A few days ago I received an e-mail from one of our TMV editors asking me if I would respond to a request from “Survivor Corps” to share news about their organization and about a specific program of that organization, “Operation Survivor.”
As one who has done his best to publicize the plight of our veterans, and especially the sorry treatment they have received from an administration that sent them into harm’s way and that touted “support the troops,” but didn’t, I am glad to do it, and only sorry that it has taken me three days to do so.
If you go to the “Survivor Corps” web site, you’ll learn the following facts:
First, about “Survivor Corps”:
Survivor Corps helps people around the world who have suffered war and violence to rebuild their lives and rejoin their communities. By connecting those affected by conflict through networks of survivors, they help people overcome trauma and injury and regain their place in society. Survivor Corps (formerly Landmine Survivors Network) was born out of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, and recently spearheaded the development of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Over the past ten years, they have established successful peer support programs in eight war affected countries in Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Now, to the more recent work by this organization, “Operation Survivor”:
First, some background:
Within the United States there are over one and a half million service members that have served in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over thirty thousand have been physically wounded, but many more have experienced less visible, psychological wounds. Traumatic Brain Injury and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder have emerged as signature injuries of these conflicts, with recent reports suggesting an increase in rates of suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, homelessness, and domestic violence among returning service members and veterans.
Ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are creating a generation of veterans in the United States from all branches of the armed services and all 50 states who are struggling to overcome physical and psychosocial injuries. Most combat veterans convalescing in military hospitals across the country will survive physically, but getting on with their lives after returning home to their families and communities is proving a significant challenge for hundreds of thousands. Among the 1.6 million who have served since 2001, suicide is on the rise, as is unemployment and incidents of substance abuse and domestic violence
Survivor Corps feels that the successful reintegration of returning service members is “an issue that will have a long-lasting impact on American society, and may become the single defining struggle facing this new generation of veterans.”
Thus, Survivor Corps and its partners are determined to avoid the mistakes made when veterans returned from Vietnam, which resulted in tens of thousands of post-war suicides and over 200,000 men and women living on the streets.
To avoid such mistakes, Survivor Corps will build peer support programs at the community level that will bring service members and veterans together for mutual support and encourage both individual responsibility and collective action to help others in need.
It is offering an alternative “treatment” that can be made readily available in all communities, regardless of proximity to traditional military or government centers of support. Their approach is nimble enough to address the needs of individual survivors, while still broad enough to build a coalition of survivors and service providers working to effect long-term positive change.
To learn more about “Survivor Corps” and about their new program to help the recovery and reintegration of hundreds of thousands of returning U.S. service members at a critical time for them and their country, please go to SurvivorCorps.org. You may even talk yourself into donating to this worthy program
November 14th, 2008 By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
GEORGE WALKER BUSH: THEN AND NOW
I had long planned to post an abridged text of George Bush’s 2000 Republican National Convention acceptance speech closer to Inauguration Day and compare his words with his deeds, but the post-mortems already are flying fast and furious. This includes a lot of revisionist clap-trap from conservative bloggers whose heads remain firmly up their backsides, including drivel to the effect that because Bush “is a kind and decent man” the excesses and failures of the last eight years should be overlooked if not excused.
I happened to be in the hall when Bush accepted the nomination that steamy August night in Philadelphia and was horrified not just by the vacuity of his words but the knowledge that up on the podium was a resume without a man into which every neoconservative and other Republican with a burr in their saddle would pour their pet animosities, causes and policies.
It was going to be rocky four or eight years, but no one could have foreseen the scope and magnitude of the Bush administration’s epic failures, including its inability to confront every major crisis on its watch.
Following are excerpts from the speech in italics and what has transpired:
November 12th, 2008 By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
I said from the moment it became obvious that Barack Obama would prevail that winning would be the easy part, and I have felt distinctly uncomfortable observing his first interactions as president-elect with George Bush and the Washington establishment.
Part of that unease falls into the category of This Is Too Good To Be True, and it will be a while before I don’t wake up in the morning wondering if it is all a dream.
The larger part of my unease is the reality that governing — you know, stuff like uniting, leading and legislating — presents challenges for any incoming president, even one with a mandate that is as broad as Obama’s. (Chris Rock hilariously notes that Obama of course has been given the most difficult job in the world because he’s black)
But this guy is being handed the reins of power in the midst of a multi-alarm fire, and while Democrats control both houses of Congress, the potential to screw up is high even if there were the makings of a bipartisan consensus on some seriously big issues like the economy, health-care reform and Iraq. Which there are not.
* * * * *
Here’s a scary thought: Conservative pundit William Kristol has been wrong — often wildly wrong — about virtually everything that he has commentated on at the Weekly Standard and The New York Times this election cycle.
So it is with horror that I note that he is predicting that it will be a tough four years for conservatives because Obama will preside over an economic recovery that will be in full flower when it comes time to for him to run for re-election.
November 11th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
The Walking Wounded
What can be done for the literally quarter million homeless vets wandering the highways and byways of our country, those who often walk miles every day and who have feet that look like bleeding lumber?
The issue of homeless vets appears to be similar somehow to poverty in pockets of Appalachia, the poverty in the outback of the Navajo Reservation and up to Rosebud… the abject poverty through much of the tobacco belt in the South.
So much resource is thrown at it all. But, somehow, something is missing. Something, but what? For the issues persist. I don’t pretend to know the fix, but I do know some of the helps.
Us.
One help is vision correction. For, in some regard, we too often develop an accidental but severe case of ’see-through-ish,‘
…that is, we, the watcher-helpers of this poor old world, no longer see what stands right before us; we mentally erase the disheveled, the tattered sign-carrying, the addicted, the ill… as one of those chronic issues that ‘will always be with us.’
I can sometimes feel it coming over me as well, and I resist that idea of “the poor will always be with us,’ if instead of it being a clarion call to action, that phrase is used instead to put us to sleep, for the phrase can sound so peaceful a phrase, so tidy, so wise.
But, it’s not necessarily. That phrase can be, instead, a powerful and poisonous soporific.
Yet, taking on helping whatever stands right before us, within our reach, is the only mighty spell-breaker we have for our spells of see-through-ish.
Thus, four days ago, 60 working women and men veterans, including my husband ( 21 year USAF partially disabled veteran,) did just that– broke through see-through-ish. Again.
They got out their sinew and gut, their bandages and iron thread, revved up their pickup trucks and vans, and helped to mend the part of the world within their reach.
With the help of the VA, Vet’s groups, homeless shelters, churches, they went out into the streets and under the bridges and along the small forests on the Platte River, bringing homeless vets in from the cold, every last one they could find.
Some homeless vets came willingly; some had to be cajoled, some were angry– why now, why not long ago? Many were literally growing moss in their beards, some were loaded, some were mentally compromised, many had infections, some were so sick they had to be dead-man carried. He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother. Yes.
This is what happened next… It could easily be made to happen where you live, too… mending up the part of the world within our reach…
November 10th, 2008 By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
To be an American (unlike being English or French) is precisely to image a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history. — LESLIE FIEDLER
The tears of joy have dried. The stage in Grant Park has been taken down. The celebrations are history. As the dust settles from Election Day 2008 the biggest message is that the 1960s are now officially over. The Baby Boomers have passed the torch. We are finally moving on.
And not a day too soon.
Born in 1947, I am a card-carrying Boomer and very much a product of the 1960s and the dirty little war and enormous social upheaval that decade brought. I am also aware that having been given the wheel a few elections ago, we have blown it bigtime.
To riff on a familiar campaign phrase, are we better off today than we were in 1968? Of course not.
The gap between rich and poor has become a yawning gulf. Main Street is in crisis and now Wall Street, as well. Nearly one in six Americans have no health insurance and access to decent care is becoming more difficult. There has been an erosion of civil liberties at home and rampant saber rattling abroad. The 9/11 attacks could have been a teaching moment, but instead unleashed deep-seated hatreds.
And the failure of old-style liberalism has been as complete as new-style neoconservatism.
When I saw this ad this morning I was struck that it seemed there was more warning than ad. (Timing it I get roughly 50 seconds of promo to 40 seconds of spooky warning.)
Then the clincher: The big brag for all this risk is that 44% of people quit smoking “at the end of” 12 weeks vs. 18% for the placebo. That risk/reward ratio doesn’t sound good to me!
It appears the Food and Drug Administration may upgrade warnings after a spate of road-traffic accidents and seizures involving people on the drug:
Pfizer, which has been struggling to overcome nearly a year of negative publicity involving Chantix, questioned the report’s conclusions. It noted that the institute’s figures are based solely on voluntary reports by doctors and others of incidents that occurred with patients taking the drug. Pfizer said these reports “are often unverifiable and lack sufficient medical information to draw any conclusions.”
Doesn’t that sound eerily like what we used to hear from cigarette companies?
November 7th, 2008 By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
If you talk to school kids what’s one constant? Many of them can tell you they’ve been bullied. If you talk to an adult — no matter how old — he or she will also tell you no matter that they can remember when they were bullied, and they probably tell you when, where, how old they were when it took place and even who did it.
Are bullies just mean people who grow out of it? Or are they misunderstood? Or are will their bullying get worse as time goes on? Do they do it because they can’t help themselves or to they actually think it’s fun?
New research confirms what many kids and grown up adults have suspected for years: bullies actually enjoy watching other people squirm in fear (or even pain) because it makes them feel good. The answer has come in research involving brain scans:
Bullies may actually enjoy the pain they cause others, a new study using brain scans suggests.
The part of the brain associated with reward lights up when an aggressive teen watches a video of someone hurting another person, but not when a non-aggressive youth watches the same clip, according to the University of Chicago study, published in the current Biological Psychology.
“Aggressive adolescents showed a specific and very strong activation of the amygdala and ventral striatum (an area that responds to feeling rewarded) when watching pain inflicted on others, which suggested that they enjoyed watching pain,” researcher Jean Decety, a professor in psychology and psychiatry at the University of Chicago, said in a university news release. “Unlike the control group, the youth with conduct disorder did not activate the area of the brain involved in self-regulation (the medial prefrontal cortex and the temporoparietal junction).”
While both groups showed activity in the brain’s pain centers, the brains of aggressive males, those with conduct disorder, also showed activity in the brain’s pleasure centers, suggesting that they may have been enjoying what they were seeing. Normal males showed no such activity.
“It just dumbfounded us,” said Dr. Benjamin Lahey, co-author of the study and professor of epidemiology and psychiatry at the University of Chicago.
Lahey said he expected an emotionally indifferent response to pain from subjects with conduct disorder, a mental disorder characterized by aggressive, destructive or harmful behavior towards other people and animals and can include theft, substance abuse and sexual promiscuity, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
It turns out that the brain circuitry in people with conduct disorder is different from a neurotypical person’s when it comes to pain.
PERSONAL NOTE: In my other incarnation I visit a lot of schools to do programs on bullying. It is a major concern in many schools throughout the country.
Schools try and teach kids at an early age that respect equals no teasing/no bullying. Schools consider it a major issue due to the pain bullying causes, how kids who are bullied might not come to school, the morality of bullying and, in the larger picture, the role bullying may have played in triggering violence on the part of victims or students who perceive they are victims in student violence directed against teachers and students in cases such asthe 1999 Columbine High School massacre. Bullying in kids can eventually morph into assault when they become teens and adults.
“The American is not always a cretin, it must be said. Having covered Bush’s reelection campaign four years ago, I saw how that debilitating cocktail of ‘gay marriage-abortion-family-religion-terrorism,’ mixed into the cauldron labeled ‘moral values broth,’ moved entire states into W’s column.
“The ‘true’ American, according to conservative mythology, is White, with family, patriotic, extremely religious, hates socialism, communism, foreigners and paying taxes. He is so naive that he believes he can save America by attacking Iraq and, at any rate, he has invested himself in a mission: to export his model to other people (without asking their opinion). This American, if he ever existed, no longer exists. This is the terrible discovery that McCain and the Republicans have just made. And it’s super-good news for America and the rest of the world. ”
“The White American - whom McCain calls Joe the Plumber or Palin calls Joe Sixpack - is no longer blinded by lies. He has seen the war in Iraq and is suffering through a crisis, while Republicans spouting about abortion, taxes or an American victory in Iraq no longer move him. The latest poll shows that half of White men are going to vote Democrat. For the first time in thirty years!
They want someone who speaks concretely, calmly, moderately: in the center. They refuse to scorn the intellectual, the notorious “elite” that the McCain camp denounces - Obama graduated from Harvard. They refuse to be afraid (of bin Laden, of the enemies of America, etc.) The White American male has closed himself off from old-fashioned ideology and has entered the rational era.”
Part of that unease falls into the category of This Is Too Good To Be True, and it will be a while before I don’t wake up in the morning wondering if it is all a dream.
