Black lives didn't *really* matter to a whole lot of post-college white people until videos of police murdering them started filling up their Facebook feeds for example. Out of sight, out of mind folks. You give them the imagery and you force a choice on them. Vietnam ended partially because it was the first televised war where people ba…
Black lives didn't *really* matter to a whole lot of post-college white people until videos of police murdering them started filling up their Facebook feeds for example. Out of sight, out of mind folks. You give them the imagery and you force a choice on them. Vietnam ended partially because it was the first televised war where people back home could *see* the carnage they were sending their children to commit and they had to weigh the morality of the cause after seeing what was being done over there in the name of the "Domino Theory."
I spent several months in Jordan helping to provide emergency assistance to Iraqi refugees. The entire country was destroyed, and the Iraqis were, and are, deeply traumatized. I knew a man whose fingers and toes were slowly dissolved by acid, as a method of torture, and a woman who was set on fire, along with her father, who died. A third woman told me how the Medhi army took her husband away, and two weeks later left his dismembered corpse on her doorstep.
The closer a human being comes to the horrors of senseless violence, the stronger those images become. We haven't brought Americans close enough to the flames of gun violence to feel the heat. We need to do that. My lessons as a volunteer in Jordan live with me to this day. I cannot read about the Ukraine war because the lessons I learned are still so vivid. I can only begin to imagine what it was like for you to be in that hell.
Doing refugee work creates a whole different kind of trauma. One that is often more abstract and second-hand, but nevertheless, deep and permanent.
I worked with the UNHCR in the Vietnamese refugee camps off the coast of Malaysia, and there the Vietnamese were those who had survived the tortures of re-education camps, their difficult escapes, and the attacks by (mostly Thai) pirates.
The deaths during their voyage came mostly from the opposing poles of dehydration and drowning. Some boats were rammed by the Malaysian Navy to deter them from reaching the shores. One man had lost his infant son and his wife. She had been raped and then decapitated. Another man lost his daughter because the boat was deliberately sunk too soon so it couldn't be dragged back out to sea by the Malaysian Navy. Many older people had their teeth pulled out for the gold. Multiply hearing stories like these for a year or two, day after day, and you can get a sense of the psychological effects on the refugee workers.
Yet, the stories were never enough to keep refugees from trying to escape an intolerable condition in their homeland. It's ironic, somewhat, how Vietnam has thrived so well economically during the past five decades. In part it's because all those refugees sent back hard-earned money from their new homelands so that their brothers and sisters, and nieces and nephews, and ... could be educated, become a professional class, start businesses, or rebuild their family farms.
Perhaps Iraq will see the same reinvigorated life in the next fifty years.
I don't think America fully understands that there was a civil war there between Sunni and Shia Iraqis between the years 2006-2008. That's how I learned what modern civil wars look like. It's a militia from one neighborhood going into the next neighborhood and rounding up a bunch of the military-aged males at night, torturing them, executing them, and then leaving their mutilated bodies in a ditch for their neighbors to find. Violence messaging. Bombing marketplaces to target the other side's innocent families. Mexican cartel war shit. All because we created a power vacuum after removing Saddam and dissolving the Iraqi military. We put thousands of young--mostly Sunni--military men into unemployment in an economy that just got destroyed while the insurgency was offering money to anyone willing to dig holes in the road and/or place explosive devices into said holes. Sometimes those bombs went off against Americans, sometimes they went off against the Iraqi police or politicians, and sometimes they went off against Shia civilians. It was a fucking mess there for at least two years, and that's before we start talking about ISIS and US troops killing people on the road in "escalation of force" incidents.
Americans all over the country have grandfathers who will not talk about world War II because of the horrors of war. Do those grandchildren ever really ponder that?
I do ponder it all. Not even my Grandfather in this case. My father -- half American, half European -- worked for the military in London during the blitz. He had tears in his eyes when he spoke of seeing a child's hand severed in death lying outside a bombed house. The rest of the stories he told me through the years are equally horrendous. I was in London on 9/11 with two small children. The news and images of New York were everywhere, and I could not protect them from seeing these images. They were really scared. My father told them he understood how bad Americans must feel about the loss of life and the two building, but he saw buildings blown up, and death in London night after night after night. They would be okay in the end, he reassured them. One had to carry on. From the stories both my parents told me I think not only are many Americans unaware, but they are spoilt in so many ways. Look at the 51% who now have a lack of willingness to sacrifice -- even a little -- for Ukraine.
I too had a wider view of things, and I found it very odd that the US turned everything upside down over 3000 dead on 9/11, while countries all over the world suffer much greater terrorist casualties on a regular basis. While 9/11 was unique in that planes were used as weapons, right-wing terrorists are the current scourge of the US in terms of the sheer number of incidents, but the right insists that the left is overwhelmingly behind US domestic terrorism.
"The minority that is rock solid for keeping things the way they are [is] clustered efficiently in certain voting districts that then put a lock into the legislative process. It’s not like they’re spread out throughout fifty states: This is a particular regional and political problem that then creates a structural lock on doing anything about it in the legislature. Everything comes back to minority rule." --Tom Nichols
Agree. Most people don’t know what the result of being shot with an AR15 or even a handgun looks like. They don’t understand what dying alone in an ICU looks like. It’s ugly. They don’t get what a trauma from crashing at 90+ MPH looks like. Really, they do not really even get what it’s like to live a full life and become elderly and frail and face death and the mental and physical toll that it takes on the person facing it. People and Americans especially are so insulated from the realities of illness, injury, trauma ,and death. Most certainly from political violence. Kind of crazy when you hear people wanting it all to crash and burn. We barely made it through a pandemic without losing our collective minds.
Total agreement, Travis. Charlie's examples from Vietnam add to the argument, and the events at My Lai. Your list could go on and on .... and then we have the photographs from Kent State that also shocked the country because the loss of young lives was now occurring on our own shores.
Your experience in Iraq reminds me much of Tim O'Brien's writing. He makes the point that the literature of trauma is so difficult to write, partly because the writer knows there will forever be that unbridgeable gap between those who have lived the experience and those who can only imagine it through the writing.
Words, like photographs, are all we have to try to tell the truth, however, to try to make the lives of others to come better than our own lives have been. If we suppress the words and photographs, how can we make those lives to come better?
I also send my thanks to Charlie for the detailed descriptions by surgeons who help us understand what the AR-15 does to the body. I doubt either those clinical words or actual photographs will influence the extreme right-wing who currently have a hold on our gun safety regulations, but perhaps my doubts will be proven wrong.
The Things We Carry stuck with me for a long time, particularly the chapter entitled "the lemon tree." It resembled a lot of what I'd end up seeing in IED blasts. That dude is a little bit of a personal hero of mine. Sebastian Junger as well.
I taught both authors' works to college students for many years, along with the works of August Wilson, Zora Neale Hurston (and other Harlem Renaissance writers), James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Audre Lorde .... and obviously the history of red lining, the Trumbull Park Homes (White) Race Riots, the Birmingham bombings, the Tulsa massacre and destruction.... never thought that literature and history would become suppressed and censored again. But here we are.
O'Brien's and Junger's works are still part of most college composition/literature anthologies, and hopefully they are making new readers and writers with a passion for getting to the truths of our lives.
Sorry and disgusted to hear about how the military treated your under-age drinking incident. Of course, it is not surprising.
Black lives didn't *really* matter to a whole lot of post-college white people until videos of police murdering them started filling up their Facebook feeds for example. Out of sight, out of mind folks. You give them the imagery and you force a choice on them. Vietnam ended partially because it was the first televised war where people back home could *see* the carnage they were sending their children to commit and they had to weigh the morality of the cause after seeing what was being done over there in the name of the "Domino Theory."
I spent several months in Jordan helping to provide emergency assistance to Iraqi refugees. The entire country was destroyed, and the Iraqis were, and are, deeply traumatized. I knew a man whose fingers and toes were slowly dissolved by acid, as a method of torture, and a woman who was set on fire, along with her father, who died. A third woman told me how the Medhi army took her husband away, and two weeks later left his dismembered corpse on her doorstep.
The closer a human being comes to the horrors of senseless violence, the stronger those images become. We haven't brought Americans close enough to the flames of gun violence to feel the heat. We need to do that. My lessons as a volunteer in Jordan live with me to this day. I cannot read about the Ukraine war because the lessons I learned are still so vivid. I can only begin to imagine what it was like for you to be in that hell.
Doing refugee work creates a whole different kind of trauma. One that is often more abstract and second-hand, but nevertheless, deep and permanent.
I worked with the UNHCR in the Vietnamese refugee camps off the coast of Malaysia, and there the Vietnamese were those who had survived the tortures of re-education camps, their difficult escapes, and the attacks by (mostly Thai) pirates.
The deaths during their voyage came mostly from the opposing poles of dehydration and drowning. Some boats were rammed by the Malaysian Navy to deter them from reaching the shores. One man had lost his infant son and his wife. She had been raped and then decapitated. Another man lost his daughter because the boat was deliberately sunk too soon so it couldn't be dragged back out to sea by the Malaysian Navy. Many older people had their teeth pulled out for the gold. Multiply hearing stories like these for a year or two, day after day, and you can get a sense of the psychological effects on the refugee workers.
Yet, the stories were never enough to keep refugees from trying to escape an intolerable condition in their homeland. It's ironic, somewhat, how Vietnam has thrived so well economically during the past five decades. In part it's because all those refugees sent back hard-earned money from their new homelands so that their brothers and sisters, and nieces and nephews, and ... could be educated, become a professional class, start businesses, or rebuild their family farms.
Perhaps Iraq will see the same reinvigorated life in the next fifty years.
I don't think America fully understands that there was a civil war there between Sunni and Shia Iraqis between the years 2006-2008. That's how I learned what modern civil wars look like. It's a militia from one neighborhood going into the next neighborhood and rounding up a bunch of the military-aged males at night, torturing them, executing them, and then leaving their mutilated bodies in a ditch for their neighbors to find. Violence messaging. Bombing marketplaces to target the other side's innocent families. Mexican cartel war shit. All because we created a power vacuum after removing Saddam and dissolving the Iraqi military. We put thousands of young--mostly Sunni--military men into unemployment in an economy that just got destroyed while the insurgency was offering money to anyone willing to dig holes in the road and/or place explosive devices into said holes. Sometimes those bombs went off against Americans, sometimes they went off against the Iraqi police or politicians, and sometimes they went off against Shia civilians. It was a fucking mess there for at least two years, and that's before we start talking about ISIS and US troops killing people on the road in "escalation of force" incidents.
Americans all over the country have grandfathers who will not talk about world War II because of the horrors of war. Do those grandchildren ever really ponder that?
I do ponder it all. Not even my Grandfather in this case. My father -- half American, half European -- worked for the military in London during the blitz. He had tears in his eyes when he spoke of seeing a child's hand severed in death lying outside a bombed house. The rest of the stories he told me through the years are equally horrendous. I was in London on 9/11 with two small children. The news and images of New York were everywhere, and I could not protect them from seeing these images. They were really scared. My father told them he understood how bad Americans must feel about the loss of life and the two building, but he saw buildings blown up, and death in London night after night after night. They would be okay in the end, he reassured them. One had to carry on. From the stories both my parents told me I think not only are many Americans unaware, but they are spoilt in so many ways. Look at the 51% who now have a lack of willingness to sacrifice -- even a little -- for Ukraine.
I too had a wider view of things, and I found it very odd that the US turned everything upside down over 3000 dead on 9/11, while countries all over the world suffer much greater terrorist casualties on a regular basis. While 9/11 was unique in that planes were used as weapons, right-wing terrorists are the current scourge of the US in terms of the sheer number of incidents, but the right insists that the left is overwhelmingly behind US domestic terrorism.
"The minority that is rock solid for keeping things the way they are [is] clustered efficiently in certain voting districts that then put a lock into the legislative process. It’s not like they’re spread out throughout fifty states: This is a particular regional and political problem that then creates a structural lock on doing anything about it in the legislature. Everything comes back to minority rule." --Tom Nichols
"I don't think America fully understands..." is the understatement of the century!
It drives me crazy when Americans talk casually about the US falling into a civil war because they have never seen what a real civil war is.
Hopefully your experiences are a lesson for us all!
Agree. Most people don’t know what the result of being shot with an AR15 or even a handgun looks like. They don’t understand what dying alone in an ICU looks like. It’s ugly. They don’t get what a trauma from crashing at 90+ MPH looks like. Really, they do not really even get what it’s like to live a full life and become elderly and frail and face death and the mental and physical toll that it takes on the person facing it. People and Americans especially are so insulated from the realities of illness, injury, trauma ,and death. Most certainly from political violence. Kind of crazy when you hear people wanting it all to crash and burn. We barely made it through a pandemic without losing our collective minds.
A lot of kids or peopke have a fetish with guns think that war is like playing video games, I bet.
The trauma is the same whether the violence is senseless or not. Acts of justifiable violence can be just as traumatic.
Thank you for your willingness to serve and aid those in need of assistance!
Total agreement, Travis. Charlie's examples from Vietnam add to the argument, and the events at My Lai. Your list could go on and on .... and then we have the photographs from Kent State that also shocked the country because the loss of young lives was now occurring on our own shores.
Your experience in Iraq reminds me much of Tim O'Brien's writing. He makes the point that the literature of trauma is so difficult to write, partly because the writer knows there will forever be that unbridgeable gap between those who have lived the experience and those who can only imagine it through the writing.
Words, like photographs, are all we have to try to tell the truth, however, to try to make the lives of others to come better than our own lives have been. If we suppress the words and photographs, how can we make those lives to come better?
I also send my thanks to Charlie for the detailed descriptions by surgeons who help us understand what the AR-15 does to the body. I doubt either those clinical words or actual photographs will influence the extreme right-wing who currently have a hold on our gun safety regulations, but perhaps my doubts will be proven wrong.
The Things We Carry stuck with me for a long time, particularly the chapter entitled "the lemon tree." It resembled a lot of what I'd end up seeing in IED blasts. That dude is a little bit of a personal hero of mine. Sebastian Junger as well.
I taught both authors' works to college students for many years, along with the works of August Wilson, Zora Neale Hurston (and other Harlem Renaissance writers), James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Audre Lorde .... and obviously the history of red lining, the Trumbull Park Homes (White) Race Riots, the Birmingham bombings, the Tulsa massacre and destruction.... never thought that literature and history would become suppressed and censored again. But here we are.
O'Brien's and Junger's works are still part of most college composition/literature anthologies, and hopefully they are making new readers and writers with a passion for getting to the truths of our lives.
Sorry and disgusted to hear about how the military treated your under-age drinking incident. Of course, it is not surprising.