Tropical Zen

It’s Veteran’s Day.

Again.

In most times and places throughout history, disabled veterans were to be discarded immediately after use; this was how it was done until relatively recently, when governments were forced to set something up. The VA as we know it was largely a product of WWII; such an overwhelming majority of the population were involved with The War Effort that Congress could not ignore their disabilities and had to create a comprehensive infrastructure to support the broken ones and their dependants.

“World War II resulted in not only a vast increase in the veteran population, but also in large number of new benefits enacted by the Congress for veterans of the war. The World War II GI Bill, signed into law on June 22, 1944, is said to have had more impact on the American way of life than any law since the Homestead Act more than a century ago.”

From http://www.va.gov/facmgt/historic/Brief_VA_History.asp

War causes so many not-dead, not-whole casualties; “undead” is not an inaccurate word for some of us. Constantly fearing for your life, and having to kill another of your own species, does a lot of psychological damage. The results are often bewildering to the civilians around us; they don’t understand why we startle at loud noises, bolt awake in terror at night, or see the faces of our victims people we may have killed when we go out shopping. It can be easy, also, to write off the common forms of self-medication in which many veterans try to lose themselves–alcoholism and drug addiction; easy, but not correct. This is suffering that has taken over mind and body, and won’t let go. Choosing escape isn’t always a moral failing. How do you explain the grueling real-ness of a nightmare that you can never wake from?

For some of us, there *is* no way to ever really come home again.

For this, if we get an “unemployable” 100% disability rating we’re paid just $300/year more than the Federal Poverty Standards; just barely enough to *not* qualify for fedral housing, college grants, or assistance programs. That’s a big if; there are so many new disabled vets coming in from the “war on terror” that the backlog for processing new vets is in the multiple hundreds of thousands. Between leaving active duty and being integrated into the VA Healthcare system, there is nothing. No money, no health care, no answers.

Those military and ex-military people who are not disabled are quick to ascribe their good fortune to their own strength, or skill, or faith; they believe that they had something to do with whether or not they were injured and disabled. This is not usually true, but it’s a tidy fiction, important to assuage survivor’s guilt. (There are situational exceptions; and the difference between “disabled” and “dead” is sometimes because of skill or determination.)

It very easily could have been you instead of me, but if you hold on to the idea that your skill somehow saved you from injury, you don’t have to think about how close you came to barely surviving, living with chronic pain. You get to maintain a sense of control.

In reality, it has to do with where you happened to be when the bomb went off; which war you were sent to and when; or sometimes, how close the truck behind you happened to be when you got bumped out of the convoy and run over. It is mostly a random chance, an accident of probability; a certain percentage of service members are going to be wounded, damaged, and killed, and it’s a crap shoot as to which side of that line we end up on. Remember, I was a warrior too, once.

I made the same commitments as someone who ultimately retired, offered the same outstanding level of wartime service, worked as hard or harder to perform my duties after I was injured during my duty– why am I not a full veteran with all the recognition and (meager) privilege? Why am I second class? We all made the same promises, we all signed away our individuality and freedom so that we could have a chance to preserve that of our children. Some of us were wounded or broken, and some of us were not. Chance.

There is often talk about “the ultimate sacrifice” – as though death were the worst that could happen. It’s not. I was young, healthy, able; now for almost 14 years, every day I struggle to get out of bed, argue with chronic pain, fight to control my PTSD and depression with pills. I fight a different fight than the service members who stayed for the full retirement; when they retire, they get to stop fighting.

I don’t get to stop fighting until I die.

Today’s Trick: Opposable Thumbs

Take your thumb and rub it lightly back and forth across the second segment of your fingers to make a whispering noise-”tssa, tssa, tss”. It’s distinct enough that that noise, repeated a few times, is enough to prevent a startled (and possibly violent) response when someone touches me unexpectedly.

Over the years, it’s come to mean many things — among them affection, care, respect, for fears and needs and space.  It also often means that petting is about to happen. This all started many years ago when I first had Sputnik the surly black cat. That boy shed like he was being paid by the by the strand–short black cat hairs floating gently everywhere with each pet. As I’d pet him I’d rub some of the fur off my fingers in the above-described fashion (tssa, tssa, tss) and he quickly associated that noise with affection, so whenever I wanted to touch him I’d make that noise. If he was sleeping, I could make the finger-whispering noise and he’d keep drowsing as I pet him (instead of attacking, which he often did in his kittenhood).

I don’t know exactly when it became a thing to do with humans, but I most strongly associate it with my kid. Like me, she startled easily and could be angry and very frightened when caught unawares. “Heightened startle response,” they call it. I also tend to pay close attention to certain familiar voices and sounds so I can pick them out from the undifferentiated din of public places, but it’s still often a game of “guess what they actually said.” We used the finger-whisper enough that even my hard-of-hearing ears could pick the noise out of the background, a vital thing when I need to hear something/someone.

Sometimes, the noise was a shortcut to whispering, “I love you.” (tssa, tssa, tss.)

I’ve since trained other animals to the sound; they pick up pretty quickly what it means. With an animal’s keen sense of hearing, they can often hear the signal from much further away than a human could, so it works pretty well as a “come here for something you like” call.  I wonder –who trained whom?

Sigh. I really miss my kid right now.

I’m trying *not* to think about actual politics today. I’m fearful of the result, whether stolen, tricked or legitimate. I’m already an anxious person with a shaky sense of hope; paying close attention to the news* and vote counts is not going to make it better. It’s all one great big anxiety-inducing show; the numbers will be the same whether I watch them or not.

This isn’t physics, where the observer effect will cause the election to be greatly altered by my singular addition to the millions of people already doing the observing. We could also see it as a thought paradox, like Schrödinger’s Cat . This was intended to point out the ridiculousness of quantum thought, but it’s still a very useful tool for seeing exactly how each version of quantum thought plays out.  I’m thinking that the same kind of ridiculousness is happening with the US presidential election–that Obama both is and is not President-Elect until we open the box (the Electoral College votes are tallied, and then the Supreme Court casts the only twleve that count) and that my anxiously watching the outside of the box won’t help either me or Obama.

I prefer to try to think about it from a zen perspective: there is no observer.
Now if only I could remember that all the time.

* “These findings demonstrate that watching the news on television triggers persisting negative psychological feelings that could not be buffered by attention-diverting distraction (i.e., lecture), but only by a directed psychological intervention such as progressive relaxation.”

One of the neat things about community is that there is some level of mutual accountability. I think, in fact, that that is a requirement in my definition of community, and probably true for the general definition as well.

I’ve decided to let anyone read, but you have to be registered to make comments. By requiring such registration for tropicalzen, there’s at least a little bit of accountability here, or more work for them to make a spammy or nasty remark. One of the things I don’t like as much about the “purely democratic” nature of the web is that there is no accountability; this is part of what makes flame wars easy. The way to combat flame wars is for the community to get together and say, “we’re not speaking to this person anymore” — accountability.

I’ve thought about this often; it seems to keep coming up all over everywhere, or the lack is sorely missing. We talk about a gay community, but there isn’t one–not in Seattle, and not in Puerto Vallarta. The scene is too big and there is no accountability. It’s strange to come from a large group of friends where checking references is easy, meeting new people is harder, and if somebody is a real jerk they can be ostracized, to a new city where everything is the opposite. More on that later, I think.

It’s okay to have anonymity and still have accountability; I don’t need to know your legal name, only who you are in relation to my community. It’s the relationships that *make* it community.

Welcome to it; I hope you’ll find some interesting people and ideas here.