The 51st State in the Union: PTSD
Murder, madness, mayhem. Incest, child abuse, spouse abuse. Treason, perjury, malfeasance.
Americans are consuming an increasing diet of emotional toxic waste, which grows more poisonous with each new technological advance in communications. If the psychological damage on American citizens gets any worse, we'll have to add Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome as the 51st State in the Union.
More than ever, we are exposed to violence on a never before seen scale. Because of this overwhelming exposure to violence and mayhem, Americans are becoming twitchier than ever before. The result of this exposure to family violence, neighborhood violence, school and workplace violence, and now, the violence of war, is generating an increasing cycle of trauma, drug use, alcohol use, escapism, and, yes, more violence.
A mile across town, in the heart of the ‘Hood, an out of control crack head throws a tantrum in front of her teenaged relatives, and conducts a three way conversation with the imaginary people who live inside her head. She airs a litany of complaints, and blames her addiction and out of control lifestyle on everything from a purported rape attack in childhood by one her mother’s boyfriends, to a recent out of town pistol- whipping.
No one, but no one, she claims, can understand what she has gone through. Her situation is unique and her selfish family isn’t giving her proper attention. To punish them, she punishes herself. Or threatens to.
For years, she made allegations that one of her mother’s boyfriends raped her when she was a child. Her mother slid from the addiction of nightclubs, to the addiction of “the church”, with the ease of a seasoned emotional escape artist. A love affair with the powerful dynamics of the herd mentality in the nightclub soon transformed itself into a toxic addiction to "church".
After being left alone and ignored as small children now the addict and her brothers and sisters suffered the consequences of being the offspring of the ‘barfly cum church fly’, leaving her children to fend for themselves as children, and live with the consequences of her emotional abandonment as adults.
Some became sexually promiscuous. Others acted out, turned to both sex and drugs as escapes. And one, turned to promiscuity, drug use, theft, prostitution, emotional blackmail and attempted suicide.
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