WHO WROTE ME?
I am, I was, I will be…
Maybe.
I sing, I sang, I will sing again
Perhaps.
The path out of the forest
disappears too soon into the hills,
corn popped, husks dropped.
Is there a me to be?
Or a time to count? If there
is more than a dream
what dreams it? A second chance
at what? Caught in something’s
game show, DNA in shreds?
Bird on the wing is migrating maybe?
Biscuits in the oven pethaps, but
is anybody home? Who wrote this?
This is an arresting article that was written by respiratory therapist Karen Gallardo and published by the Los Angeles Times. I wish it was compulsory reading for everyone who refuses to wear a mask or to get vaccinated.
She writes:
I’m a respiratory therapist. With the fourth wave of the pandemic in full swing, fueled by the highly contagious Delta variant, the trajectory of the patients I see, from admission to critical care, is all too familiar. When they’re vaccinated, their COVID-19 infections most likely end after Stage 1. If only that were the case for everyone.
Get vaccinated. If you choose not to, here’s what to expect if you are hospitalized for a serious case of COVID-19.
Stage 1. You’ve had debilitating symptoms for a few days, but now it is so hard to breathe that you come to the emergency room. Your oxygen saturation level tells us you need help, a supplemental flow of 1 to 4 liters of oxygen per minute. We admit you and start you on antivirals, steroids, anticoagulants or monoclonal antibodies. You’ll spend several days in the hospital feeling run-down, but if we can wean you off the oxygen, you’ll get discharged. You survive.
Stage 2. It becomes harder and harder for you to breathe. “Like drowning,” many patients describe the feeling. The bronchodilator treatments we give you provide little relief. Your oxygen requirements increase significantly, from 4 liters to 15 liters to 40 liters per minute. Little things, like relieving yourself or sitting up in bed, become too difficult for you to do on your own. Your oxygen saturation rapidly declines when you move about. We transfer you to the intensive care unit.
Stage 3. You’re exhausted from hyperventilating to satisfy your body’s demand for air. We put you on noninvasive, “positive pressure” ventilation — a big, bulky face mask that must be Velcro’d tightly around your face so the machine can efficiently push pressure into your lungs to pop them open so you get enough of the oxygen it delivers.
Stage 4. Your breathing becomes even more labored. We can tell you’re severely fatigued. An arterial blood draw confirms that the oxygen content in your blood is critically low. We prepare to intubate you. If you’re able to and if there’s time, we will suggest that you call your loved ones. This might be the last time they’ll hear your voice.
We connect you to a ventilator. You are sedated and paralyzed, fed through a feeding tube, hooked to a Foley catheter and a rectal tube. We turn your limp body regularly, so you don’t develop pressure ulcers — bed sores. We bathe you and keep you clean. We flip you onto your stomach to allow for better oxygenation. We will try experimental therapeutics.
Stage 5. Some patients survive Stage 4. Unfortunately, your oxygen levels and overall condition have not improved after several days on the ventilator. Your COVID-infested lungs need assistance and time to heal, something that an ECMO machine, which bypasses your lungs and oxygenates your blood, can provide. But alas, our community hospital doesn’t have that capability.
If you’re stable enough, you will get transferred to another hospital for that therapy. Otherwise, we’ll continue treating you as best we can. We’re understaffed and overwhelmed, but we’ll always give you the best care we can.
Stage 6. The pressure required to open your lungs is so high that air can leak into your chest cavity, so we insert tubes to clear it out. Your kidneys fail to filter the byproducts from the drugs we continuously give you. Despite diuretics, your entire body swells from fluid retention, and you require dialysis to help with your renal function.
The long hospital stay and your depressed immune system make you susceptible to infections. A chest X-ray shows fluid accumulating in your lung sacs. A blood clot may show up, too. We can’t prevent these complications at this point; we treat them as they present.
If your blood pressure drops critically, we will administer vasopressors to bring it up, but your heart may stop anyway. After several rounds of CPR, we’ll get your pulse and circulation back. But soon, your family will need to make a difficult decision.
Stage 7: After several meetings with the palliative care team, your family decides to withdraw care. We extubate you, turning off the breathing machinery. We set up a final FaceTime call with your loved ones. As we work in your room, we hear crying and loving goodbyes. We cry, too, and we hold your hand until your last natural breath.
I’ve been at this for 17 months now. It doesn’t get easier. My pandemic stories rarely end well.
Karen Gallardo is a respiratory therapist at Community Memorial Hospital in Ventura.
Biden must have a heavy heart now. He chose the wrong action, and must deeply regret it. –Not to regret pulling out but not to have taken one more month to get our folks and their folks out. Something about a letter from the embassy in Kabul that wasn’t delivered flies in the face of ignored intelligence reports. And the number of troop suicides is expected to go up a tick due to all that heartache and destruction for nothing, at least as envisioned by a Republican in Congress. The troop suicides of course is a matter of concern, no matter the cause. What is the rundown on the suicides of our armed forces, anyway?
Npr reports that Female veterans are nearly 250 percent more likely to kill themselves than civilian women. There are also the general demands of military life to consider, from long hours and separations from families to, notably, the prevalence of sexual trauma, according to Megan McCarthy, the VA’s deputy director for suicide protection. Often, even back on base between missions, while the men are decompressing, the women may feel like they can’t let down their guard because of the possibility of sexual assault. “One of the reasons we think why women veterans die by suicide at higher rates than civilians do is because they are more likely to attempt suicide with a firearm than civilian women,” McCarthy said. “Firearms are a very lethal method of suicide.” A study released Monday June 2, 2021, by the Costs of War Project, points out that the way the Defense Department and VA track suicides might mean even the growing numbers are incomplete. DoD’s numbers may be off for active-duty suicides, “by as much as half,” according to the report, because of the way it investigates and determines whether a death is a suicide.
In addition to other factors, “it is imperative we also consider the impact of the military’s reliance on guiding principles which overburden individual service members with moral responsibility, or blameworthiness for actions or consequences, over which they have little control.” (Meghann Myers, https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2021/06/21/). Simultaneously, the length of the war and advances in medical care have allowed service members to redeploy after severe physical trauma,” according to the report. “These compounding traumas contribute to worsening suicide rates as service members deploy and redeploy after sustaining severe injuries.” ….“For example, since the post-9/11 wars began, we have seen a tremendous rise of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in warfare, significantly increasing the number of traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) and polytrauma cases among service members,” according to the report. “TBIs have affected as many as 20 percent of post-9/11 service members, with many experiencing more than one during their career.” Twenty years of combat operations might also be a factor. “That polytraumas and repeated TBIs are so commonplace should motivate changes in if and how service members are redeployed.”
There’s also a culture that values pushing distress aside in service of the group, putting the mission above any one person’s needs, despite a decade of ever-increasing research, support and an attempt to de-stigmatize struggles with mental health.
“Military life is exhausting, and the high operational tempo limits time for reflection,” according to the report. “Further, the dominant masculine identity that pervades the military is one that overwhelmingly favors machismo and toughness. Asking for help during trauma or suicidal ideation, then, is necessarily at odds with military culture; ‘acknowledging mental illness is likely to be viewed as a sign of weakness and a potential threat to their careers.’ “
The following is from the NY Times magazine by Nick Turse : Published June 30, 2020 Updated June 22, 2021, U.S. Commandos at Risk for Suicide: Is the Military Doing Enough?
“In 2017 one of the largest efforts to understand military suicide ever undertaken — a study examining suicide attempts by soldiers during the early years of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — found that Special Operations Forces might be more resilient than the Army’s general-purpose forces, because of rigorous selection, intense training, strong unit cohesion or psychological and biological characteristics. The next year, S.O.F. suicides spiked nearly threefold above 2017’s total.”
“Joseph Votel, a retired Army general who commanded SOCOM from August 2014 to March 2016 recalled discussions about the suicide study. “People were witnessing horrible things on the battlefield; people were injured and were taking a lot of medication to manage the pain; people were in 15, 16 years and dealing with the wear and tear of a military career, and they worried that they couldn’t keep up.”
He was one of the most elite military men in America, but his service in the Special Operations Forces (S.O.F.) had taken a heavy toll. “The job I love and have committed my whole being to is creating my suicidal condition, but I’d rather die than admit to having trouble and being removed from my unit and my team,” he said often, according to someone close to him. It was impossible for The New York Times to follow up with this special operator, however, because he had died by suicide.
“The soldier’s troubling admission is found in a study of suicides among America’s most elite troops, commissioned by U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and obtained by The New York Times via the Freedom of Information Act. Conducted by the American Association of Suicidology, one of the nation’s oldest suicide-prevention organizations, and completed sometime after January 2017, the undated 46-page report aggregates the findings of 29 “psychological autopsies” — detailed interviews with 81 next-of-kin and close friends of commandos who killed themselves between 2012 and 2015″…
“The findings of SOCOM’s psychological-autopsy study, which have never been released to the public, offer a window into the private struggles of the elite troops who have borne a disproportionate burden over almost two decades of ceaseless American conflicts. Researchers found that nearly all of the 29 commandos suffered some form of post-traumatic stress disorder or emotional trauma following their first deployment, according to their loved ones. A dozen or more had shared details of how they were affected by combat, and their accounts included not only being under fire or experiencing the deaths of colleagues but also the killing of enemy soldiers, witnessing or participating in the torture or deaths of detainees and missions that violated their personal ethics. Such war zone-specific issues, the study found, compounded typical home-front issues like financial problems, which affected 58.7 percent of the deceased, and relationship problems, which afflicted 51.7 percent.”
“Joseph Votel, a retired Army general who commanded SOCOM from August 2014 to March 2016 recalled discussions about the suicide study. “People were witnessing horrible things on the battlefield; people were injured and were taking a lot of medication to manage the pain; people were in 15, 16 years and dealing with the wear and tear of a military career, and they worried that they couldn’t keep up.
In 2017…. “one of the largest efforts to understand military suicide ever undertaken — a study examining suicide attempts by soldiers during the early years of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — found that Special Operations Forces might be more resilient than the Army’s general-purpose forces, because of rigorous selection, intense training, strong unit cohesion or psychological and biological characteristics.” The next year, S.O.F. suicides spiked nearly threefold above 2017’s total.
“The psychological-autopsy report found a widespread fear that reporting mental health issues or suicidal ideation would lead special operators to be separated from their unit, cripple their chances of promotion or otherwise negatively impact their careers. S.O.F. members “see the way others who sought help were treated and recognize that most of these individuals left the service soon after they had shared that they had suicidal ideation, the study found…”
Concered about forestalling more troop suicides following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, focussing on the bright side of the war has been suggested, and unfortunately I can’t find the post now. (I’m still a newbie after 7 years)… But it motivated me to do this post, so at least let me explain. I seem to remember it was from the V.A. and said to expect more troop suicides because of our withdrawal. And it cautioned us not to dwell on the negative aspects of losing the war, but instead to focus on the positives from the war. It listed “positives,” but the only one I recall was that the rate of infant deaths has decreased since the occupation in Afghanistan….
A refreshing new poetry form on Tanka Tuesday weekly Poetry Challenge Christine Bialczak poetry:
“This week I will try Rhyming Wave https://poetscollective.org/poetryforms/rhyming-wave…This form was made by Katherine L. Sparrow and I really love it! I just found it out of the blue!”
WITHOUT YOU
a rainy day is nothing new
nothing, nothing, nothing new
just like a rainbow pouring through
just like a ray of hope
I cling to you like knotted rope
knotted, knotted, knotted rope
I think and know love’s true
I’m blue the days I’m without you
without, without, without you
A day of darkness seems so blue
A day of agony
We fit together perfectly
perfect, perfect, perfectly
Without you I can’t bear to be
without you I am lost
A rainy day is nothing new
without you I am lost.
CBialczak Poetry
SMARTY PANTS
I was born in June, but I became me oh, about March. I didn’t know that this would be the best time of my life. More’s the pity if you can’t remember the gentle, reassuring warmth of the timeless sea rocking you. One with the world—no, the World itself.
We can all hear while still in the womb, but few are sufficiently fortunate to receive an early education through the pulsing walls of their mother, as she taught her first grade students. I suspect it was her sprightly voice delivering my first knowledge base that helped sharpen my hearing.
What was fortuitous for me posed small problems for my family, because I was reluctant to talk during my first three years. I wanted to think and absorb the daylight scene. I was busy absorbing and disinterested in verbally engaging. I already knew there were three people in my family: Annie Harris—Mom, quick-witted and energetic with soft flowing dark hair and twinkling eyes, although I wasn’t sure what color her eyes were; Harry Harris—Dad — balding, horn-rimmed glasses, smiled a lot when he looked at me; and Tristan Harris, big brother, who took some getting used to. Just kidding, he was at that awkward age, I think they call it. I soon learned to recognize my own name, Jenny Harris.
The information I took in visually, however, was brand new. I had to sort out colors first, having no idea what colors were when my mother pointed them out in her classroom. Although I was slow to learn my colors, I spent days absorbing my family’s features. Mom had lots of hair, and it was curly. Dad’s hair wasn’t much so I didn’t know if it was curly or not. Tristan’s hair was longer than my dad’s, and not curly.
For a long time I studied their eyes, but not knowing colors I couldn’t label them at first. They were all crinkly and reassuring, however. The family was glad to see me, although later I caused problems for them. I gained weight and crawled as they expected, even walked and ran. But as the months passed and they peered at me expectantly, I didn’t talk.
Mom took me to the doctor regularly and finally told him about my not talking. He looked at me and smiled. “She can. There’s nothing wrong with her vocal chords.” He tapped his eyeglasses on his hand and said, “Can she cry?”
Suddenly Mom recalled my word-free howls when displeased, and laughed. “Can she ever!”
The doctor gave me a conspiratorial wink and said, “She will when she wants to, I ‘spect.” I knew he was my buddy.
Soon after I came out, my family got a new member. A black and white kitten –Mom said it was a girl– came to visit, and stayed. Mom thought she had been abandoned, which made me feel sorry for her, so I kind of mothered the kitten, I guess. Her lips were colored—I later learned they were “pink,” and Tristan named her “Tulips.”
While other children might hug their blankies, I had my Tulips to snuggle with. Note that I considered myself a child from birth. There wasn’t a lot of baby still in me at birth, other than size.
Mom was intuitive, which means comprehending without being told. She could tell from looking in my eyes that I understood more than I let on, so from almost the beginning she began to read me stories. I sat in her lap and followed along, and that’s how I learned to read—painlessly, the way it should be.
We soon used up the story books left over from Tristan’s childhood and so one fine sunshiny day Mom popped me in the stroller and headed for the library. Oh, that magnificent building! Mom gave me a choice of books, by holding several out until I pointed at one. Or two. (I was secretly reading to myself when Mom wasn’t around.) Tulips would snuggle and purr, and I would silently read.
Mom took me to the library every week, and gradually I began pointing at books for juveniles, not infants. Intuitive Mom got the hint, and followed my lead in reading selections. So it was that one evening in my third year, as we were dining on spaghetti and meat balls, I said my very first word. It was not “spoon,” which I was reaching for, but “Meowr.”
I was half joking, but Mom became tense and said, “Don’t over react. We don’t want her to become mute again.”
They resisted handing me the spoon, however, until I said the magic word, thereafter continuing to live up to the new name they gave me: “Smarty Pants.”
Luckily my uniqueness was kept secret, even from the neighbors, who had no children. We just took me for granted, a blessing compared to what some special children are exposed to in the media. My dream was to become me.
I can remember back to when Tulips was “fixed.” I was horrified. I didn’t want to be fixed! What if my mother had been fixed? I knew Mom had enjoyed teaching school and I also knew I was a bump in her road. As the family’s ever questioning pest, I asked her about it. .
Her answer was reassuring, just a warm hug, a kiss and her dear smile. Then she added, “We chose to have you. When you grow up you can choose what you want to do with your life”. That sounded pretty good to me, so I went back to Tulips and Google.
The Washington Post published a remorseful article about the negative effects of 20 years of was in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hindsight is sometimes useful. Many books will be written about “lessons learned” from these past 20 years of warfare.
There’s a scene in the 2014 film “American Sniper” that sums up the country’s post-9/11 war lust. Chris Kyle, the late U.S. Navy SEAL played by Bradley Cooper, watches a newscast of the twin towers crumbling before his eyes. The camera fixes on Kyle’s steely yet stunned face as he holds his shaken wife, before cutting to an image of him in full military gear, glaring through the scope of his sniper rifle in the middle of an Iraqi town. (He goes on to gun down a woman aiding Iraqi insurgents.)
The film, which some critics panned as proto-fascist agitprop, spends no time interrogating this implied connection between the events of 9/11 and the American decision to “preemptively” invade Iraq less than two years later to topple the regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Neither did much of the American public or political establishment that got swept up in the George W. Bush administration’s rush to punish “evil-doers.” A Washington Post poll in September 2003 found that close to 7 in 10 Americans believed that it was at least “likely” that Hussein was directly involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
That, of course, proved to be preposterous, as was much of the case Bush and his allies made about the imminent threat posed by the Iraqi regime’s phantom weapons of mass destruction. Animated by a neoconservative zeal to oust enemy regimes and wield American might to make right — and unhindered by the bulk of the Washington press corps — the Bush administration plunged the United States and its coalition partners into a war and eventual occupation that would reshape the political map of the Middle East, distract from America’s parallel intervention in Afghanistan and provoke new cycles of chaos and violence.
The first couple of years after 9/11 marked “an era where the United States made major strategic errors,” Vali Nasr, a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, told Today’s WorldView. “Its vision was clouded by anger and revenge.”
But what if the United States had opted against invading Iraq? The decision to oust Hussein, even more so than the invasion of Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, was an unprovoked war of choice that, on one hand, sealed off a range of other policy options available to Washington’s strategists and, on the other, set in motion events that fundamentally altered the region. It’s impossible to unwind what the Bush administration unleashed, but indulge us at Today’s WorldView as we puzzle through just a few elements of this counterfactual proposition.
First and foremost, there’s the Iraqi death toll. The Watson Institute at Brown University calculates that 184,382 to 207,156 Iraqi civilians were directly killed in war-related violence between the start of the American invasion in March 2003 through October 2019. But the researchers suggest the real figure may well be several times higher.
Even considering Hussein’s own long record of brutality, it is difficult to envision a future of greater suffering for the Iraqi people had the United States not swept him from power, argued Sinan Antoon, a New York-based Iraqi poet and author.
“No matter what — and I say this as someone who was opposed to Saddam’s regime since childhood and wrote his first novel about life under dictatorship — had the regime remained in power, tens of thousands of Iraqis would still be alive today, and children in Fallujah would not be born with congenital defects every day,” Antoon told Today’s WorldView, alluding to the impact of U.S. forces allegedly using rounds of depleted uranium in their battles across Iraq.
Antoon added that we also would not have seen the rise of the Islamic State had the United States not invaded — a conviction shared by former president Barack Obama and echoed by myriad experts. “In the near term, the Iraqi political order probably would not have collapsed and created a void that nonstate or quasi-state actors could fill,” wrote international relations scholars Hal Brands and Peter Feaver in a 2017 study.
“The Sunni-Shia cleavage that has made Iraq so difficult to govern still would have been present,” they continued, “but without the violence, political chaos and Sunni marginalization of the post-invasion period, that cleavage would have remained in a less combustible state, and terrorist groups such as [al-Qaeda in Iraq] and [the Islamic State] would not have found such fertile ground for recruiting.”
Other paths were possible. In 2002, Shibley Telhami, a veteran pollster affiliated with the Brookings Institution and a professor at the University of Maryland, was part of a group of Middle East scholars based in the United States who opposed the Bush administration’s drumbeat to war in Iraq.
“Bush had a chance to build global coalitions, strengthen international norms and institutions, focus on the threat from al-Qaeda, reshape relations in the Gulf region and use domestic and international support to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which, before 9/11, was the central grievance against the United States in the Middle East,” Telhami told Today’s WorldView.
Instead, he added, “Bush chose a policy of unilateralism,” pursuing a war that ravaged the Middle Eastern country, stoked sectarian violence and extremist militancy and “ended the balance of power between Iran and Iraq.” Iran’s gain from seeing its longtime foe fall in Baghdad, in turn, would reset the geopolitical calculations of Gulf Arab states, which became “so insecure that they embarked on destabilizing policies of their own, including the Yemen war,” said Telhami.
In 2003, the Iraqi regime still faced asphyxiating international sanctions. Had those eventually weakened — various countries apart from the United States were eager to bring Iraq out from the cold — the country’s youths would have been better linked to the world and an entrenched regime could have faced its own Arab Spring uprising.
Rasha al-Aqeedi of the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a Washington think tank, suggests an “Iraqi spring” would still have been brutally put down by the country’s Baathist government. “Saddam would have passed away and [his son] Qusay would have become president — an Iraqi version of [Syrian President Bashar] al-Assad, basically,” she told Today’s WorldView, imagining a milder end for the Iraqi dictator who was hanged in 2006. The status quo in Baghdad would have been “as stable as an authoritarian Baathist state can be.”
Alternatively, there could have been a steady internal unraveling, with the United States in a stronger position to support democratic and economic development, Amy Hawthorne, research director at the Project on Middle East Democracy, told Today’s WorldView. “Iraq, under punishing international sanctions and totalitarian rule for another decade, would have become a failed state, with parts of the south and Iraqi Kurdistan falling outside Saddam’s control.”
Instead, by 2007, the United States was compelled to deploy a “surge” of its troops to combat an Iraqi insurgency it would never quite quell. For multiple reasons, from feckless leadership to sectarian enmities, the government that the United States helped prop up in Baghdad would make a catalogue of its own mistakes. The occupation swiftly became a parable for American blundering and hubris.
“The U.S. was barely keeping its head above water during the surge,” Nasr said. “The aura of its power was gone.”
Ishaan Tharoor is a columnist on the foreign desk of The Washington Post, where he authors the Today’s WorldView newsletter and column. He previously was a senior editor and correspondent at Time magazine, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.
OUCH!
This report from the Casper Star Tribune showing that the even smaller state of Wyoming has seen 7,358 students and 60 staff test positive in the first week of school. (Daily Kos)
Enough bloodshed for active combatants and veterans the world over! Why must our playing cards always risk death to enlisted men and women (aka Trump’s “suckers?”) Why not schedule a game at an agreed-upon date and let the winner of the freedom-from-death GAME be declared the winner? If we’re all brothers and sisters under the skin, it seems the rational thing to do. I’m bothered by the idea of living humans being moved across combat zones like chess pieces when there’s a rational alternative. Sure, we’d be gambling, but aren’t we anyway?.
It feels like I’m there! Thanks, Lois!
My mum and her sisters kept a diary during the war; a few years ago I shared the entries they made. In the early years of the war, my grandmother and her daughters, my mum and her sisters, were very kind and hospitable to the young soldiers stationed near their village of Harston. Alan, the oldest in the family was int RAF, and although grandpa had enlisted despite being fifty, he was at home and he too was glad to welcome these lads. My mum and aunties kept a diary which they called ‘Ships that pass in the night’, recording the visits of these young men who were soon to be posted away.
9th – 26th June 1940
Noel Francis Bone L/C Aged 22 years
2nd London Div. Royal Corps of Signals
Home: – London
Stationed: – Pinehurst, Harston
On the evening of 9th June 1940, a few hours after Tony met with his accident…
View original post 800 more words
Dana Milbank is a regular opinion writer for The Washington Post. As a native Texan, who still has strong emotional ties to the state, I found his analysis to be deeply upsetting. Since the Supreme Court’s decision not to overturn the Texas abortion ban, I can no longer buy anything from Texas, including Tito’s, my favorite vodka. When the anti-vaxxers show up at school board meetings proclaiming “My body, my choice,” I wonder why they don’t feel the same about women’s reproductive rights.
Texas this week showed us what a post-democracy America would look like. Thanks to a series of actions by the Texas legislature and governor, we now see exactly what the Trumpified Republican Party wants: to take us to an America where women cannot get abortions, even in cases of rape and incest; an America where almost everybody can openly carry a gun in public, without license, without permit, without safety training and without fingerprinting; and an America where law-abiding Black and Latino citizens are disproportionately denied the right to vote. This is where Texas and other red states are going, or have already gone. It is where the rest of America will go, unless those targeted by these new laws — women, people of color and all small “d” democrats — rise up.
On Wednesday, a Texas law went into effect that bans abortions later than six weeks, after the Supreme Court let pass a request to block the statute. Because 85 to 90 percent of women get abortions after six weeks, it amounts to a near-total ban. Already on the books in Texas is a “trigger” law that automatically bans all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest, if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. At least 10 other states have done likewise.
Also Wednesday, a new law went into effect in Texas, over the objections of law enforcement, allowing all Texans otherwise allowed to own guns to carry them in public, without a license and without training. Now, 20 states have blessed such “permitless carry.”
And on Tuesday, the Texas legislature passed the final version of the Republican voting bill that bans drive-through and 24-hour voting, both used disproportionately by voters of color; imposes new limits on voting by mail, blocks election officials from distributing mail-ballot applications unless specifically requested; gives partisan poll watchers more leeway to influence vote counting; and places new rules and paperwork requirements that deter people from helping others to vote or to register. At least 17 states have adopted similar restrictions.
All three of these actions are deeply antidemocratic. Texans overwhelmingly object to permitless carry. Fully 57 percent of Texas voters oppose such a law and only 36 percent support it, according to a June poll by the University of Texas and the Texas Tribune. The partnership’s April poll found that, by 46 percent to 20 percent, Texans want stricter gun laws — and support for tougher laws is 54 percent among women, 55 percent among Latinos and 65 percent among Black voters.
Texans also oppose banning all abortions if Roe is overturned, with 53 percent against a ban and 37 percent for one. Women oppose the ban, 58 percent to 33 percent. A narrow plurality (46 percent to 44 percent) oppose the six-week ban, too.
Furthermore, pluralities of Texans opposed the ban on drive-through voting and restrictions on early voting hours. The drive-through ban was particularly objectionable to Black voters (52 percent opposed to 30 percent in the April poll) and Latino voters (44 percent to 36 percent), as were the limits on early voting hours, opposed 52 percent to 28 percent among Black voters and 46 percent to 31 percent among Latino voters.
And that’s the whole point of such voter-suppression laws. Texas became a “majority minority” state more than 15 years ago — and the country as a whole will follow in about two decades. But White voters still dominate the electorate. Latinos are about 40 percent of the Texas population, but only 20 to 25 percent of the electorate. Texas legislators aren’t answering to the people but rather to the White, male voters that put the Republicans in power. The new voting law, by suppressing non-White votes, aims to keep White voters dominant. As demographics turn more and more against Republicans in Texas, their antidemocratic actions will only get worse.
Bad things happen when leaders don’t reflect the will of the people. This is happening already in Texas and some other red states. It will be happening more nationally if Republicans get their way.
I’ve lived a long life…
The fourth consecutive Wednesday posting of Fallout: A Survivor Talks to Incest Offenders:
First, I must tell you that I was not severely traumatized by my sexual abuse. I did not significantly dissociate nor develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I provisionally met the criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder at one time. I’m telling you this so you can place the effects incest had on me in perspective.
Numerous others described herein experienced much more damage. Even with my non-violent assault, however, the damage should be obvious in the following pages.
FOR MEN WHO MOLEST
It is probable that you are much more than a man who molests. You may engage in good deeds, be a hard worker and good provider.
Like an animal that has developed rabies, however, you become a danger to society and will be/are being treated as such when your behavior is discovered. Your contributions to society become invisible and you are a marked man. The condition may not be terminal, however. In fact, you are far from alone in the population.
Most men who molest children have not yet been reported and convicted, nor have they been exposed to some of the information provided in treatment programs. You can learn to understand your urges and explore strategies for controlling them.
David Finkelhor was sensitive to the potential usefulness of shared information when he wrote of prevention programs: “Even without specifically addressing the possibility that audience members might become abusers … it is likely that these programs do have an important deterrent influence on anyone who is exposed to them, if for no other reason than that they clearly reinforce the norm that such behavior is exploitative of a child” (Finkelhor 1986b, 234). I hope the information in this book will both encourage men who are still free to resist molesting and strengthen the resolve of those currently in treatment.
The majority of incestuous fathers are symbiotic, in that they feel an emotional bond with their victim (Courtois 1988; Justice and Justice 1979). Maddock and Larson (1995, 84) refer to “affectional based incest,” reporting that “a significant amount of incest behavior appears to serve as a means of expressing affection.” (There is a difference between affection and empathy, however; see Chapter 5.)
A glaring example of this misinformed motivation is reported by de Young (1982, 36), who quotes a molester as saying: “I wanted to be her lover, not the victimizer. I wanted her to remember our affair as one of affection and warmth, not fear and pain.”
Much of the thrust of this book is, therefore, to make a case for the fact that incest is damaging, especially for a child you care about or who is under your protection. I use myself as the example, since to outward appearances I have “succeeded” in life. Read my story and you will find otherwise.
FOR SURVIVORS:
I hope that survivors will find the information within these pages helpful, not only in the section for survivors but also the perpetrator section. I myself was surprised to learn that being able to make sense of my sexual abuse is healing, as discussed later in the book.
A group of female survivors and their therapist once visited our
program during a group session. Each man introduced himself and explained why he was in prison. They answered any questions the visitors had. After the group was over, the survivors confessed they had been anxious, scared, and even angry with the men they were
yet to meet. Upon leaving they reported feeling better about the
men, whom they saw as working on themselves.
From time to time I wondered how my father or grandfather would have fit into our prison group. Would they have denied their culpability? My grandfather would deny his molesting behavior and perhaps convince himself that he was blameless. I can imagine him complaining—as I have heard more than one offender do—that “it’s gotten so you can’t even give your grandkid a hug any more.”
I do not believe treatment would have deterred my grandfather. My father would have been more honest, but both would have denied that any damage had been done.
So do child molesters—especially incest offenders—harm their
victims?
At first I resisted the idea that much of my life had been negatively shaped by the incest. Then as I learned more about the kinds of effects it exerts, I was able to gain a clearer perspective of myself. Coming to realize that I have dissociated was an eye-opener as well. Keeping a journal, along with a record of my dreams, has been beneficial not only at the time of writing but later, when tracing my journey.
FOR THE COMMUNITY AND FAMILY
It is no surprise that the community at large knows so little about incest. It’s such an ugly topic and so difficult to discuss with children! That ignorance leaves both us and our loved ones vulnerable, however. We dress our little girls as sexy vamps, don’t know the difference between “playing doctor” and juvenile sex offending, and don’t know how to respond when our young child says she wants to marry us, insists she/he doesn’t want to return to camp again this year, or begs for a different babysitter.
What if a family member who molested a child is chastened and “wants to make it up to her,” or to work on building a better relationship with her? How should you respond if a family member
who has been in sex offender treatment gets depressed and starts blaming his victim? Or decides to start coaching Little League?
People can be wonderful in many different ways and still sexually abuse children. I hope you will find answers to these and other questions throughout this book.
FOR OTHER PROFESSIONALS
I once asked Jan Hindman why there were so many survivors treating sex offenders, and she said, “Because they know how important it is.”
Come see what I share
Welcome to the Anglo Swiss World
EXPRESSIONS
Loves, lamentation, and life through prose, stories, passions, and essays.
Let's Explore The Great Mystery Together!
Second Look Behind the Headlines - News you can use...
choosing medical career; problem faced by doctors; drawbacks of medical profession;patient tutorials
Cries from Jamaica
A place where I post unscripted, unedited, soulless rants of a insomniac madman
CHOOSE LOVE
My Life And Everything Within It
Just Here Secretly Figuring Out My Gender
A Watering Hole for Freelance Human Beings Who Still Give a Damn
"The only thing that stands between you and your dream is the will to try and the belief that it is actually possible." - Joel Brown
we're all cyborgs now
Seeking Dialogue to Inform, Enlighten, and/or Amuse You and Me
NANMYKEL.COM 