What I Know about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) – Part I

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I have it.  That’s the first thing I know about it.  Or more accurately, I live with it. 

And I’m constantly discovering a new way in which I’m suffering from it—like peeling layers from an onion.  But today, I know that suffering from it is strictly optional, and when my denial bubble pops on a new level of my PTSD dysfunction, I’ve got a process that works for letting go of it. 

How’s that for a string of psychobabble?  I mean every word of it.

PTSD is a strange, scary, subtle critter.
In a strange way, I’m quite lucky.  I’m an only child, and when I was three years old, I had a specific event that taught me with profound certainty that my parents not only were not safe, but were potentially dangerous despite their very best intentions.  From that moment, I was on my own.

I use the word “lucky” because I’m convinced that an overwhelming majority of Americans born after WWI, or maybe WWII at the very latest, live with and suffer from various degrees and permutations of PTSD, without the slightest clue why they feel that something’s missing or not quite right, no matter how good their lives are otherwise.  Their life-long trauma comes from the disparity between the cultural norms of the time and the reality they see around themselves in their everyday lives and relationships—forever begging the eternal question “Has the whole world gone crazy, or is it just me?”

My other double-edged advantage besides having a specific event that gave me a handle on thinking about the whole trauma thing came in the form of my parents themselves. 

Don’t get me wrong.  My parents were amazing people, but they were products of the times and culture in which they were formed.  Mom was from Gibson City/Paxton, Illinois, and Dad grew up in Griggsville.  The small town factor alone added at least one full generation to the gap between us.  Add to that  that they were 40 when I was born, and you have two generations between them and the parents of my peers, and three generations between my parents and me. 

We are all formed by the cultural norms or “common wisdom” of our childhood, and when your parents were formed in a reality that is not the normal one generation past, but three generations from the day’s reality, the answer to the “is it them or me?” question is a lot easier to see and believe.

In my lifetime, there has been no period of time when the distance between conventional wisdom and reality has been greater nor more traumatic for a forming human being than the formative years of the baby boomers and generation X.  If you don’t get what I’m talking about, here’s an example:

The world in which I was forming was a very progressive world compared to most of the rest of Springfield and 1940s-50s America.  My parents and their friends and associates were well educated, enlightened intellectuals who read and traveled and were pacifists and rejected materialism and classism and stood up for civil rights and civil liberties, and were unafraid of the unknown and unfamiliar—and yet, formed by the conventional wisdom of their childhoods, they carried all sorts of erroneous nonsense from their past in their innocent hearts:  from a long list of racial stereotypes applicable to all coloreds except their colored friends—and the same for homosexuals and Jews and to a lesser extent women—to another lengthy list of what constituted morality that, although most of them were various forms of atheists and agnostics, drew heavily on the conventional taboos of conventional Christian orthodoxy and dogma.  And don’t forget that these peaceniks, including one of the original founders of the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom, defended our involvement in Vietnam and the domino theory until mid-Nixon!  Their hypocrisy was obvious to my young mind, and it seriously pissed me off.

Most of my peers didn’t have even that little bit of affirmation at home to question authority and the tyranny of conventional wisdom to help them process the enormous gap that existed in the 1950s U.S. A. between the way it was spozed to be and reality!  Traumatic?  You bet your sweet ass!  Hippy?  Revolution?  Question authority? Visualize world peace (or whirled peas)?  Inevitable!  I think this is why the boomers are the first generation to really begin to get a handle on PTSD and begin to understand how it works and how to live with it comfortably, with a minimum of suffering.

Back to that suffering thing (and PTSD)
I sometimes get a kick out of responding to polls from Harris Online and ERewards.  Who doesn’t  enjoy telling a stranger what you think about the world?  Plus, they give you points which every once in a while can be exchanged for something worth having if somebody gave it to you for free.  Also every once in a while, the sponsor of that day’s poll will be a drug company with a new product. 

When that happens, the first set of questions after age and gender usually asks you what diseases you “suffer from,” and I always wish there were a place for me to explain that while I live with diabetes and ADD and a tendency toward hypertension and high cholesterol and depression and anxiety, I sure as hell don’t suffer from any of them.  This is the 21st Century, and these are all conditions with which a person with a little money and/or insurance can live quite comfortably.

Thanks to a new generation of research and picking away at the whole idea of PTSD, led by the boomers—many of whom themselves live with it, PTSD is also slowly but surely creeping its way onto the list of conditions one can live with quite comfortably and contentedly.

So just what is PTSD?
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is one of those psycho-medical terms that means exactly what it says.  It was first addressed by the modern medical community during WWI when allied soldiers were returning from the horrors of that war with a condition that came to be known as “shell shock.”  Today stress is the number one killer in American culture, and post-traumatic stress is a chronic stress that one experiences after an especially powerful or prolonged trauma which at the very least undermines one’s sense of safety, well being, and the ability to trust and/or control one’s own environment.

People with PTSD tend to be intense, hypervigilant, easily startled, perfectionistic, demanding, unforgiving, rigid, anxious, possess a low tolerance for ambiguity, etc., or they may demonstrate an exaggerated opposite of any or all of those characteristics.

They often have varying degrees of tendencies toward at least alcoholism/addiction, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, attention deficit/hyperactivity, and/or a variety of phobias and neuroses.  They live with a lurking fear that somewhere deep inside lives the truth that it’s really them against the world and they are somehow inadequate to that challenge.

More to come:
Part II, A Personal Journey About Healing
Part III, Taking the Whole Thing Macro

Let’s Call Bullshit on the “War on Terror”

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us-homeland-security-seal-plaque_m-747261 George W. Bush’s absurd “War on Terror” (WOT) is arguably the third or second (time will tell) largest scam ever pulled on the American people in the brief history of this wonderful and gigantic nation.  It’s time to put a stop to it.

Terror is a powerfully strong fear reaction to sudden, unexpected, life-threatening circumstances—an emotion, in other words.

Terror is what drove America’s wild over-reaction to to the bombing of the World Trade Center and led to the “Patriot Act” and the decimation of the Constitution and civil liberties and the balance of powers—and ultimately is playing a huge role in the falling apart of our System—financial and political.

Some guys from the Middle East stole some planes and provided the event.  America, led by cheerleaders from the already-on-the-verge right, provided the terror.  In Spades!

Khalil BendibHow fortunate that this occurred at a time when the previous excuse for the government to take all our tax dollars and give them  to the war profiteers, The Cold War, was seriously losing its punch.  And wasn’t it cool that good old Uncle Dick, was there to mentor his friend the President and take advantage of his simplistic world view and need to show Daddy, and to guide him into declaring war on an emotion! 

Better ‘n the Cold War on account of there’s no foreseeable end.  Ever!!!  And Cheney and his Warbux cronies declared free champagne and caviar in the Winners’ Circle Clubhouse, and the party’s still going strong.

Back in 2008, candidate Obama sent me a letter in response to my comments about retroactive telecom immunity and presidential abuse of power (he was my Senator) in which he explained that because of the superamazinggeewhiz importance of the WOT to our nation’s security and our children’s futures, we must be careful in reprimanding the excesses of [the obviously deranged] Mr. Bush, that we not tie the hands of a future [fabulously sane and upright Democratic] president—or something very much to that effect.

(That letter, incidentally is the reason I am careful to explain to friends that I did not vote for Obama in 2008.  It was only a matter of his name being next to the box the checking of which would be my best bet for voting No Effing Way McCain/Palin!)

And that’s the problem in a nutshell:  The President of the United States (and who knows how many members of Congress) believes that sending our young men and women to fight and kill and be killed in a foreign country is an effective way to fight an emotion!

If you want to “fight” terror, Mr. President, here’s how to do it:

  1. tsa_profiling Declare the WOT bogus and, as they say, walk the response to it all the way back.  That’s “all”, which means absolutely everything from “enemy combatants” because you say so, to the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA—and even governmental use of the word “homeland.” And “back”, which means gone, repealed, dismantled, erased from existence.
  2. Bring the troops home.  Now.  All of them.  Tell the Afghans and Pakistanis and Iraqis that if they’d like our non-military assistance in getting their acts together, we’ll be happy to sit down and explore ways that we can do that, but no assistance will involve the American military participation in combat or in aiding or assisting in combat.
  3. Open a national dialog on the subject of fear.  You’re a tremendous communicator.  It’s what you’re famous for, so do it.  For 65 years, the oligarchy that owns America (the people George Carlin referred to as our Owners) have used fear to reinforce their ownership and keep the money flowing from our hands into their pockets.  Let’s talk about that.  Let’s talk about how it happened and make an honest appraisal of where we are today as a result of that fear.  People fear what they don’t understand.  Let’s talk about it until we do understand.  And then let’s talk some more about what we can do to to set the country on a path to a real recovery—not just financial (although jobs would be a good place to start), but a recovery of national unity and spirit.
  4. Appoint a nonpartisan, professional-politician-free commission to examine the actions of the Bush administration and arm it with a special prosecutor to pursue prosecutions where applicable.  That particular past is one that we cannot afford to turn the page on.  Horrible crimes against humanity and against the US Constitution were committed in the name of “national security” and deregulation by the last administration (too many of which are being continued by yours) to simply turn the page and move on.  The Bush years presented America with an open wound which cannot be healed by the application of a Band-Aid.  It has infected the body politic and it will continue to fester under the surface until either it is excised in the light of day or its poisons take over our national bloodstream—unto death.
  5. Lead.  So far, your “economic recovery” has had very little to do with our economic recovery.  Wall Street is thriving(?).  Main Street, not so much.  Candidate Obama had some potentially very worthwhile ideas about turning things around:  a national jobs corps, investment in infrastructure, small business investment and support, reinventing mass transit, restoring real regulation to the financial industry,  investing heavily in education—mostly ideas that might have provided jobs and opportunities for real people.  Unfortunately, we’ll never know whether they would have worked or not, because when candidate Obama became President Obama, the first thing you did was sit down with the Republicans (who, in case you have forgotten, lost the 2008 election, big time) and present your proposals to them.  And when they said, “No, we wouldn’t like it if you did that.”, instead of taking names and kicking ass—going on TV and calling them out, saying “America, you elected me to fix this mess.  Here are the people who are now standing in the way of doing that.  Please replace them with people who are interested in fixing the mess we are in”, you responded to their “No” with an “Oh, OK.  What would you like me to do?”

A very incomplete list, to be sure, but I can’t help but believe that it would be a good start on getting our nation back on track.

Feel free to discuss, add your own items to the list, or argue against it in Comments.

Let’s Privatize Social Security Now

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sscards The libertarian right is all for privatizing Social Security and making it optional.  On the face of it, it’s an idea I could get behind in a big way. 

Of course, when talking about America and Social Security, you’ve got to begin by defining your terms. 

In the rest of the world “social security” (capitalized or not) refers to all government programs for the common welfare, from medical care to free public education, to unemployment insurance and retirement pension and all the way through to death benefits. 

In the United States, “Social Security” means the self- and employer-funded retirement fund that pays money for Grandma and Gramps to live on, and funds Medicare so they can have at least basic medical care as they age and need it more.

While privatizing using the American definition would undoubtedly please the libertarians no end, I can’t help but think that going with the world definition would send them into (quiet, restrained, lady- and gentleman-like) orgasms of delight. 

I say let’s make their wildest dreams come true and privatize the whole thing and make it all optional.

Let’s spin off not just Social Security/Medicare, but also health, education, and welfare into private, not-for-profit cooperatives, governed by a board of directors elected by and responsible to the membership at large and prohibited from making any speculative use of funds.  Then let’s make participation optional.

For the time being, the IRS will serve as the the collecting agency for the voluntary taxes paid by those who opt in.  We’ll see how that goes.  But that will be the only role of any Federal agency in the operation of the coop(s).

Rather than Congress dictating the budget and how the money is spent, those decisions will be made cooperatively, with Anything Really Important (including the “tax” rate) determined by a vote of the membership.

Lots of details to work out, but as I said, on the face of it, it looks damned good to me.

As for those who opt out?  Give them a check for what they’ve paid into Social Security to date, minus any benefits they’ve received.  Let them make their own decisions regarding providing for themselves and their families.  And to remove any punitive aspects from the decision making process, allow anyone outside a coop to buy (back) into it for the equivalent of  back taxes.  I’m sure that some libertarian entrepreneur will set up a private insurance company to protect against that eventuality. 

This plan achieves two very desirable goals:  1) It takes control of essential human services away from a Congress which over the last two years has demonstrated that it’s incapable even of tying its own shoes, and 2) It takes the money to run those services out of the U.S. Treasury, so that when our government ceases to function, there’s at least a chance that those services might continue.

Feel free to discuss.  I say we go for it.

Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

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UPDATED BELOW

The American Civil War was about a whole lot more than slavery.  Civil_War

While the issue of slavery provided strong motivation for both the North and the South in the war of southern secession, at stake was what kind of nation the United States would be.

The northern industrialists wanted the entire “American” portion of the North American Continent to be one country in which Important Decisions were made for the whole country by one central (Federal) government composed of  representatives from each state. (Top Down)

The southern agriculturists wanted independence from America in order to form their own country in which Important Decisions would be made on the local (state) level, with a central  government whose authority required a unanimous agreement of all the autonomous Confederate(d) states.  (Bottom Up)

plantation-slaves Morally, the Good Guys won.  Slavery was a horrible institution which will forever be a blot on America’s history.  But from a practical point of view, it’s unfortunate that the winners weren’t also the guys who were advocating for a Confederacy. 

The story of America since that war—and particularly since WWII—has made it abundantly clear that the federal, top down, republic of Jefferson et al does not scale up well—certainly not to its current size, and most likely not even to the original thirteen states over time.

There are bunches o’ natural factors that determine the optimum number of people and the size of the geographic area that can be united behind a government empowered to make Important Decisions. In growing to fill all the available land mass, the USA has defiantly flown in the face of those natural laws, to the point where continuation in its present form is no longer sustainable.

As we watch America follow the same path of denial as the former Soviet Union, falling apart from the inside out, let’s remember that it’s within our power to stop it anytime we can amass the public will to do so.

It is within the power of the people to call a Constitutional Convention and start again from scratch.  It’s scary to contemplate, but it might be the only way to avert the bloodshed that’s otherwise inevitable. 

Are we adult enough yet as a culture to do that before the country falls apart completely?  Time will tell. 

For more information on the movement to call for Constitutional Convention, see http://www.callaconvention.org/, and read Lawrence Lessig’s “A Call for a Constitutional Convention” in Huffington Post.

UPDATE:  See also http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-lessig/neoprogressives_b_704715.html?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=090310&utm_medium=email&utm_content=FeatureMore#, and although I’m no huge fan of the Coffee Party http://www.fixcongressfirst.org/blog/entry/coffee-party-national-convention/.  And finally, thanks to reader Bill Walker for providing this link in comments:  http://www.foavc.org

Death Watch

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From today’s Think Progress email:

A new Newsweek poll has found that a majority of Republicans believe President Obama "sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world." Only 33 percent of Republicans said the "allegation" was "probably not true," while 38 percent said it was probably true and 14 percent said it was "definitely true."

And the death watch continues . . . .

Superstition and stuff

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sistine

I’m always thinking, and seldom focusing (ADD), but there’s been a theme to my recent ponderings having to do with the underlying differences between agnostics and true believers—beyond their obvious tolerance and intolerance of ambiguity. 

In the process it occurred to me that the whole Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition is founded on the conviction that there is indeed a supernatural being which created the universe and which—at least insofar as its relationship with the human race is concerned—is an unmitigated asshole

The supernaturalists talk a lot about their faith, but if faith is the absence of fear, I’ve gotta wonder where the greater faith lies:  with those who are convinced that there is a god who’s an asshole, or those who are betting that if there is indeed a god, she/he/it is not an asshole?

Just sayin’ . . . .

This Sucks

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DonkeyElephant

This past week, our bickering children in Washington failed to pass either the “Disclose Act” or the incredibly popular plan to aid the multitude of emergency response workers and volunteers who are now experiencing devastating health problems as a result of their rescue work in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Posturing for power and control is more important to our “government” than solving problems.

I suppose that even the collapse of America has a bright side.  If we don’t bring down the whole human race with us in the process, perhaps the survivors will finally have learned that unbridled capitalism (“The Market” to Republicans and libertarians) is a fine social model for animal life in the jungle, but it sucks for human beings.

The ability to reason and form social contracts that elevate the quality of life for all of us (the common good) is kinda what distinguishes humans from other animals.

The doing of this by a society or culture is more or less what we’re talking about when we use the word “civilization.”

We judge the success and quality of a civilization or culture on how successful they’ve been in forming these social contracts and raising the quality of life for all.

So in a crisis where it is absolutely essential that America repair our social contract, why are so many working so hard to obstruct the repair and even dismantle it?

How about if all the progressives in both political parties were to join Bernie Sanders in the Social Democrats and leave the other two parties to the corporatists who run them.  They have proven themselves to be totally irrelevant, and yet they still have the keys and are sitting in the driver’s seat.  Time for an alternative.

Random Thoughts

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Long time without writing. It’s been a busy year, much of it spent in political shock overload — when I wasn’t hiding out from the nastiness of the Illinois winter on the beach on the Costa del Sol.

In the course of my dual hiding-out (from winter and from the feckless misadventures of President Milquetoast): (in no particular order)

Spain is a mess
Any interest in buying a vacation (or full-time) home on the Costa del Sol? For years Málaga has been my get-away Happy Place: home away from home where I could disappear into the happy-go-lucky world of mañana; smiling faces; gorgeous señores and señoritas. And an over-all sense of well being.

Today, not so much. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a lovely place to spend a few months. It’s an absolute delight to spend time with my loved ones there, and Málaga has more hours of sunshine per year than anywhere else in Europe and in the winter time, almost always the warmest temperatures. But the loveliness of it all is having a more difficult time masking the growing despair that’s eating away at the happy facade with the passing of very day.

Spain, on paper, has always looked ‘bad’ economically, with higher unemployment rates and lower per-capita incomes than its northern siblings. But Spain on paper and Spain in real life are two very different kinds of creatures. There are scores of reasons, but these two stand out in my mind:

  • Spain has a ginormous black economy
  • and a fierce spirit of personal autonomy

The proud and noble European tradition of tax evasion is practiced the most artfully in the Mediterranean states, and in none more enthusiastically than in Southern Spain. In transactions where there is some form of ‘strict’ government oversight (retail sales, home sales, professional services, etc.) 30% of the transaction amount is expected to disappear from the table. No ‘strict’ oversight? Report just enough to justify your having an income. No oversight at all? Straight to the mattress!

And I’m not kidding about the mattresses: I was in Spain in 2002 when the Euro replaced the peseta. At that time, I could have bought my apartment for around 10,000,000 pesetas: a king’s ransom in Spain, but only around $52,000 in U.S. money. But all that changed with the Euro. Spaniards had one year in which to spend all of their cash on hand. After that, the only thing to do with peseta currency was to take it to the bank and exchange it for euros. And, of course, all currency exchanges are reported to the government.

Solution? Empty out the mattress and buy real estate! Literally trillions of pesetas (billions of dollars) were pulled from under floorboards and out of trunks in the attic and poured into the real estate market. Between January of 2002 and the middle of 2007 when the market topped out, the ‘value’ of my apartment skyrocketed from $52,000 to ~$400,000. Today, I’d be very lucky to get what I paid back out of it, and even that is probably impossible right now.

But anyway, that’s the power of the Spanish mattress! And along with the black cash flow, there’s the black employment flow that’s every bit as big is its dark cash brother.

So any official stats regarding income and employment are grossly skewed by virtue of perhaps as much as 50-60% of the economy being extra-legal. Then, the government cooks the books further by paying the unemployed to attend school (already free) and counting them as ‘students.’

All of which is by way of saying that in a fairly decent economy, those ‘depressing’ numbers on paper don’t have much to do with the quality of life to your average working Andalucían, whose economy directly or indirectly relies upon tourism.

When I left there at the end of March, the official unemployment rate was somewhere around 23%. Economists outside the government estimated the real rate as being somewhere between 50 and 60%. And the tourists ain’t coming. Whoops.


Undesirable elements
I recently discovered that I had gotten one of my most favoritest quotations in the world WRONG. For years, Emma Goldman’s “The most dangerous element in any society is ignorance” has rotated in and out of my email .sig file. Turns out she actually called ignorance the most violent element. Thank you anonymous driver of the mom-mobille in the Springer Center parking lot whose (correct) bumper sticker inspired me to look it up.

My much-loved maternal grandmother was a Tribune-reading matron from Ford County who had the whole world divided into elements — desirable and un- (mostly un-). Dad (from Griggsville) had a little bit of this, too, but not nearly as much as Mom, whose family had pretensions.

I grew up hearing about elements: rough, dangerous, disruptive, violent, puerile, corrupting, and of course, the all-encompassing yet somehow superlative ‘undesirable’ sneered with a chin-slide implying a status lower than pond scum. I can’t say I ever did more than shrug off the whole idea of elementizing the world (the better to control it?) until I realized somewhere around middle school that the only sane behavior open to me was to become an Undesirable Element. (Not that my behavior was particularly sane!)

A good 20 years before Question Authority became a t-shirt slogan, I made Question Conventional Wisdom my life’s cause, and as a result was irreversibly imprinted with how absurd is the all too common human tendency when uncomfortable to label the source of our discomfort as somehow undesirable and dismissing it out of hand. Rather, of course, than dealing with it in an honorable way.

So when I first spied Emma’s ignorance quote, I grabbed onto it and took it to my heart. I still can’t figure out either where I copied it from or whether it was incorrect there or I miscopied it. but the beauty of Goldman’s statement is that whether you declare the element to be most violent or most dangerous or most corrupting or costly or disruptive or destructive…ignorance still fits the bill!