2 weeks ago I attended a day long didactic at the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley. The conference was put on by the Evangelical Luther Church of America. The goal of the day was to equip faith communities with resources that might help them minister to returning veterans from the OIF/OEF conflicts abroad. Though I had several beefs with the conference one comment has remained with me. A liaison officer of the U.S. Marine Corps proclaimed loudly, "I refuse to put the D on the end of PTS; it's my way of resisting the stigmatization of what our soldiers come home with."
Today I was riding over to the Menlo Park division of the VA where the National Center for PTSD is located. My colleagues and I were listening to NPR in the car and the radio program was exploring the Pentagon's recent statement that it would not reward the Purple Heart to soldiers with PTS. Several folks (mostly male, though one female journalist voice came through) called in to express opinions. Every person that called in or spoke from the studio talked about the normalcy of PTS in returning combat soldiers and vets. This is a good thing. But when it came to whether or not a soldier experiencing PTS should/could receive the Purple Heart, the line that seemed unquestionable for people had to do with the "physicality" of injury. Let me explain...
There was a recently returned OIF soldier who endured a physical injury while fighting in Falluja and he kept saying, PTS is not a physical injury; it's a mental illness. The Pentagon came from a similar conceptual framework when they likened PTS to a disease, not an enemy-inflicted war wound. Quite brilliantly, one caller said "Yeah but our military specializes in psychological warfare all the time, so how does psychological violence fall outside the jurisdiction of war-inflicted injury?" Indeed.
Further, I'd like to challenge the assumption that PTS falls outside the category of a "physical wound." Anyone who has suffered from PTS knows the condition involves devastating bodily affects. Secondly, trauma impacts several areas of the brain, particularly the amygdala, prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. The brain is a body part, neurotransmitters are somatic phenomena. It appears to me that drawing an arbitrary line between psychological and physical injury hinders our ability to think critically about the way war impacts physiological subjects. It reminds me a lot of the argument running through certain sects of Christianity about whether the flesh or spirit matter more in/to salvation. Well, I ask: where's the line between the two? Watch out for binaries; there's usually an agenda.
The way medical conditions get classified determines, not completely but to a large degree, how those conditions will be responded to culturally and how those conditions will be "helped" in the health care system. We can de-stigmatize PTS all day in magazine articles and talk shows (and unfortunately this is going to happen considering how popular the condition is among returning soldiers), but if the very persons who sent these womyn and men into war classify this condition as a disease or mental illness, the pejorative label still leaves the onus on the troops to advocate for themselves. Do you know what it would mean if the government actually classified PTS as something THEY helped create, instead of something that happens to "certain individuals"?? They'd have to accept responsibility and respond. That means money and an overhaul of social/mental health services. Hard to do when you've just run the economy into the ground, huh? G-d help us...
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
Externalized Access
Cannot contain any resemblance to codes of the past.
Cannot be your name or birthday.
Make sure it's a robust combination of upper case, lower case,
arabic numerals and special characters.
Must be between 8 and 40 characters.
Remember it, faithfully.
Or you're fucked.
So many amalgams to keep track of in this
self-made cyber cyclone:
personal email
work email
blog site
facebook
(occasional) myspace
charting system
personal pc log-on/pw
work pc log-on/pw
I could keep going, but you get the point, because you too,
are locked out of something.
This morning, I cannot remember the username or password
to my Learning Management System (LMS) here
at this federally funded, military motivated place
where war-wounded veterans and silenced, sick male bodies lay
waiting while their wives wait crying in the hallway.
I've forgotten what I'm supposed to remember.
Perhaps this is the greatest learning one can expect
from such a (micro) managed system.
Cannot be your name or birthday.
Make sure it's a robust combination of upper case, lower case,
arabic numerals and special characters.
Must be between 8 and 40 characters.
Remember it, faithfully.
Or you're fucked.
So many amalgams to keep track of in this
self-made cyber cyclone:
personal email
work email
blog site
(occasional) myspace
charting system
personal pc log-on/pw
work pc log-on/pw
I could keep going, but you get the point, because you too,
are locked out of something.
This morning, I cannot remember the username or password
to my Learning Management System (LMS) here
at this federally funded, military motivated place
where war-wounded veterans and silenced, sick male bodies lay
waiting while their wives wait crying in the hallway.
I've forgotten what I'm supposed to remember.
Perhaps this is the greatest learning one can expect
from such a (micro) managed system.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Doing Theology
This is my friend Uk's son, Jayoo. This is my image of G-d for the week. I'm holding it tightly and taking it with me wherever I go.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Too Close?
One of the things I've learned in the last 4 months, while working in a trauma hospital, is the non-utter-ability of present tense pain. Elaine Scarry writes:
"Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned." Yes. And let the record show: her thesis applies to emotional/cultural/psychological pain too. That being, of course, why in November I couldn't write about gay marriage, why the last month I haven't been able to write about my mom, and in the last 4 days I haven't been able to write about Oscar Grant. The too-closeness of it--whether it hooks into my body, my relations, or my home-town--slashes utterance before birth, shuts down communication by cliche-ing each word prior to speech. The formation of language somehow trivializes the experience of pain. This resistance complicates things though because as Merleau-Ponty once claimed, "all lived experience moves towards expression." To stifle the pain, by allowing the wordlessness to freeze over the heart, is sure death. There are forms of expression that do not necessitate idiom. For instance, one can cry out "injustice" or one can mimic the face down, arms spread, back vulnerable position of Oscar Grant to express the genuflection of police-committed manslaughter. You tell me which expressive act carries more weight in the arena of truth-communication? (I'm not arguing for a hierarchy of resistance strategies that pits word and deed against one another. Of course speech is integral to resistance. Just considering...) Tonight, perhaps because I'm not in Oakland, or perhaps because I didn't listen to trauma stories all day at the hospital, I want to write about Oscar Grant. About six months ago I had a classmate point out how unwilling white people are to talk about race and racism. As I look over Facebook tonight and see how many of my white lesbian friends are going to the Velvet Fundraiser for a hate crime against a lesbian and consider how many of them showed up at the protest for Grant's murder--zero--my classmate's words unfold (again) with new vibrancy. I have questions for my people. We care about a rape in Richmond, Palestinians in the streets of Gaza--and we should. Do we care about a cold-blooded, tax-funded murder of a black man in our own neighborhood? Is compassion color coded? Or again, is this a matter of things being too close? Does the white skin I wear make me too close to the cop who pulled that trigger? Is the invasion of Gaza somehow far enough away to warrant a cry that doesn't incriminate my flesh? Are we afraid that we'll have to confront what we share--white supremacy--with that crime and somehow lose our standing as activists absolved from any guilt for anything? On another friend's Facebook page I see a white man saying "Let's hold out judgment until the facts come clear; according to all the reports I've read, he wasn't yet handcuffed." Did he see the damn video? Is it that difficult to believe a white cop shot a young black man in the back just because? I guess so if you're busy trying to avoid the racism that lives and constructs the reality we (unequally) share. I guess so if you don't want to admit that it could have been you holding that gun, feeling that hate, shooting that man with 2 jobs and a 4 year old daughter. (Think racism wasn't a part of that crime? Ponder, for a moment, what Grant's daughter will stumble upon when she begins to question why someone who is supposed to protect and serve--why an officer of the "law"--killed her daddy.) It's hard to admit that what lived and moved in that cop lives and moves in me and my people. And I'll be damned if Oscar Grant's murder doesn't put that shared reality on blast. We share the reality. We share the responsibility. But white supremacy isn't the only thing brought out here. Another question. What makes the shooting of Oscar Grant in the back any different than the kidnapping, holding, stripping, and torturing of Arabs and Muslims by American GI's? These cops and military personnel are officials emboldened by an authority granted by the state. They are invested, with our money and our acquiescence, with weaponry and intent/cause to kill. When you pair these role-based investments of power with a white supremacist cultural ethos that needs racialized-othering and racially-based narrative to sustain itself, there's little wonder that the bodies labeled most "violent" are actually the bodies most likely to have violence perpetrated on them.
"Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned." Yes. And let the record show: her thesis applies to emotional/cultural/psychological pain too. That being, of course, why in November I couldn't write about gay marriage, why the last month I haven't been able to write about my mom, and in the last 4 days I haven't been able to write about Oscar Grant. The too-closeness of it--whether it hooks into my body, my relations, or my home-town--slashes utterance before birth, shuts down communication by cliche-ing each word prior to speech. The formation of language somehow trivializes the experience of pain. This resistance complicates things though because as Merleau-Ponty once claimed, "all lived experience moves towards expression." To stifle the pain, by allowing the wordlessness to freeze over the heart, is sure death. There are forms of expression that do not necessitate idiom. For instance, one can cry out "injustice" or one can mimic the face down, arms spread, back vulnerable position of Oscar Grant to express the genuflection of police-committed manslaughter. You tell me which expressive act carries more weight in the arena of truth-communication? (I'm not arguing for a hierarchy of resistance strategies that pits word and deed against one another. Of course speech is integral to resistance. Just considering...) Tonight, perhaps because I'm not in Oakland, or perhaps because I didn't listen to trauma stories all day at the hospital, I want to write about Oscar Grant. About six months ago I had a classmate point out how unwilling white people are to talk about race and racism. As I look over Facebook tonight and see how many of my white lesbian friends are going to the Velvet Fundraiser for a hate crime against a lesbian and consider how many of them showed up at the protest for Grant's murder--zero--my classmate's words unfold (again) with new vibrancy. I have questions for my people. We care about a rape in Richmond, Palestinians in the streets of Gaza--and we should. Do we care about a cold-blooded, tax-funded murder of a black man in our own neighborhood? Is compassion color coded? Or again, is this a matter of things being too close? Does the white skin I wear make me too close to the cop who pulled that trigger? Is the invasion of Gaza somehow far enough away to warrant a cry that doesn't incriminate my flesh? Are we afraid that we'll have to confront what we share--white supremacy--with that crime and somehow lose our standing as activists absolved from any guilt for anything? On another friend's Facebook page I see a white man saying "Let's hold out judgment until the facts come clear; according to all the reports I've read, he wasn't yet handcuffed." Did he see the damn video? Is it that difficult to believe a white cop shot a young black man in the back just because? I guess so if you're busy trying to avoid the racism that lives and constructs the reality we (unequally) share. I guess so if you don't want to admit that it could have been you holding that gun, feeling that hate, shooting that man with 2 jobs and a 4 year old daughter. (Think racism wasn't a part of that crime? Ponder, for a moment, what Grant's daughter will stumble upon when she begins to question why someone who is supposed to protect and serve--why an officer of the "law"--killed her daddy.) It's hard to admit that what lived and moved in that cop lives and moves in me and my people. And I'll be damned if Oscar Grant's murder doesn't put that shared reality on blast. We share the reality. We share the responsibility. But white supremacy isn't the only thing brought out here. Another question. What makes the shooting of Oscar Grant in the back any different than the kidnapping, holding, stripping, and torturing of Arabs and Muslims by American GI's? These cops and military personnel are officials emboldened by an authority granted by the state. They are invested, with our money and our acquiescence, with weaponry and intent/cause to kill. When you pair these role-based investments of power with a white supremacist cultural ethos that needs racialized-othering and racially-based narrative to sustain itself, there's little wonder that the bodies labeled most "violent" are actually the bodies most likely to have violence perpetrated on them.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
How Many Shoes Need to be Thrown?
The often repeated statement that "one cannot simultaneously support the troops and criticize US foreign policy in general & the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in particular" is false. False: completely arbitrary without any solid evidence to prove its (unsubstantiated) claim. This contrived rhetoric serves to silence the faithful, patriotic voice of dissent.
Having now worked with a generation of Vietnam veterans, I can understand the fear around mistreatment of soldiers. However, most of the same veteran voices mourning their own mistreatment in the 60's, severely critique the senseless violence being perpetrated in the Middle East.
The U.S. wars waged in Afghanistan & Iraq are colonial occupation, period. They have been wrong from day one. This violent destruction continues, in part, because much of the American public remains stuck, not knowing what to say or what to do. I understand that and relate to it on some level. However, we have a new president entering the White House and according to his theory/campaign slogan, it's time for change. (Let us not forget that Obama ran on an anti-war ticket and many of us got him elected for that reason). The exit of U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan should come second only to domestic economic repair--and if we are being totally honest with ourselves, we know the two go hand in hand.
So let the voice of reason and the actions of liberation come back into the public square.
**Comments suggesting concrete resistance strategies--especially from academics and clergy--welcome.
Having now worked with a generation of Vietnam veterans, I can understand the fear around mistreatment of soldiers. However, most of the same veteran voices mourning their own mistreatment in the 60's, severely critique the senseless violence being perpetrated in the Middle East.
The U.S. wars waged in Afghanistan & Iraq are colonial occupation, period. They have been wrong from day one. This violent destruction continues, in part, because much of the American public remains stuck, not knowing what to say or what to do. I understand that and relate to it on some level. However, we have a new president entering the White House and according to his theory/campaign slogan, it's time for change. (Let us not forget that Obama ran on an anti-war ticket and many of us got him elected for that reason). The exit of U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan should come second only to domestic economic repair--and if we are being totally honest with ourselves, we know the two go hand in hand.
So let the voice of reason and the actions of liberation come back into the public square.
**Comments suggesting concrete resistance strategies--especially from academics and clergy--welcome.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Resolution Substitute: Letting Go & Letting In
Hey everyone. Happy New Year! Hope you rang 2009 in with pizazz.
I had the honor of facilitating a group on the Psych Ward this New Years Eve. For the folks currently in that place of treatment, it's a time to "start over" regardless of the holiday season. Many of them talked earlier in the week about sucking at keeping New Years Resolutions, so instead of having the guys write goal-directed lists, I asked them to focus on the things they needed to let go of and the things they needed to let in as means to achieving meaning-full success in their lives. The results were fascinating--and surprisingly similar among the 12 men present.
Wonder if you'd be willing to share with me what you'd like to let go of and what you'd like to let in these days. I, for one, would like to let go of hustle and let in more meditation, let in disciplined budgeting and let go of incessant worrying about money. I'd also like to let go of certain memories from my final semester of seminary that continue to haunt me, while letting in some forgiveness around those events. You?
Maybe you don't care to comment. That's cool. But how about reading this article?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/fashion/01change.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
It's thought-provoking and insightful, not a bad way to begin 2009.
I had the honor of facilitating a group on the Psych Ward this New Years Eve. For the folks currently in that place of treatment, it's a time to "start over" regardless of the holiday season. Many of them talked earlier in the week about sucking at keeping New Years Resolutions, so instead of having the guys write goal-directed lists, I asked them to focus on the things they needed to let go of and the things they needed to let in as means to achieving meaning-full success in their lives. The results were fascinating--and surprisingly similar among the 12 men present.
Wonder if you'd be willing to share with me what you'd like to let go of and what you'd like to let in these days. I, for one, would like to let go of hustle and let in more meditation, let in disciplined budgeting and let go of incessant worrying about money. I'd also like to let go of certain memories from my final semester of seminary that continue to haunt me, while letting in some forgiveness around those events. You?
Maybe you don't care to comment. That's cool. But how about reading this article?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/fashion/01change.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
It's thought-provoking and insightful, not a bad way to begin 2009.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)