Hi brother and sister veterans and friends!
There is a new free treatment for veterans suffering Post Traumatic Stress, who have children.
If the Veterans Hospitals could cure the mental problems of their post-combat soldiers, returned from having engaged in immoral actions in defenseless populations, their children would certainly benefit.
This veteran has often thought to report having Post-Traumatic Stress, having lived almost an entire adult life with emotional upset, even depression, over the genocide by United States military forces done 'in my name' and 'in the name of family and friends', all the more intense for having personally participated in the trigger pulling.
Maybe we could force them to broaden the category to include mental distress for having taken part in something immoral.
For this elderly veteran, it is a case of one musician suffering years of mental anguish that interrupted and ended full dedication to a socially useful calling, replaced by solum duty to be the perennial conscience-stricken protester.
Are not most fellow Veterans For Peace, who steadfastly come to meetings, participate in leafleting, marches, demonstrations and other activities driven by similar brutal memories of doing wrong to mankind while deceived by their elders, by their own nation's prominent leaders and lied to by media and even clergy?
Do we not all feel compelled to try to make up for wrongdoing by working, albeit impotently, for the world peace we mistakenly, immorally, and naively followed orders to destroy in the time of our youth?
In spite of years in penance in activist dedication to history and humanism journalism to expose the false justifications of wars of imperialist capitalist society, one still suffers stress from being aware of the continuing killing overseas, killing deviously proclaimed in the military beholden conglomerate mass-media as protecting our freedoms and American interests - the taking of lives in all of our names, supposedly for everyone's good.
Each of us is living life in the singular, regardless whether one cooperates or
does not cooperate with others. Except when citizens cooperate in some agreed upon purpose, collective life is only an abstract term.
One veteran cannot personally experience another veteran's stress. Apart from Veterans For Peace meetings and activities, when each individual stress is temporarily melted down and poured into a warm brotherly collective dissatisfaction instilled with intentions to act responsibly, each of us is alone, dealing with one's own personally experienced stress.
Moreover, except when engaged in group anti-war activities, one is alone with one's thoughts, not being able to answer for anyone other than for oneself. Each of us, anguishes as if the murdering might as well have been carried out, and continues to be carried out, solely in one's own particular name, for example, in Jay Janson's name. The anguish and frustration is suffered individually.
The continual merciless slaughter of others is observed from one single
accountable conscience's point of reference and painful experience. So John, Tom, Mary, Bill, Sue, Jay, etc. are each only able to experience trauma from one's own particular perception, as the news constantly reminds us of our acquiescent complicity in our nation's bringing mass violent death to our Third World brothers and sisters.
We ache, each of us alone, for our inability to save one's fellow human beings
from slaughter. It can be diagnosed as arising within a sensitivity to caring and
helping others taught to us by our parents in early childhood.
There is no cure for this vicarious ache for the pain and misery of bereaved members of the various families whose loved ones have passed from this world in sudden horror for having gotten 'in harms way' of American weapons? No cure. One can only anesthetize the ache with distractions and thats why the majority of Americans tightly confine our interests to our personal lives, desperately seeking intense fun with sports and movies.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
