PTSD. What is it?

You feel on edge most of the time, unable to truly relax. The nightmares keep coming back. Sudden noises make you jump. You’re staying at home more and more. Could you have PTSD?

If you have experienced severe trauma or a life-threatening event, you may develop symptoms of posttraumatic stress, commonly known as posttraumatic stress disorder, PTSD, shell shock, or combat stress. Maybe you felt like your life or the lives of others were in danger, or that you had no control over what was happening. You may have witnessed people being injured or dying, or you may have been physically harmed yourself. In some cases, perhaps you made it through a combat event where the soldiers around you were killed but you somehow survived.

“Even though I knew they were just fireworks on the 4^th of July, to me they still sounded like incoming mortars. It took me right back to my deployment…”

Some of the most common symptoms of PTSD include recurring memories or nightmares of the event(s), sleeplessness, loss of interest, or feeling numb, anger and irritability, but there are many ways PTSD can impact your everyday life.

Sometimes these symptoms don’t surface for months or years after the event or returning from deployment. They may also come and go. If these problems won’t go away or are getting worse—or you feel like they are disrupting your daily life—you may have PTSD.

Some factors can increase the likelihood of a traumatic event leading to PTSD, such as: 

The intensity of the trauma

Being hurt or losing a loved one

Being physically close to the traumatic event

Feeling you were not in control

Having a lack of support after the event

What are the signs of PTSD?

“Driving down the roads in my home town, I found myself noticing every piece of debris, avoiding every pothole.”

A wide variety of symptoms may be signs you are experiencing PTSD:

Feeling upset by things that remind you of what happened

Having nightmares, vivid memories, or flashbacks of the event that make you feel like it's happening all over again

Feeling emotionally cut off from others

Feeling numb or losing interest in things you used to care about

Depression

Thinking that you are always in danger

Feeling anxious, jittery or irritated

Experiencing a sense of panic that something bad is about to happen

Having difficulty sleeping

Having trouble keeping your mind focused on one thing

Having a hard time relating to and getting along with your spouse, family or friends

“When stress brought on flashbacks, I dealt with them by drinking them away. I considered it recreational drinking, but really I was self-medicating.”

It’s not just the symptoms of PTSD but also how you may react to them that can disrupt your life. You may:

Frequently avoid places or things that remind you of what happened

Consistent drinking or use of drugs to numb your feelings

Consider harming yourself or others

Start working all the time to occupy your time

Pull away from people and become isolated

What is the treatment for PTSD?

If you have PTSD, it doesn’t mean you just have to live with it. In recent years, researchers from around the world have dramatically increased our understanding of what causes PTSD and how to treat it. Hundreds of thousands of Veterans have gotten treatment for PTSD—and treatment works.  

“In therapy I learned how to respond differently to the thoughts that used to get stuck in my head.”

Two types of treatment have been shown to be effective for treating PTSD: counseling and medication. Professional counseling can help you understand your thoughts and discover ways to cope with your feelings. Medications, called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, are used to help you feel less worried or sad.

In just a few months, these treatments can produce positive and meaningful changes in symptoms and quality of life. They can help you understand and change how you think about your trauma—and change how you react to stressful memories.

You may need to work with your doctor or counselor and try different types of treatment before finding the one that’s best for dealing with your PTSD symptoms.

Talking to others about the combat situation they survived is usually difficult for most veterans but it would be healthy to talk to your family and loved ones about PTSD and it's effects on you. This could also open the door to let them know about the traumatic events you suffered and allow them to support you in coping with the negative aspects of PTSD. You may also find other veterans in your area to talk to. Perhaps together you can support one another.

Racism in America. My View.

 

Racist Definition

 

rac-ist

noun: racist; plural noun: racists

 

A person who believes that a particular race is superior to another.

synonyms: racial bigot, racialist, xenophobe, chauvinist, supremacist.

My Definition

 

Its difficult for me to add my own accurate personal definition without appearing to be somewhat of a racist myself, that is, a racist toward my own race. Is that even possible? Reverse racism? I have some anger and resentment inside when I think about this issue because of what I have personally seen, heard and experienced when it comes to this controversial topic. But I will give you my personal definition of a racist, largely censored and edited. To me a racist is a bitter, scary white man who feels that they were left behind by economic and cultural change.

 

I grew up mostly in a small town, in a mostly white population. There were Hispanics. There were no African American people. But for a time, I lived in the rural south, in a small town in Louisiana. I went to a public school that was mostly African American. Most of the teachers, staff, faculty and student body were predominantly black people. Each morning all students stood for the pledge of allegiance and at lunch time our teacher led the whole class in prayer asking God to bless our meal and each other. Us young white students did not use the "N" word. Not because we were afraid of getting a beat down, which would have definitely happened, but because we genuinely "loved" our teachers. They loved us too!They were our mothers away from home. For some, they were more of a mother than our own. When we did wrong, they corrected us. Let me add here that if none of you have ever experienced being corrected by a southern black woman in Louisiana, you've really missed out on the art of correction LOL. We said "yes ma'am, no ma'am" too. Me and my brother turned out better men because of that experience. Later we moved to Oklahoma to a predominantly white school. What a huge difference in culture and way of thinking! And a huge difference in food but that's a different topic.

 

I never really saw racism during that period, which was High School, but it was there. Racism is evil and I don't know about you but I can just "feel" it. Its a like a living, breathing entity. Once I enlisted in the Army, I saw racism. You take young men from all over the nation of different races and throw them all into a barracks, a small confined space, for about 16 weeks or more, you can expect racism to show its ugly head. Every fight I got into was with a white recruit who thought his race was the best. The fight wasn't always about that fact either. I just cannot stand racists and during my younger days, if one was around me voicing his opinion on any topic I would usually pick a fight with him. Not because I'm some kind of tough guy, its because...well its because I'm Irish. Other Irish people will understand. After becoming a police officer, I saw racism in large scale. I'm not just talking about whites and blacks here either. I've seen people of various races do and say some pretty ugly things to each other.

 

There are some pretty scary people out there. I would think that most people would agree that any person who actually thought that their race was supreme over others, whose mind was so messed up to think in that manner, and on top of that they "hated" others who were of a different race...that's an unstable, scary person in my books. I'm not saying that I'm afraid of them, but I am afraid for all the children in our society who may at some point or time come into contact with these people.

 

Why would I choose to write about such a controversial topic? Its not that I think I can make a change in our society by merely writing about racism. I have a platform to speak about things that are important to me and hopefully, important to others as well. Regarding a broad subject as racism, I cannot make a significant change in the society in which I live. On the other hand, if more people would make a stand...then something could be done. I have family members who are of mixed races and I love them very much. I have one grand child at the moment but one day I will have a grand child who will be of a mixed race and believe me, when they are sitting in Grandpa's lap, the only race they will be is my Grand baby.

 

Where are racists?

Excerpted from “Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era” 

 

Geographically, they come from America’s heartland—small towns, rural cities, swelling suburban outside larger Sunbelt cities. These aren’t the prosperous towns, but the single-story working-class exurbs that stretch for what feels like forever in the corridor between Long Beach and San Diego (not the San Fernando Valley), or along the southern tier of Pennsylvania, or spread all through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, across the vast high plains of eastern Washington and Oregon, through Idaho and Montana. There are plenty in the declining cities of the Rust Belt, in Dearborn and Flint, Buffalo and Milwaukee, in the bars that remain in the shadows of the hulking deserted factories that once were America’s manufacturing centers. And that doesn’t even touch the former states of the Confederacy, where flying the Confederate flag is a culturally approved symbol of “southern pride."

 

There’s a large rural component. Although “the spread of far-right groups over the last decade has not been limited to rural areas alone,” writes Osha Gray Davidson, “the social and economic unraveling of rural communities—especially in the midwest—has provided far-right groups with new audiences for their messages of hate. Some of these groups have enjoyed considerable success in their rural campaign.” For many farmers facing foreclosures, the Far Right promises to help them save their land have been appealing, offering farmers various schemes and legal maneuvers to help prevent foreclosures, blaming the farmers’ troubles on Jewish bankers and the one-world government. “As rural communities started to collapse,” Davidson writes, the Far Right “could be seen at farm auctions comforting families . . . confirming what rural people knew to be true: that their livelihoods, their families, their communities—their very lives—were falling apart.” In stark contrast to the government indifference encountered by rural Americans, a range of Far Right groups, most recently the militias, have seemingly provided support, community, and answers.

 

In that sense, the contemporary militias and other white supremacist groups are following in the footsteps of the Ku Klux Klan, the Posse Comitatus, and other Far Right patriot groups who recruited members in rural America throughout the 1980s. They tap into a long history of racial and ethnic paranoia in rural America, as well as an equally long tradition of collective local action and vigilante justice. There remains a widespread notion that “Jews, African-Americans, and other minority-group members ‘do not entirely belong,’” which may, in part, “be responsible for rural people’s easy acceptance of the far right’s agenda of hate,” writes Matthew Snipp. “The far right didn’t create bigotry in the Midwest; it didn’t need to,” Davidson concludes. “It merely had to tap into the existing undercurrent of prejudice once this had been inflamed by widespread economic failure and social discontent.”

And many have moved from their deindustrializing cities, foreclosed suburban tracts, and wasted farmlands to smaller rural areas because they seek the companionship of like-minded fellows, in relatively remote areas far from large numbers of nonwhites and Jews and where they can organize, train, and build protective fortresses. Many groups have established refuge in rural communities, where they can practice military tactics, stockpile food and weapons, hone their survivalist skills, and become self-sufficient in preparation for Armageddon, the final race war, or whatever cataclysm they envision. Think of it as the twenty-first-century version of postwar suburban “white flight”—but on steroids.

They’re certainly Christian, but not just any Christian—they’re evangelical Protestant, Pentecostals, and members of radical sects that preach racial purity as the Word of Jesus. (Catholicism is certainly stocked with conservatives on social issues, but white supremacists tap into such a long and ignoble tradition of anti-Catholicism that they tend to have their own right-wing organizations, mostly fighting against women’s rights and gay rights.) Some belong to churches like the Christian Identity Church, which gained a foothold on the Far Right in the early 1980s. Christian Identity’s focus on racism and anti-Semitism provides the theological underpinnings to the shift from a more “traditional agrarian protest” to Para militarism. It is from the Christian Identity movement that the Far Right gets its theological claims that Adam is the ancestor of the Caucasian race, whereas non-whites are pre-Adamic “mud people,” without souls, and Jews are the children of Satan. According to this doctrine, Jesus was not Jewish and not from the Middle East; actually, he was northern European, his Second Coming is close at hand, and followers can hasten the apocalypse. It is the birthright of Anglo-Saxons to establish God’s kingdom on earth; America’s and Britain’s “birthright is to be the wealthiest, most powerful nations on earth . . . able, by divine right, to dominate and colonize the world.”

Perhaps what binds them all together, though, is class. Rural or small town, urban or suburban, the extreme Right is populated by downwardly mobile, lower-middle-class white men.

On the extreme Right, by contrast, race is a proxy for class. Among the white supremacists, when they speak of race consciousness, defending white people, protesting for equal rights for white people, they actually don’t mean all white people. They don’t mean Wall Street bankers and lawyers, though they are pretty much entirely white and male. They don’t mean white male doctors, or lawyers, or architects, or even engineers. They don’t mean the legions of young white hipster guys, or computer geeks flocking to the Silicon Valley, or the legions of white preppies in their boat shoes and seersucker jackets “interning” at white-shoe law firms in major cities. Not at all. They mean middle-and working-class white people. Race consciousness is actually class consciousness without actually having to “see” class. “Race blindness” leads working-class people to turn right; if they did see class, they’d turn left and make common cause with different races in the same economic class.

So, who are they really, these hundred thousand white supremacists? They’re every white guy who believed that this land was his land, was made for you and me. They’re America’s Everymen, whose pain at downward mobility and whose anger at what they see as an indifferent government have become twisted by a hate that tells them they are better than others, disfigured by a resentment so deep that there are no more bridges to be built, no more ladders of upward mobility to be climbed, a howl of pain mangled into the scream of a warrior. Their rage is as sad as it is frightening, as impotent as it is shrill.

They believe themselves to be the true heirs of the real America. They are the ones who are entitled to inherit the bounty of the American system. It’s their birthright—as native-born, white American men. As sociologist Lillian Rubin puts it, “It’s this confluence of forces—the racial and cultural diversity of our new immigrant population; the claims on the resources of the nation now being made by those minorities who, for generations, have called America their home; the failure of some of our basic institutions to serve the needs of our people; the contracting economy, which threatens the mobility aspirations of working class families—all these have come together to leave white workers feeling as if everyone else is getting a piece of the action while they get nothing.”

                                                                                                                                                                      

Racism starts at home. Babies aren't born a racist. They are born "human." It takes another human to teach them to hate others. I don't understand how you can teach a child that their skin color is supreme over another skin color. How do you explain that? Children also learn this type of ugliness at school too. Parents certainly need to get involved with what their children are learning and guard their minds. Look for signs of racism. Be prepared to explain it. Teach them that its evil. Search your community for programs that could allow your children to interact with children of different races and ethnic backgrounds. Allow them to come to the realization that skin color is not an issue at all.

 

Is A New American Revolution Coming?

Times are changing. Depending on your age, some have seen more change than others, for better or worse. In my opinion, it's getting worse.

And speaking for myself, I've seen some pretty big changes in my lifetime but the biggest change is the overall pulse of this nation. The attitude, the feeling of security...patriotism. The pulse is a broad definition but I'm sure there are many who understand. As a matter of fact, I know there are.

If you google anything related to a new American revolution your probably going to see websites devoted to a movement of some sorts with similar agendas but for the most part, they all seem to want the same thing and that is, to preserve the constitution. The same ideals that the American forefathers began the original American revolution. Many of them gave their lives for those ideals. They had a vision of a free country. Have you seen any changes in freedom in your lifetime?

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
-Thomas Jefferson

We live in a nation who has a long history of standing up and defending other nations when it comes to democracy and freedom. But some may say that our own freedom, within this nation, is fading. We have seen a huge increase in violence just in the last couple of decades in America and as a result the lawmakers have responded by creating an abundance of laws. Gun laws have changed dramatically but not enough to those in power because there's a familiar stumbling block in their way...the Constitution of the United States of America. A document that many of us took an oath to defend. Some gave their lives.

Many of those who took that oath answered their nations call to serve and have returned to a country who has for the most part failed them. Our Veterans are not being taken care of properly. In my opinion they are being overused during their service but when they return they are not getting adequate care or benefits. Priorities?

If we examine closely the period in which the American Revolution began we are able to see the events which unfolded; After years of peaceful protests and petitions to their government, these brave men and women stood against their government’s excessive taxation, tyrannical oppression, and punishing subjugation. 

If we examine further, our founding documents declare that the rights of citizens and states supersede federal authority. The preservation of these rights, of our individual liberty, demands personal responsibility. Many Americans are speaking out and voicing their opinions and many want to return to a smaller central government, one of limited powers of authority, expenditure and taxation.

Where do you stand? Are you one of the "silent majority?" Those in the silent majority do somewhat stay informed. They watch the news and/or read the newspaper.

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers."

-Thomas Jefferson

For certain, the next American Revolution will be won in the ballot box. So whatever direction you would like to see this country go, whatever kind of nation you want your children to live in, open your eyes and listen to the heartbeat of this nation and most of all, Vote!

Marines Body Sent Home Without Heart

The parents of a Marine sergeant who died while stationed in Greece say that they discovered weeks after his funeral that his body had been sent home without a heart — and that the Department of Defense later gave them somebody else's heart in its place.

Craig and Beverly LaLoup, who are suing the department, said Tuesday that authorities told them 21-year-old Brian LaLoup had shot himself in the head during a party at the U.S. Embassy compound in Athens, where he worked a security detail.

The Marine was taken to an Athens hospital and died a few hours later. Six days after that, on Aug. 18, 2012, the state-run hospital performed an unauthorized autopsy, according to the family's lawsuit, filed Friday in Pennsylvania.

The LaLoups don't know what happened to their son's heart. They say a heart arrived months later and the Department of Defense and Greek authorities claimed it was their son's. However, a months-long wait for DNA results proved otherwise.

"This is his heart. This is his soul. This is what made Brian who he is," Beverly LaLoup stated.

Brian LaLoup, who was buried with full military honors, had served in Afghanistan before being selected for the embassy detail in 2011. He first worked in South Africa, where a photograph shows him with visiting first lady Michelle Obama. He loved the Marines but was upset about a recent romantic breakup, said the family's lawsuit, which seeks at least the minimum $75,000 for a federal claim.

A friend told a Marine supervisor, who suggested more drinks instead of getting help, the lawsuit alleged. LaLoup, despite being intoxicated, was allowed to get a weapon from an unsecured storage area, it said.

Government immunity prevents the family from filing a wrongful-death lawsuit. Their lawsuit instead seeks damages for emotional distress over the missing heart. But mostly, the family wants answers.

The Department of Defense says it doesn't comment on pending litigation.

The LaLoups only learned their son's heart was missing by chance. They were filling out paperwork weeks after the funeral when a military official with the file let it slip, Beverly LaLoup said.

"I was absolutely devastated," she said. "I was hysterical. I was running around the house, hyperventilating."

She made a flurry of phone calls, to the embassy, to the Marine Corps, to the Department of State.

A spokesman for the Greek Embassy in Washington, D.C., said Tuesday that the heart was removed during the autopsy.

"His heart was kept for toxicological tests," said spokesman Christos Failadis, who declined to answer questions about what happened to it or why the family received a heart belonging to someone else.

"The Greek ambassador in Washington has offered his condolences to the soldier's mother," Failadis said.

Family lawyer Aaron Freiwald said he doesn't believe that hearts are typically tested for toxicology.

Dr. Judy Melinek, a San Francisco pathologist unaffiliated with the case, agreed it would be unusual to use a heart for toxicology testing. However, she said, organs are sometimes removed for further study, especially if anything seems amiss, and laws governing how long they can be retained vary from place to place.

The LaLoups sued the Department of Defense along with the Navy, which handled the family's inquiries. They spent months trying to work through administrative channels but got nowhere, said Freiwald, who hopes to learn not only what happened to LaLoup's heart but what led to the wrong one being flown to the U.S.

"They actually had somebody fly with (it), because this is part of a fallen soldier," Freiwald said. "The image of that is gruesome and disturbing and ultimately so incredibly sad."

Couple Calls 911 When They Don't Get Hash Browns At McDonalds

When Michael and Nova Smith didn't get the hash browns they ordered they did more than chew out the employees, they allegedly called 911.

The couple ordered two breakfast meals from a Mesa, Ariz., McDonalds, and when they noticed the missing potatoes, they got fried themselves and Nova went inside to confront managers.

“It’s a meal. Just like you should get fries with your hamburger, we should have got our hash browns with our breakfast sandwiches.” Nova Smith told ABC15 on Tuesday.

Smith said when McDonalds employees refused to give her the hash browns or refund her money she said she threw her food in their direction.

"And that was out of frustration which I probably shouldn't have done, but I did. Fighting over $2 of hash browns is ridiculous. It is ridiculous to have to fight that hard just to get customer service," she griped.

Michael Smith was just as miffed. He says he called 911, then walked behind the counter to confront the manager.

“I just was barely able to hold myself back,” he said, according to WCPO-TV. “And if not for the 911 call operator calling me back, "I probably would have went berserk on him."

A store employee and another customer also called 911.

A manager at the McDonald's said the Smith's problems could have happened because the location had just opened and new employees may have made a mistake, according to the New York Daily News. The manager also said employees were trying to correct things when the Smiths became enraged.

The Smiths were cited for assault and disorderly conduct for throwing food at employees, the Associated Press reported.

10-Year Old Suspended For Imaginary Weapon

A 10-year-old Pennsylvania boy was suspended from school for making an imaginary bow out of his pencil, pulling back an imaginary string and shooting an imaginary arrow in October. Now, his parents have legal help and are trying to fight back.

Johnny Jones, a fifth-grade student at South Eastern School District in Fawn Grove, Pa., joins the ranks of other students who seem to have violated zero-tolerance weapons policies in schools around the country with their pretend weapons made from their fingers or even breakfast pastries.

The Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties organization that’s defending the fifth-grade student and requesting that the weapons violation and suspension be removed from his record, described what happened:

The incident took place the week of October 14th, when fifth grader Johnny Jones asked his teacher for a pencil during class. Jones walked to the front of the classroom to retrieve the pencil, and during his walk back to his seat, a classmate and friend of Johnny’s held his folder like an imaginary gun and “shot” at Johnny. Johnny playfully used his hands to draw the bowstrings on a completely imaginary “bow” and “shot” an arrow back. Seeing this, another girl in the class reported to the teacher that the boys were shooting at each other. The teacher took both Johnny and the other boy into the hall and lectured them about disruption. The teacher then contacted Johnny’s mother, Beverly Jones, alerting her to the “seriousness” of the violation because the children were using “firearms” in their horseplay, and informed her that the matter had been referred to the Principal. Principal John Horton contacted Ms. Jones soon thereafter in order to inform her that Johnny’s behavior was a serious offense that could result in expulsion under the school’s weapons policy. Horton characterized Johnny’s transgression as “making a threat” to another student using a “replica or representation of a firearm” through the use of an imaginary bow and arrow.

Jones was suspended for a day for his actions.

It’s not only failing to recognize that the student’s intent was in play, not a threat, but the application of the school’s policy to punish Jones that Whitehead said was inappropriate. The South Eastern School District’s zero-tolerance policy for “Weapons, Ammunition and other Hazardous Items” prohibits “weapons,” which it defines as a “knife, cutting instrument, cutting tool, nunchaku, firearm, shotgun, rifle and any other tool, instrument or implement capable of inflicting serious bodily injury.” The school’s code of conduct elaborated upon this policy banning replicas of such weapons as well.

To Whitehead, these policies should not include the imaginary bow and arrow action made by Jones.

“The policies need to apply to actual guns, actual threats and actual intent,” Whitehead said, encouraging policies to be revised to reflect this sentiment.

The South Eastern School District was closed due to weather Monday and a representative could not be reached for comment.

Whitehead said schools slapping students with weapons violations in cases like this have lingering effects.

“This does affect kids psychologically. Politically correct bureaucrats are not thinking at all what they’re doing to kids,” Whitehead said.

Whitehead said the South Eastern School District has until Friday to respond to the institute’s letter requesting that this be wiped from Jones’ record. If they don’t respond, Whitehead said it will be up to his parents to decide if they wish to press for further legal action.

In the mean time, Whitehead said he tells students “don’t joke around in school today,” fearing they could get in trouble.

Are You Kidding Me?

The first item I read in the news this morning was the story about a group of college kids at the University of Oregon. It seems they got into a playful snowball fight on campus, which prompted the school to suspend one of it's starting football players, and it could result in the prosecution of other students.

University of Oregon officials confirmed Monday that the brawl happened Friday. Starting tight end Pharaoh Brown has been suspended for his part in the snowball fight and will not play in the upcoming Alamo Bowl on December 30th in San Antonio.

Wow. This wasn't a drive by shooting. This was a playful snowball fight. No reported injuries. Just innocent fun.