America Has PreTSD

In writing, it always helps me to collect my "thoughts" if I can think of one word or a short phrase that sums up what I plan to dribble over. Let this week's word or short phrase be Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)!

I've been meaning to talk about PTSD for some time. For one thing, there's a lot of it going around. For another, I have caught some.

Last week Jim Page walked into the Real Change and invited me to a house concert set for the next day. I mentioned that my PTSD might prevent me going. He mentioned back that he himself has Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I'll be getting to that later. But first I want to explain how the Post-kind of TSD can make it hard to do things on the spur of a moment.

Usually I won't go to any event for which I have less than 48 hours to get used to the idea. One time I agreed to go to a community meal with 3 hours notice. I found myself waiting in line alone for the dinner to start, with loud conversations battering me from all sides. The ensuing panic attack didn't make me stronger.

People often tell me, "Wes, suck it up. We've all had bad things happen to us in the past. The trick is to put it behind you and get on with your life." These people are sadly misinformed. They think that the panic attacks are caused by dwelling on bad memories, which is wrong. So as a public service I will explain what really happens.

First of all, yes, there is the Trauma. Note that it is capitalized. We aren't talking about little t trauma. We ARE talking about the time Mom tried to suffocate me after Dad drove off to leave me to collapse into the pool made by the geyser of blood from my temple. We are NOT talking about dead goldfish or simple corporal punishment, unless there were thousands of screaming goldfish, or unless by simple you mean by the rack or thumbscrews or such.

Big T Trauma isn't just more traumatic than little t trauma. There are qualitative differences. Big T Traumas undermine your world view and force you to be on your guard for years to come.

After my Father nearly killed me, and after my Mother tried to, I still had to live with those people! If you can't trust your parents to not try to kill you, you can't trust strangers to not try to kill you, either. So I had to spend years looking over my shoulder, ready to duck.

It's that long period of necessary vigilance that gives rise to most of the unpleasant symptoms of PTSD. By the time you get the diagnosis, you have worn out your vigilance machinery. You have arthritis of the vigilator joints. Your original injuries have more or less ceased to be a factor. Being told to forget about them is useless. You might as well tell me to forget the Hundred Years War. Have done so -- doesn't help.

The phrase "panic attack" adds to the confusion. The "panic" is not in response to any fear. It just is. The disorder is this: That you get the physical symptoms of panic when you KNOW there is nothing to be afraid of. Being told there is nothing to be afraid of, over and over, by well meaning people, when YOU ALREADY KNEW THAT, could result in someone taking someone's head off, tossing a penny in the socket and making a wish. Ha! Get it? Means "well"! I just channeled Shakespeare!

Getting back to Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder. If you've followed me so far you should understand now that Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder is just as bad as the Post-kind. It's all about being on Orange and Red Alert so long they look Blue to you. Your alert button is broke. Sometimes it doesn't work at all; sometimes it gets stuck.

Nightmare of Elm Street

This is my last chance to yap about the 2004 presidential election before it happens. Also, I have no idea as of this writing how the World Series has developed, either. So let's talk about a metaphor!

The metaphor I have in mind has to do with the fact that I learned at an early age to dislike sports. I have told a part of this tragedy before. How I wore glasses in grade school. How, when it came time for us kids to play baseball for gym class, my teacher realized the threat that my glasses posed if I were hit in the face with a baseball. As she herself put it, my glasses would break into deadly razor sharp shards and pierce my eyes on their way to my brain, where doctors would be helpless to remove them, and I would either die in violent throes of agony, or I would be a vegetable for the rest of my life.

Therefore she made me go out and play right-field blind. Therefore I was hit on the head with a ball which I could not see coming. Therefore I did not die or become a vegetable, thank you teacher. Instead, I became traumatized for life.

Actually, I had already been traumatized for life three years earlier. That was when my father took me to a Red Sox game. I was six, and I had never seen a baseball game before. At the time we lived at Fort Devens, an army base about 35 or 40 miles from Fenway Park, so seeing the Red Sox was well within reach. It's also relevant that we were living on a street named after a Civil War battle, Chancellorsville Street. It has since been renamed Elm Street -- this is absolutely true -- to make it easier to spell.

You see, when I went to that Red Sox game, I thought the idea was to watch a baseball game, yell on behalf of the good guys, eat some hotdogs, see them win, and go home happy. My father had neglected to tell me that the good guys don't always win.

All he had to do to prepare me was to explain to me what our street name was about. Namely, what did transpire at Chancellorsville, Virginia in early May 1863, when they had the aforementioned battle? He could have said, "Son, we live on Chancellorsville Street. Have I ever told you what happened in the Battle of Chancellorsville?" And I could have said, "No, Dad, you suck. You're always watching Lawrence Welk. You never tell me anything." And he could have smacked me.

Or, he could have told me that when the Battle of Chancellorsville was over, General Robert E. Lee was generally considered the winner, since he had got the higher score. And this would have taught me that the other side (we, my father and I, being Northerners) sometimes wins.

Or, he could have really bored me to tears. He could have told me that, actually, General Lee went into the battle with only about half as many men as his opponent General Hooker, so the higher casualties on Hooker's side in fact represented a smaller percentage of losses for his total forces, and he was thus left with the larger force at the end, so you could very well say that the Union side won after all, so there.

Or, my father could have said that it was exactly during the Battle of Chancellorsville that Stonewall Jackson was fatally shot. Who knows, but maybe that particular casualty by itself cost the Confederates the whole War.

Or, he could have said, go read about it in a book, I'm too busy watching Lawrence Welk to talk to you now.

In any case, I could have learned that winning and losing isn't always what it looks like. I could have learned that the Red Sox could lose that game in 1955 but might still have a chance to win the World Series in 2004, or 2005, or someday after I'm dead. I could have been prepared for the 2000 presidential election, when the guy with the best score lost.

So what is the moral of our story? The moral is, don't demand that street names have to be easy to spell. What do elm trees have to do with presidential elections and baseball games? Nothing. So leave the names of streets alone.

Good Grief, Indeed

I'm in for it this time: I let myself get talked into making this column about the death penalty and Ridgway's sentence deal. Look out, everybody, we're in for a laugh riot now!

This situation came about because our beloved "editor" Adam "Designated Cat-Herder" Holdorf wrote an Op Ed piece last issue (Nov. 13) on the same subject entitled "Beyond Retribution." That article contained elements which various of us other "editors" on the "Editorial Committee" thought was, well, let's just say we thought Adam was experimenting with unusual pesto recipes when he wrote it, if you get my drift.

Now we all know that anybody who reads Adventures in Poetry for fact-based analyses of deep contemporary issues would eat cardboard for the vitamins. We hate facts here the most. We hate detailed analyses the second most.

Growing up I had many traumatic experiences involving facts and analyses. I was repeatedly forced to compare and contrast things. It was torture. This one may have scarred me for life: "Compare and contrast the maple producing industry of the Northeastern United States to the production of papyrus in Egypt circa 1000 BC, indicating the social effect either has had. Be as specific as possible and incorporate at least one pie chart."

Because of that psychological scarring I now constantly make fun of facts and analyses. A day isn't complete unless I have found a fact to mercilessly tease and poke for my sick amusement. While I avoid targeting innocent people who might get in the way, I sometimes will inadvertently slip and tease a human who just happens to be standing next to an intelligent critique. I deeply regret these incidents. I want to especially apologize for the "pus-filled wonk" comment some time ago. It was horribly, horribly, wrong.

So I am naturally very reluctant to comment on Adam's Op Ed. But I must. Adam's piece was an intelligent critique if I ever saw one. It had a lot of good parts to it. Therefore, I need to pick at it. It is my twisted purpose in life, thanks to my twisted nurturing.

One of the very good parts of it is the part where Adam says that capital punishment is in no way a deterrent to murder. As strong as that statement looks, it isn't strong enough. There is strong evidence that capital punishment actually increases murder and other kinds of violent crime. There are other factors affecting the murder rate, such as economic and social and cultural conditions, that can mask these increases, but really the evidence is getting so massive that continued denial of it is beginning to look seriously stupid.

I mean if you're standing on railroad tracks and you hear a whistle blowing, you get off the tracks. You don't stand there and insist that it might not be a train.

It's a matter of survival. The evidence strongly supports the view that a brutalization effect is at work that is stronger than any deterrent effect. So to persist in supporting capital punishment is ASKING for more murders.

Yet it is now being suggested that this deal with Ridgway to trade his death penalty for confessions provides a new justification for the death penalty. In Adam Holdorf's words, "It indicates that, however cruel and arbitrary the death penalty may be, its existence functions as a tool to coax confession."

No! We can't be mandating the death penalty as a tool to engineer good grief management outcomes. "Coax confession?" The word is "extract" and we don't need to go there. We don't do torture. This is morally equivalent and subject to the same uncertainties. Torture does not guarantee truth.

What we need is to take the step to humanize society by doing away with the death penalty once and for all.