pain, mourning
mike writes:
*There is no real recognition of the mourning. The mourning - the pain, the frustration, the terrible rage - have to be lived through...
Suzanne:
The difficulty that I see and hear about is not so much that there isn't recognition of the need for mourning but that hundreds of thousands of people have recently returned from refugee status to take up their former lives and their former homes. Victims and perpetrators are finding themselves living side by side as neighbors certainly without ample time to move through all of the stages of grief and to find some semblance of restitution and justice...I think the gacaca process is a noble effort to deal with an unbelievably difficult situation....We Germans and Jews are still dialoging in fact many are just beginning to) after 60 years and two generations later...
*You don't have to 'recover' - you have to walk on. As the Zen saying goes: 'Is there nowhere I can lay my burden down, even for an instant?'
Well, this may just be semantics but I do believe and have personally and in my work with One by One and as a therapist experienced what I think of as recovery. I'm about to go for a ten day EMDR training which is complicated to describe but a most amazing work that can alter the way the brain holds traumatic memory. Trauma need not be lived over and over again as it does in cases of severe PTSD...the psyche and brain can learn to hold it differently...My mother never recovered from her war trauma or her shame and guilt for being a bystander during the Holocaust but she might have if she had had access to therapy and or/dialogue the way I did. I'm not talking about forgetting...the loss will always be there...but we can learn to carry it differently as we walk on..and we can help one another make meaning of these experiences that honor our dead and our suffering....I have a dear friend whose father was responsible for the mass murder of many thousands of Jews in White Russia
and she would not have survived without the help she received from folks she met in One by One...She wouldn't have survived without the repeated assurance from several of the children of her father's victims that it wasn't her fault....nowadays she is a photographer doing amazingly beautiful work and living a relatively happy life....When she found us she was in and out of mental institutions for repeated suicide attempts....There was a recovery of sorts...a recovery of her humanity, of her belief that she had a right to live...
There is no peace without working to help with the rehumanization of the perpetrator side..That is where some of us with experience of German/Jewish reconciliation might be of help in Rwanda...We are looking at the possibility of sharing our One by One dialogue model there. I have been invited to attend a week of dialogue and workshops in March...
*I would love to be more meaningfully involved myself, but don't see how I can.
I'm not sure how to do it either...my teachers at SIT told me to take it one step at a time...two people who heard me speak at SIT when I gave my final presentation a month ago have called and invited me to speak at other events...I will speak at a class in psychological trauma at Smith college in a few weeks and possibly in New York in september....so perhaps one thing will lead to another and there will be a place fro me to do this work...
It is the personal stories and experience that are ultimately our greatest teachers....
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from deb:
Suzanne said: >>I'm about to go for a ten day EMDR training which is complicated to describe but a most amazing work that can alter the way the brain holds traumatic memory. >>
and Phoebe said: >>... There have been several studies recently that CT and some other techniques
(perhaps EMDR) stimulate the brain to make different cognitive paths, an
actual, observable change in the way our brains process thought. >>
Thanks for all this, would like to know what you learn. Have been paying attention to the drug solution , i.e., "wiping away" or "forgetting" trauma. In a culture where the range of attitudes towards the unconscious varies greatly ( e.g.., Freudian cesspool, the Id; Christian demon, evil; pure rationality's denial of uc input on all levels) this solution works to bury the pain deeper, it seems to me. To re-route seems sane... at least the concept feels 'right.'
So much of our response is to cut a great hole in a life, to throw out our past, to throw out ourselves. We're inorganic; in pieces, not whole. But then, it reflects what's being done to whole cultures. The bulldozers, everywhere.
--Posted by deborah to the moon's favors at 7/25/2005 12:58:58 PM
posted by deborah @ 7/25/2005
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
It's the way they do things. No matter who you are, what you think, know they want our kids.
No Child Left Behind was formulated slyly with the aim to bring down the public school system. Hand and hand with vouchers, it's brilliant, something that can be and has been put over as progressive, choice-ey, an answer to dissatisfaction that will work to uncover and correct problems. But not so. If your school doesn't measure up, vouchers will let your child go elsewhere with tax money. Overwhelmingly that means straight to the local Bob Jones style Heritage/Christian Academy. The ready, waiting alternative.
"Left Behind." An inside joke worthy of Goebbels.
If that seems fine to you, you'd better ask yourself where that leads, where it ends, because you give up all control. Think about it, follow it through, back to the wisdom of separation of church and state and why our founders thought such things so important.
The Right hasn't been able to bring down the NEA and get around the call for fairness, tolerance, religious freedom that is central to public schools and necessary in a Democracy. (You can't pray at school? Absurd! People pray all the time, quietly and with true reverence. They simply aren't allowed to climb up on the table in the lunch room and spew forth. Mass and Sunday School are there for all at the tax-exempt church of your choice.) They haven't been able to get their fists around Fed money for private indoctrination of the future dreamed-of Ashcroft Youth. So they devised this.
Bush made nice, selling No Child to Kennedy. He didn't let on it wouldn't be funded to succeed, that schools could only fail. And when it all rolls over all of us, the Repugs will point to Kennedy.
(See that little smirk? Bush can never get to the punch line without laughing.)
It's the way they do it. Even the way they lie is dishonest. Vote them out.
Strength,
Deborah Conner
--
Posted by deborah to the moon's favors at 7/12/2005 08:02:00 AM
posted by deborah @ 7/12/2005
Saturday, July 09, 2005
Pay particular attention to pages 72 through 78...
[http://www.suntimes.com/output/marin/cst-edt-carol081.html]
"Kids, don't fall for 'free press' hype""... But don't for a second doubt that genuine, hard news reporting is under siege. It is. Just ask Judith Miller, who was jailed Wednesday for refusing to reveal her sources for a story she never even published. Or better yet, ask the Bush administration, which has no compunction about recruiting public relations people to pose as reporters in taxpayer-subsidized video news releases that were peddled as "news reports." That's the same Bush administration that is classifying documents at breakneck speed to keep actual vs. manufactured information out of the hands of the public and the press.
Lesson No. 2: Judith Miller
Anybody who thinks they want to be a reporter should be required to read every single word of the opinion of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia No. 04-3138. That's the one that ordered Miller and Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper to reveal their confidential sources to a federal grand jury.
Pay particular attention to pages 72 through 78. Why? Because they're blank, that's why.
Even experienced constitutional lawyers are flabbergasted by this. But at the request of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor assigned to this inquiry, his most powerful arguments for why Miller and Cooper should break their promises to sources are too sensitive for any of us to see." ...
--Posted by deborah to the moon's favors at 7/09/2005 07:01:13 AM
posted by deborah @ 7/09/2005
Friday, July 01, 2005
Blix: Iran years away from nuke weapons
bakersfield.com
The Associated Press
"Former chief U.N . weapons inspector Hans Blix said Thursday it would take many years for Iran to achieve the capability to produce highly enriched uranium needed for an atomic bomb.
Blix also dismissed worries about a new nuclear reactor being built in Iran, saying it was not suitable to produce weapons-grade material.
'They have many years to go before they will be able to produce highly enriched uranium for a bomb and I believe there is plenty of room for negotiations,' Blix said in an interview with Swedish Radio.
The U.S. has accused Iran of trying to make nuclear arms, but Tehran says its nuclear program is for generating energy.
Blix dismissed worries about a nuclear reactor Russia is building in the Iranian city of Bushehr, which the United States fears could help Tehran develop nuclear weapons.
Iranian state television on Thursday quoted Asabollah Sabori, deputy head of Iran's nuclear agency, as saying the Bushehr reactor will become fully operational by end of 2006.
U.S. officials have said they accept for now Russian assurances that no enrichment or reprocessing will take place, and that any spent fuel rods will be returned to Russia.
'These type of reactors are not very suitable to produce plutonium. It is possible, but it is very difficult,' Blix said.
'The way to go normally is to build a research reactor. The Iranians have such plans for a 40-megawatt reactor and to use heavy water, which has led to some suspicions.'
But these plans are very much in their infancy and the West is not particularly worried and maybe (can) count on being able to talk the Iranians out of it.'
Iran suspended all uranium enrichment-related activities in November to avoid having its nuclear program referred to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions. France, BrBritain and Germany have been offering economic incentives in hopes of persuading Iran to put a permanent halt to enrichment.However, Iran has always said its suspension is temporary and it will never abandon enrichment.
Blix, a former Swedish foreign minister, said in 2003 he believed Iraq had destroyed most of its weapons of mass destruction years before, but kept up the appearance that it had them to deter a military attack.
He now heads a Stockholm-based independent commission on weapons of mass destruction."
--Posted by deborah to the moon's favors at 7/01/2005 05:44:00 PM
posted by deborah @ 7/01/2005
Fwd: [the moon's favors] 7/01/2005 05:32:02 PM
What It Takes to Become a Nuclear Terrorist -- Steinhausler 46 (6): 782 -- American Behavioral Scientist:
"There is justified concern that terrorists may use nuclear or other radioactive material to commit an act of terrorism. However, there are multiple barriers to be overcome by a terrorist to actually be able to deploy such a weapon. This article discusses four threat scenarios involving nuclear and other radioactive materials: radioactive dispersion with criminal intent, radiological malevolence, attack on a nuclear power plant, and nuclear weapons. Altogether, 16 attack modes are identified with largely different logistical and technical requirements for their implementation. However, none of them should be considered as out of realm for a dedicated terror organization with a certain degree of sophistication."
--Posted by deborah to the moon's favors at 7/01/2005 05:32:02 PM
posted by deborah @ 7/01/2005
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