correct in all things will not help us understand and move past racism, sexism, gender bias, and others.  

Back to my point.  As I said.  I’ve been emotionally distant.  It just isn’t there.  Whatever walls exist within me they are pretty good.  I’ve not even called my family in weeks.  Yet thinking about virtue and such I noticed that what I had to go on, of late, was only philosophy.  That is, only some code of conduct understood by myelf as appropriate behavior (thou shall not punch someone in the face because it isn’t considered nice in polite company, etc…).  In looking at possible behaviors and such the usual gut reactions to things are not there.  There is no guiding hunch that motivates one toward/away from various activities.  In states such as this, it seems to me, it is no wonder that one could get into a wide array of trouble.  If snorting cocaine off of a stripper’s back in a limo on its way to Vegas after calling in sick to work and spending the last money in one’s bank account were to come up… what is to stop someone from doing this their internal feelings of what is right action. Note, this scenario might be appropriate for someone else… but for myself, for a whole host of reasons, it would not be.  Yet in my choosing for it not to be at this moment (supposing there is a limo of strippers outside my door at the moment) would not be because I have some drive of what is right/wrong within me (as is so strong in me at other times, even to the point where I’ll fight the world for my stance) as it is that it would be a cold calculation against a series of ideas and their weights.  For example, I can’t go to Vegas ‘yet’ because I have a final exam coming up (this itself is shoddy and needs a lot of other things to shore it up… it is easily knocked over).  

On to the point.  Part of the culture of warriorhood is justice.  We have it internalized.  Many of us have these feelings, or at least some of them so that we feel a righteous anger against those that violate our norms of justice and virtue.  This is emotion.  If one loses, for whatever reason, the emotional compass by which one navigates ethical decision making, then the only thing left is a great philosophy that is sound and valid.  This philosophy ought to be able to answer any question that comes upon it with ease and satisfaction.

Side note (because it is 2 AM and I ramble at 2 AM).  The story in the Bible about King Solomon who was ‘wise’ and ‘just’ and before him came two women, each with claim to a baby.  The King said that he’d cut the baby in half and give half to each woman, to which one relented, preferring that the baby live, if only with the false mother.  This is touted as an example of the wisdom of the King.  I say that it isn’t  that at all but instead a deeper message of sacrifice of self for the benefit of another.  The mother acted selflessly out of concern for the baby.  We might say, in bible class, that this is an example of the wise king, but it is really a passing along of social values.  King Soloman could have been wise, or lucky.  What if the false mother truly loved the baby as well?  What then?  In the story that is passed down to us we are told that the only one mother seemed to truly love the baby (even us kids could tell at the beginning which mother was the real one).  What if both women, A and B, cried terribly for the baby… sobbing and wrenching their clothing.  How could you tell?  Either King Soloman could tell straight away which woman was the mother and therby needed an excuse to give the baby to the other one that fit the legality of the times, or he was truly a lucky king that didn’t care at all what happened to the baby.  I am inclined to believe the former.  

Back to the point.  Take a veteran of a war and all the things tha s/he has seen.  This would, among other things, rock the notions of BJW to their foundations.  BJW is for Belief in a Just World and is a psychological concept.  If we lose our abilities to navigate virtously according to the feelings within us (that most people use) we must fall back on our philosophies… philosophies that have been damaged, altered, shattered, changed, or at least shifted by what we’ve done, experienced, or have been witness to.  How can one have belief in a universal justice when one has seen children with great lesions across their faces, living in open sewers, and living in an an area where random car bombs blow civilians into pieces the size of marbles, or where one has, in fighting back against an enemy, caused the death of innocents?  

Some people who have their philosophies and like to espouse their values from the comfort of their recliners, bar stools, and couches,  while listening to some idiot on talk radio (Yes, Rush Limbaugh that is you) haven’t had to hold their philosophies up to the test of what some of our veterans have had to do and see.  Can your philosophy of justice stand up to seeing children die by your own hand?  Good fucking luck.  

I don’t know the answer… but I’m working on a path.  Right now I am deep in the jungle myself.  Hell, it wouldn’t take but one stripper, a can of beer, and the nearest town for me to leave right now.  Fortunately, temptation is not around and I continue to plan my demise via final exam.  Yet while I am in this malaise I can ask questions, for I am still a philosopher and I am in that spot that philosophers write of with respect… loss of emotion.  What good can I bring out of this?  

Suicide Epidemic Hits Veterans

Portland Tribune Story from August 2008 tells what has become more and more real.  Listen up.  There may very well be some soldiers out there that don’t buy into the ideas of ‘friction’ or ‘combat stress’ or ‘PTSD’ or even of ‘depression’.  There are many reasons for this; stoic mentality and outlook of the solider, cultural norms and pressures, the uncomfortable nature of dealing with one’s own emotional landscape (easier to ignore it, some believe), and more.  Yet here is the reality… whatever your viewpoint on mental states, soldiers are comitting suicide at alarming levels.  If you are in a position of leadership and you simply thumb your nose at the data, you are failing your troops.    By not taking this seriously you are failing as a leader and aren’t worth your stripes.  Period.

 

Educate yourself on the signs.  Watch your troops.  Don’t take no for an answer.  When we are out on a movement on a hot day, the good NCO doesn’t take "I’m not thirsty sarge" as an excuse for not drinking water.  At least not any NCO I know of.  You  make them drink water (or if you let them pass out you do so with medics nearby so that they can get the pleasure of an IV to learn their lesson).  Why would any competent NCO treat drinking water as more important than suicide risk behavior among his/her troops?  Well, one it is uncomfortable to talk about issues.  How do we do it?  Do you just go up to a troop and say ‘hey, how ya feeling?"  Actually, that’s a start.  You already know your troops (if not, get to know them) and keep close to them.  Learn to read them.  Educate yourself on the warning signs and then wonder what each of the different personalities that are under your leadership would behave like for each sign.  We all show joy, anger, sadness in different ways.  And if you think someone is a risk… keep on them.  Stay close.  Hell, bring them home and make them watch bad movies with you just so they are not alone.  You don’t have to be the world’s best counselor, but you can be a good NCO and take care of them.