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Common Sense
Here is National Review's Rich Lowry on the constant chatter in the media about post-traumatic stress disorder in the aftermath of the Ft. Hood massacre:
The obsession with PTSD serves two purposes. First, it fits the media’s favorite narrative of soldiers as victims. Here was poor Hasan, brought low like so many others by the unbearable burden of Iraq and Afghanistan. Never mind that
PTSD usually results in sleeplessness, flashbacks, and — in the extreme — suicide. Hasan is the first victim of PTSD known to jump on a table and allegedly yell “Allahu Akbar” while slaughtering his fellow troops.
Actually, I sort of share Lowry's annoyance on the PTSD front. It's belaboring the obvious to say that of course PTSD is a serious problem, one that the military should (and, I think, does) take seriously. But intentionally or not, hauling it out after every meltdown by a service member serves largely to tar them all in the public mind as unstable misfits who could blow up at any second. That's both unfair and lazy.
But Lowry then goes on to insist that we should obsess over the fact that Nidal Malik Hasan was a Muslim who was apparently motivated by religious fervor. His colleague Andy McCarthy puts it even more bluntly, claiming that the same beliefs that animated Hasan are widely accepted by Muslims in the United States:
The rote government response is to point out, mulishly, that there are many Muslims honorably serving in the U.S. armed forces. This is absolutely true but utterly beside the point....The honorable service of many Muslims does not alter the reality that there is enormous pressure on Muslim soldiers, from their religious authorities, to sabotage American military operations. Hasan's massacre of his fellow soldiers is the worst incident we've seen, but it's hardly an isolated incident.
I wonder if they even see the contradiction here? When it comes to PTSD, every soldier is an individual and it's insulting to see it lying in wait everywhere. But when it comes to extremist beliefs, well, Muslims are all under extreme pressure and we'd be fools not to see it lying in wait everywhere.
I prefer door #1: soldiers aren't all time bombs waiting to go off, and Muslims aren't all Manchurian candidates waiting to turn on their fellow Americans. Just because they're different problems doesn't mean we can't address them both with equal doses of common sense.
The right because they hate
The right because they hate brown people serving tell us that the brown people are under pressure.
But actually, a lot of the left tell me a similar message if for a different reason.
All of Muslim soldiers, each and every cute and fuzzy one of them, are living in extreme pressure because the United States and its Army is so incredibly racist. This is why it's so obvious that Hasan had PTSD and/or went Postal, because of how we treat all Muslims...
(And of course, that's how we treat women, and all minorities, and it's all those angry white men like Lou Dobbs that Mother Jones tells me about.)
Huh?
Um, how could PTSD not have something to do with "every meltdown"? Killing people and/or expecting to be blown up at any moment might contribute to your stress load in some way, no? And someone please tell me what the fuck Anonymous is talking about.
Kevin's point that the right
Kevin's point that the right makes sweeping generalizations to suit their needs is banal, trivial, self-serving, and overlooks the exact same behavior from the left.
If he doesn't want to take it or reward it from the right, that's good.
If he's willing to accept it from the left, that's dumbassery.
This post provides an
This post provides an excellent lesson in why one should never ever agree with Rich Lowry. You'll learn someday, Kevin.
...
PTSD often shows up in soldiers not actually in combat. Our training and way we deal with their human needs is terrible, and leads to it. PTSD shows up in children and abuse victims, too, without combat.
Combat soldiers just have it more noticeably.
Can one be "known" to have
Can one be "known" to have "allegedly" done something?
You say Pock-ee-stan, I say
You say Pock-ee-stan, I say Pakistan.
You say diversity. i say Balkanization.
You say melting pot. I say chamberpot.
You say PTSD. I say Jihad.
No different from typical Israeli cases where some local Arab gets tired of injustice and runs a bus into a crowd of Jews or some such thing.
I tend to be more sympathetic to the Palestinian point of view than the US/AIPAC policies, but not to the point of bringing in millions of immigrants into the US who hate this country. Most of the immigrants I've conversed with from South America, Iran, Haiti, etc., just despise this country and come here SOLELY to make money.
Maybe they'd like this
Maybe they'd like this country better if they met fewer people like you. Or maybe they like America fine and just hate you. Most immigrants I know, including my family, love it here and wht the US stands for. In my high school AP history class of the 5 people that scored a 5, 4 were immigrants or the children of immigrants. In fact, that population mopped the floor in general with the native born population in US History. The population of 1st or 2nd generation immigrants made up <20% of the class, so it wasn't due to the makeup of the sample.
Your contempt for immigrants
Your contempt for immigrants is communicated when you converse with them, whether consciously or not, so naturally your interviewees are going to reflect your disdain.
Well Kevin, I'm really sorry
Well Kevin, I'm really sorry that you didn't like what McCarthy wrote.
But is it not incumbent upon you to, you know, refute it, rather than just saying you don't like it?
You know, reality-based and all that?
Well written post. Shame
Well written post. Shame about the comments.
The dilemma of the “crazy vet” stereotype
Ken MacLeish wrote a post on Savage Minds about "The dilemma of the “crazy vet” stereotype." This was written before the recent tragedy, but remains relevant.
http://savageminds.org/2009/09/27/wounds-of-war-and-the-dilemmas-of-ster...
The only thing that's really
The only thing that's really obvious: extreme fervor in any religious belief should be, by definition, classified as mental illness.
The Manchurian fallacy
"The honorable service of many Muslims does not alter the reality that there is enormous pressure on Muslim soldiers, from their religious authorities, to sabotage American military operations."
Which is the exact logic that led to the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II.
Green Zone shooting
Did the entire U.S. forget about the other soldier on soldier mass shooting that happened this year?
I didn't, because I know a mental health worker that was in Hasan's unit. He was there when Hasan started shooting. Before he deployed he was worried about a situation like the one in Baghdad where Sgt. John M. Russell walked into the combat stress clinic at Camp Liberty and shot five people. The medical workers in this unit were fully f-ing aware of the potential for fratricide in the military because it happened to one of their own. Some of them were going to deploy to that same stress clinic. What does this linkage mean? I don't know, but at the least can someone somewhere discuss the Sgt. Russell situation? It seems too related to just ignore it.
Link to story below:
http://is.gd/4TvtT
Anyone aware of the killing,
Anyone aware of the killing, the maiming, the violence, the rape, the coercion, the injustice, the deprivation of the wars the US wages throughout the world has PTSD. Many have PTSD but do not know it. They think only soldiers who have served in war zones contract it, but the stress of the atrocities the US commits affects many more than those serving the beast. Whole nations, including the US, are now functioning under a disorder brought on by eight years of continuous institutional violence. Hundreds of millions of people have PTSD. The soldiers' malady is easily understood, but limited. The harsh stress imposed on populations will be longer lasting, and probably provide for greater stresses in the near future.
green zone killing
Did the entire U.S. forget about the other soldier on soldier mass shooting that happened this year?
I didn't, because I know a mental health worker that was in Hasan's unit. He was there when Hasan started shooting. Before he deployed he was worried about a situation like the one in Baghdad where Sgt. John M. Russell walked into the combat stress clinic at Camp Liberty and shot five people. The medical workers in this unit were fully f-ing aware of the potential for fratricide in the military because it happened to one of their own. Some of them were going to deploy to that same stress clinic. What does this linkage mean? I don't know, but at the least can someone somewhere discuss the Sgt. Russell situation? It seems too related to just ignore it.
Link to story below:
http://is.gd/4TvtT
mental illness is complex
PTSD is a significant mental illness that effects a wide variety of people- the common thread being the experience of significant trauma that inspires horror and helplessness. PTSD sufferers include rape victims, childhood sexual abuse victims, disaster survivors (man-made and natural), assault victims, and, as mentioned above, combat troops. People with PTSD exhibit a variety of symptoms, but aren't "ticking time bombs" just one push away from extreme violence. The current focus on PTSD is good becuase it has been under-studied and under-diagnosed, especially in the military. But it is not the only mental illness out there, and mental illness is not the only contributer to violence risk. I think there was much more going on than PTSD- if it even was PTSD- there are a wide variety of conditions that couls have contributed. I really like the point made above regarding the killing in the green zone. It was also soldier on soldier violence- except for the religious/ethnic background of the shooter they are similar. And, it should be noted, the Ft. Hood shooter was born here, not an immegrant. And what about the extreme religious fervor of evangelicals? the christian extremists? Certain groups among home-grown christian people have shown themselves capable of violence. I don't see a rush to weed them out of the military. I am very interested to see how this turns out, but please, lets not rush to judgement and prejudice on religious or mental health grounds.