Showing posts with label PTSD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PTSD. Show all posts

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Iraq and Palistian forever and ever

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Date Line May 18, 2008

Mr. Bush, long hailed as a true friend of Israel, said all those things:
1. There has to be “an end” to the Israeli “occupation” of the West Bank “that began in 1967.”
2. Any peace agreement “must establish Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people.”
3. “The establishment of the state of Palestine is long overdue. The Palestinian people deserve it.”

Bush recently was taken back – or taken down by a sixteen year old Islamic girl – when his interest in Jewish boys and Islamic girls meeting and dating lead to the question of them meeting at dances. It would appear that this graduate of Harvard and Yale, with one of his degrees in history, could not connect the idea that girls, who cannot be out with any non-related males, would go somewhere where strangers of the male kind would have their arms around the girls waist.

Any wonder that he has so egregiously screwed up the Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation? This clown has no idea of how Islam works; or how it works to those he is personally addressing.

Obama has lived in an Islamic nation, his father has been both Islamic and Christian, it is doubtful that Obama would make such a mistake. It is also doubtful that Obama would call for the creation of an Islamic nation adjoining Israel – setting aside a reality which see sufficient of them – one would ask how peaceful such a state would be.

Consider: Where the Palestinian live together they riot and kill each other based upon whether their form of Islam is Shiite or Sunni. So would the “new” Palestinian State be Shiite or Sunni? And who would decide?

Which ever was the official Islam the “new” Palestinian State, it would have to be imposed by “Christian” nations and immediately anger the excluded sect and all those nations, or peoples, which support that sect and its beliefs.

Any attempt to declare a non-sectarian “new” Palestinian State would obviously also be a Christian imposition. Moreover, the Palestinians and Iraqis have demonstrated their love for killing each other based on this fourteen hundred year old division. It follows that any the “new” Palestinian State would immediately fall into the same style of civil war Bush and his idiot followers have been denying exists in Iraq.

We could elect John McCain – he says he can win this by 2013. This being the invasion and occupation of Iraq. So, McCain has publically declared he can bring an end to fourteen hundred years of sectarian hatred and murder. McCain has declared he can subdue Iraq – for one most subdue and enemy in order to have victory over them – and thus create what? What type of Nation State would he leave after his “victory?” Or would he leave? It is likely that McCain envisions permanent occupation of Iraq – that hundred years occupation he spoke of – and even making Iraq a fifty-first American State. Is that what McCain has in mind? Is that “victory” – to incorporate warring Shiite and Sunni into America? Hardly realistic; but no more fanciful than the idea of a victory by 2013.

Why 2013? Is it because that is a year after the next election, the year the second term of the next president would begin? Or, given McCain’s advanced age, dose he expect to be dead? Hence the problem, the broken promise, would be his vice-president’s broken promise – a promise to be renounced as belonging to an old prisoner of war suffering from PTSD and given to irrational outbursts of anger.

Isn’t it nice. We have a choice between someone with real world experience with the Arab and Islamic world, and someone suffering from PTSD with delusions of a military victory which his people could not achieve against exactly the same type of enemy – the same in terms of motivation to evict an invading army which was intent on denying the people the government they were promised and choose.
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Saturday, April 21, 2007

Rats in a cage

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Date Line April 21, 2007

Virginia Tech, 33 dead, but not an isolated instance. More important, it was predicted.

Turn back to Scientific American circa 1960 and you will discover a study on rat populations which lead the author to predict, as city populations increased, there would be increased crime and violence.

I don’t recall the details, but the study has, obviously, stuck with me for more than forty years.

As the world population continues to increase, so too will the number of wars, genocidal conflicts, and seemingly random shooting of the kind which just occurred at Virginia Tech.

Psychologists talk of mob psychology. That groups of people have a tendency to behave in a manner independent of the behavior of any single individual.

The typical example is a lynch mob. There will be a rope; but who will bring it? There will be a stone or other item tossed; but who will toss it? In each instance the specific who is unknown; but there will be one person who responds in the manner which ends in a lynching.

We no longer have a system conducive to a mob hanging. Which is not to say it is not ever going to happen. If events are right, there will be a time when people storm into the streets and violence results.

We can think times when it happens; times which we do not equate to the old fashioned lynching. No matter. The emotional forces are at play, they are inherent in humanity; especially in humanity of a given emotional bent.

There will be more “Virginia Tech”, or “Columbine”, or Texas University Watch Tower, style massacres. They will occur because, like the rats in the Scientific American report, we have reached the point of ultimate stress.

We are facing overpopulation, a shortage of food, rising sea levels, general climate change, disease (natural and as a result of our own actions), and most important, we have people who are corrupting the things we turn to force solace ... making them a cause for anger.

Ignorance and intolerance are generally associated with the lynch mob mentality. We push our neighbor to the breaking point; and wonder why they break; and then expound on the violence released.

It is as if we play at triggering an atomic explosion; and then fain amazement at the hole created and destruction done.

We know of PTSD. We associate it with combat stress. We then deny treatment to our combat veterans returning from a conflict in which every step, every person, every place or sound, meant the possibility of death. When will Iraq cause its killings here?

Will you be surprised, and cry for the victims, who need not have been created but for the failure to give psychological treatment to the returning troops? Will you take responsibility for what you denied?

The rats are in a crowded cage, the population and pressures are increasing, we are intentionally aggravating and agitating them; we teach them to kill and then act in amazement as they turn on and devour each other.

We have knowingly redefined the environment for our lynch mob; and they are coming after us. Are you having fun yet?
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