Just Me

On this Memorial Day, I would like to remember all of the countless innocent victims of war who have been raped, maimed, or murdered because of the fear, greed, shortsightedness, and stupidity of people in power. I would like to remember the landscapes that have been decimated, poisoned, and irradiated out of all of their splendor and usefulness. I would like to call out the military industrial complex that uses a spectacular propaganda campaign to convince poor people all around the world—with the allure of glory, patriotic superiority, rations, and “safety”—that they are each others’ enemies. I would like to implore those soldiers who serve to please think and try, if they can, to find another way to survive. The system does not care about its soldiers and the evidence is in how they’re treated once they return from raising hell in some distant land. Every homeless or untreated mentally ill or unemployed veteran is proof that the military industrial complex cares about its soldiers to the degree that they’re guard dogs and cannon fodder; to the degree that they can secure resources for the wealthiest 1%; resources which poor soldiers will scarcely benefit from, if at all. On this Memorial Day, my greatest wish is for REAL justice and LASTING peace.

Ashe.

A lot of people don’t heal [from trauma], and it manifests in a lot of different ways throughout their lives. There’s a study they did with Vietnam vets who’d had—clearly—a lot of trauma during the war. Twenty years later, they measured their levels of pain before and after they showed them intense footage from Vietnam. Pretty much across the board, after they saw this really intense, violent footage from the war, their levels of pain went down. Because when trauma doesn’t get to work itself through your system, your system idles at a heightened state, and so getting more really intense input calms your system down….A lot of folks who’ve survived trauma end up being really calm in crisis and freaking out in everyday life.