WHEN WILL IT STOP?

FROM WHERE I SIT...

Dwight Eisenhower’s statement

warning of the

Military-Industrial Complex:

This speech was made in January as 

Eisenhower handed the torch to Kennedy.

As we peer into society's future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.

Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

ALSO:

          - Eisenhower never thought, or meant, our 

            commitment in Southeast Asia to be long term.

         - Then, behind closed doors, Kennedy, under

            pressure from the Military/Industrial Complex, 

            started increasing our footprint there, while

            everyone swooned over what a beautiful person he

            was.

         - Johnson owed many people political I.O.U.’s and the

           M/I Complex held quite a few. He oversaw a huge                     Military buildup; to over 600,000 Troops.

         - Then, 1968-1969-1970 happened in the U.S.

           Martin Luther King - April 4, 1968, Memphis, TN

           Bobby Kennedy - June 6, 1968, Los Angeles, CA

           Woodstock - August 17, 1969, Woodstock, NY

           Kent State - May 4, 1970, Kent, Ohio

                  *note: I was serving in the Army over that period of time,

                  so I wasn’t in the U.S. and that made it hard to fully         

                  appreciate what was going on back home.

Rich people paying poor people      

to kill other poor people on the

other side of the world. War is

a rich man’s game. All wars are

banker’s wars.

Then we got the Reagan - W. Bush years, and we still insisted on fighting wars in foreign lands. I must say that, since the Vietnam Conflict, the U.S. hasn’t had a very good track record of actually winning or ending our Military Expeditions and National objectives, or our wars. Nobody knows how to formulate an “exit plan” from all our recent conflicts, large and small.

No one can lay blame on the Military’s doorstep. The Military did what they were sent to do, and won the battles. There were, and are, forces at work that have a burning desire to micro-manage every aspect of our war machine, so our men and women in uniform can only do their masters’ bidding.

Who are their masters? That would be the Congress and the Military/Industrial Complex. This Complex is not what you see on the surface. It has many layers and runs deep into our economic system.

1)  The major Manufacturers of our war machine

2)  Subcontractors in this Country & foreign Countries

3)  the weapons design community; including our Universities

4)  etc...........

That is just a brief overview of how this system works. It takes a lot of money to make the production chain work; from raw material sourcing to finished product. All the banks and almost all the producers have shareholders who expect to make money. That is when the bankers arrive to start the ball rolling.

The larger players also have their lobbyists on K Street in Washington DC. During this cycle, there are trillions of dollars changing hands. Where does that money eventually come from? If you guessed the American taxpayer, you would be correct.

I think the hardest pill to swallow is that “We The People” are purposely blocked from having any say in how our money is spent. There is also no accounting or auditing on where and how all these trillions of dollars are spent. Somehow, we have left Congress in charge of allocating these monies in their best interests: not ours. More often than not, our Congress bows to those who donate large sums of money to their reelections.

I feel what it comes down to is there has to be some structural changes in the way our elected officials get elected and what they are restricted from doing once elected.

If you can’t be elected to an office without accepting corporate donations from lobbyists, perhaps you’re in the wrong business. If you come under the spell of the sinister, greedy lobbyists on K Street in DC, a career change is a great option.

The only thing that “We The People” have left to control is the ballot box. A staggering number of Americans opt out of the ballot box; they just stay home and suck their thumbs. Meanwhile their world is crumbling and they don’t have a clue. The best this Country can do is send maybe 60% of eligible voters to the polls in a Presidential election year. This percentages are even worse when it comes to State and local elections.

If American democracy is

to survive, these percentages

must be brought up to

the 90-95% level.

Cut Ties With The FOP

FROM WHERE I SIT...

The Fraternal Order of the Police is the deadliest frat in the world.

Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd’s murders sparked righteous outrage across the United States and the world, with millions of people taking the streets to protest the unjust treatment of Black people at the hands of the police. While the majority of the country, including non-governmental leaders and politicians of all party affiliations, have denounced these murders, there’s one outlier: police unions.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the Minneapolis Police Chief Bob Kroll penned a letter to his fellow officers calling George Floyd a “violent criminal”, and called the people protesting his unjust killing “terrorists.” While many would find Kroll’s comments to be deplorable and inflammatory, he is not the only police union head to spew such rhetoric following the murder of an innocent Black person. 

When the officer who killed Laquan McDonald was convicted of murder, Chicago’s police union slammed the trial process as unfair. When Philando Castile was murdered by police in Minneapolis, the union president jumped to the officer’s defense with attempts to discredit accusations of racism. When 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot dead in Cleveland, cops appealed the removal of the officer responsible. And even now, in this moment of national revolt against police brutality, we’re seeing these groups double down on their racist excuses for unforgivable violence. The Minneapolis police union has continued to throw its support behind violent, troublesome officers in defending George Floyd’s murderer. One of New York’s police-only unions recently doxed — released identifying and personal information to the public — the mayor’s daughter, who is Black, after she was arrested during a protest. 

Police unions create one of the biggest barriers to our progress towards officer accountability and policy change. These institutions keep the tradition of police brutality alive and pledge blind loyalty to police officers -- even the most violent among them -- and make powerful political allies of the elected prosecutors who are intended to hold them to account. For decades, police union leaders have used their power and influence over the law enforcement community to preserve a rigged system rather than embrace fair, safe, common-sense solutions.

We know that the Black community, when organized, is a powerful force for political and social change -- and we’re paying attention. We are taking note of which elected officials have chosen to accept contributions and make themselves beholden to these unions, and against the interests of our community. The time has come for these officials to make a choice: you are either with the people, or you are in support of systemic police violence and mass incarceration.

We call on elected leaders across the nation to return and refuse political donations from police unions and the Fraternal Order of Police that have excused, defended and encouraged police violence for decades.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Here is the petition:

Dear (Elected Official),

I am writing to you as a concerned constituent who stands against police brutality and white supremacy. I am urging you to stand on the right side of history: refuse to take any political donations from police unions or sheriff associations and donate any contributions you have taken in the last year to Black-led community-strengthening initiatives. 

The continued violence against Black, Brown, and Native communities at the hands of ‘law enforcement’ is disgraceful. Police unions are in the business of defending the most consistent murderers and abusers of the Black community, creating obstructions to justice for the families and loved ones.

Stand with your community today.

{Your name}

THE EVOLUTION OF PTSD

From Where I sit

How PTSD went from ‘shell-shock’ to a recognized medical diagnosis

The symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder have been recorded for millennia, but it took more than a century for physicians to classify it as a disorder with a specific treatment.

BY ERIN BLAKEMORE

PUBLISHED JUNE 16, 2020

The battles were over, but the soldiers still fought. Flashbacks, nightmares, and depression plagued them. Some slurred their speech. Others couldn’t concentrate. Haunted and fearful, the soldiers struggled with the ghosts of war.

Which war? If you guessed Vietnam, the U.S. Civil War, or even World War I, you’d be wrong. These soldiers’ symptoms were recorded not on paper charts, but on cuneiform tablets inscribed in Mesopotamia more than 3,000 years ago.

Back then, the ancient soldiers were assumed to have been hexed by ghosts. But if they were treated today, they would likely receive a formal psychiatric diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Although the diagnosis has its roots in combat, the medical community now recognizes that PTSD affects civilians and soldiers alike. Patients develop PTSD after experiencing, learning about, or witnessing a traumatic event—defined as “actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence”—and their intrusive symptoms affect their ability to cope in the present.

Nearly seven percent of American adults will likely experience PTSD during their lifetimes, but it took hundreds of years, and the dawn of industrial-scale warfare, for society to recognize the deleterious physical and mental effects of experiencing, witnessing, or becoming aware of traumatic events.

"Traumatic hysteria"

Medical historians have documented many early accounts of what would now be classified as PTSD. There’s Herodotus’ description of an Athenian soldier who became blind after witnessing the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., and a Shakespearean monologue in Henry IV, Part 1 in which Lady Percy describes her husband’s sleeplessness and inability to enjoy life after fighting a battle. Then there are more modern descriptions, like accounts of Civil War combatants who developed what their doctors called “soldier’s heart.”

But though early physicians looked for a physical cause, it wasn’t until the 1880s that psychiatrists connected the symptoms to the brain. At the time, women who expressed vehement emotions were labeled with “hysteria,” a condition that supposedly arose from the uterus. When French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot saw similar symptoms in men, he chalked them up to traumatic events—rather than biological destiny—and the term “traumatic hysteria” was born.

“The concept of trauma was entangled with feminine weakness from the beginning,” says Mary Catherine McDonald, a historian of PTSD who works as an assistant professor of philosophy and religious studies at Old Dominion University. And when World War I blasted onto the scene, it challenged a common conviction that psychological steadiness was a matter of personal character, masculinity, and moral strength.

Shell shock and combat fatigue

From aerial combat to poison gas, WWI introduced terrifying new combat technology on a previously unimaginable scale, and soldiers left the front shattered. Seemingly overnight, the field of war psychiatry emerged and a new term—shell shock—appeared to describe a range of mental injuries, from facial tics to an inability to speak. Hundreds of thousands of men on both sides left World War I with what would now be called PTSD, and while some received a rudimentary form of psychiatric treatment, they were vilified after the war. As historian Fiona Reid notes, “shell-shock treatment was constantly entwined with discipline” in militaries that had trouble aligning their beliefs in courage and heroism with the reality of men who bore invisible wounds.

By World War II, psychiatrists increasingly recognized that combat would have mental health ramifications—and concluded that too many men who were prone to anxiety or “neurotic tendencies” had been selected to serve in the previous war. But though six times as many American men were screened and rejected for service in the lead-up to the World War II, military service still took its toll. About twice as many American soldiers showed symptoms of PTSD during World War II than in World War I. This time their condition was called “psychiatric collapse,” “combat fatigue,” or “war neurosis.”

Military officials assumed that removing men from combat situations or treating them with injections of drugs such as sodium amytal would relieve their psychiatric distress. It didn’t work: Nearly 1.4 million of the 16.1 million men who served in World War II were treated for combat fatigue during the war, and the condition was responsible for 40 percent of all discharges.

Post-Vietnam syndrome

A growing recognition of the ubiquity of psychiatric injury during war prompted more compassionate approaches to traumatized veterans. “The soldier suffers in the modern war situation a privation hard to equal in any situation in civilian or even primitive life,” wrote psychiatrist Abram Kardiner, whose 1941 book The Traumatic Neuroses of War helped change views of what is now known as PTSD. But, despite a growing recognition of the unique stresses of combat, as well as studies that showed the effects of war could last for decades, soldiers continued to face out-of-date views on their ability to bounce back from combat-related psychiatric distress.

In 1952, the American Psychological Association published the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the closest thing psychiatry has to a bible. The handbook helps professionals diagnose mental illnesses and strongly influences everything from research to public policy to health insurance. But veterans’ symptoms were categorized under disorders like depression or schizophrenia instead of being recognized as a distinct diagnosis.

Enter “Post-Vietnam syndrome,” a term coined in 1972 by psychiatrist Chaim Shatan. By then, Vietnam veterans had been returning home for years, and many were beset by emotional numbness, volatility, flashbacks, and rage. In part because many experienced delayed symptoms, veterans had trouble accessing treatment and benefits despite their invisible wounds.

Increasingly, veterans turned to what psychiatrist Robert Lifton called “street corner psychiatry”—veteran self-help communities who often combined their healing with anti-war protests. Along the way, they met clinicians and researchers like Lifton and Shatan, who began to advocate for the DSM to include some kind of post-combat stress diagnosis. In 1980, “post-traumatic stress disorder” became a formal diagnosis in the DSM’s third edition. Twelve years later, it was also adopted in the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases.

Invisible wounds

Today’s definition of PTSD is more inclusive than ever—and the condition is recognized among survivors of sexual abuse or assault, health crises and surgeries, natural disasters, bereavement, mass shootings, accidents, and more. PTSD is associated with everything from flashbacks and nightmares to

hypervigilance, problems concentrating, amnesia, dissociation, and negative beliefs about themselves or others.

With every passing year, researchers develop new treatments for PTSD and learn more about how trauma affects the brain and body. They are also grappling with the possibility that the effects of trauma and stress can be passed from one generation to the next through chemical changes that effect how DNA is expressed. A 2018 study, for example, found high mortality among the offspring of men who survived Civil War prison camps in the 1860s. Scientists are still sparring over an earlier study that suggested the offspring of Holocaust survivors inherited a different balance of stress hormones than their peers.

Other researchers, like Jessica Graham-LoPresti, push against the limitations of the official PTSD diagnosis itself. A clinical psychologist and assistant professor at Suffolk University, Graham-LoPresti studies the effects of systemic racism on African-Americans. “People of color experience a lot of symptoms in response to the frequency and pervasiveness of racism that mirror the symptoms of PTSD,” she says, noting that watching footage of police brutality can exacerbate the fears and stresses of lives already touched by pervasive racist experiences. “This is not new, but [this imagery is] causing a lot of hypervigilance, emotional responses of stress and anxiety, and feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.”

But though the current definition of PTSD considers experiencing or witnessing a single incident of racialized terror an inciting incident, it doesn’t allow for the macroaggressions and intergenerational dynamics African-Americans experience every day. “It’s a complicated conversation,” says Graham-LoPresti. “It is so new, and researchers of color are starting to get a lot of pushback because the field is so overwhelmingly white.”

As Graham Lo-Presti works to connect the dots between racism and PTSD, her colleagues are considering the potential effects of another pandemic: COVID-19. Psychiatrists are bracing for a flood of patients traumatized both by surviving the illness and losing their loved ones to it. In the wake of the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong in 2003, some patients and healthcare workers developed PTSD—and in a variety of studies, people who were quarantined exhibited more signs of post-traumatic stress than people who were not.

But that doesn’t mean that everyone who lives through a traumatic event will develop PTSD—or that those with post-traumatic stress disorder can’t find healing and joy. As with other chronic illnesses, PTSD can go into remission—and as the study of PTSD matures, researchers have come to appreciate the brain’s heroic attempts to heal itself after traumatic events.

“It’s such a destructive idea to think that PSTD is dysfunction,” says McDonald. “We’re getting it fundamentally wrong when we think it’s a sign of brokenness. It’s the sign of the impulse to survive.” 

https://api.nationalgeographic.com/distribution/public/amp/history/2020/06/ptsd-shell-shock-to-recognized-medical-diagnosis