Into the Void

Today I learned that the Arabic word for mental illness has the same etymology as the Arabic word for evil spirits. This has an unfortunate effect on how the mentally ill are perceived in the Middle East.

Language is an odd thing. It enables you to express your innermost thoughts and feelings. BUT it almost guarantees that the thoughts and feelings you express have been totally shaped by the language itself. In the words of comedian Lenny Bruce,

“Believe me, I’m not profound, this is something that I assume someone must have laid on me, because I do not have an original thought. I am screwed. I speak English. That’s it. I was not born in a vacuum. Every thought I have belongs to somebody else.”
– Lenny Bruce, quoted on Rakes Progress: Lenny Bruce is not afraid

So what’s happening is that as long as the doctors use that old-fashioned word to describe mental illness, demon-possessed the mentally ill will remain.

Arabs don’t have a monopoly on superstition though. The following TinyUrl will take you to a google search for “mental illness exorcism.”
http://tinyurl.com/5gwe4p

In WWII the Germans ran into Russia killing everyone they found. They destroyed entire villages, an entire way of life. In some parts of Russia one in four people died. Every family was affected.

However, the Germans awakened a sleeping giant. And when U.S. General George Patton realized just how big Russia was, he wanted our army to march right through Germany and into Russia to get at them while they were still recovering from Germany’s predations. There was a big antisemitic component to this that I don’t wish to go into at this time.

Remember that at the same time we were taking back Europe, we were also fighting in the Pacific theater. Japan was throwing Mitsubishi Zeros at us – yup, made by the same company that makes cars and Three Diamonds tuna. The kamakazi pilots literally committed suicide by ramming our ships with planes. They had already been at war with China for years before Pearl Harbor and they were pretty much tapped out.

Kamakazi means “divine wind” after a Chinese attack that was thwarted by high winds in the Sea of Japan.

Despite the fact that we had pretty much won against Japan, in 1949 we dropped atomic bombs on two important cities. Not on the Mitsubishi plant where Zeros were manufactured but a few miles away on a city full of civilians.

Why???

To impress the Russians that we were technologically superior.

The Russians hurried up to create their own atomic bomb. We upgraded to hydrogen bombs, which use an atomic bomb as an igniter. Russia upgraded.

The government created a big Communism scare to get the American people to fund this massive effort. We used smaller nations as proxies to test our technology against other countries that acted as Russia’s proxies.

We engaged in a “space race” that started with Russia’s Sputnik satellite in 1957 and culminated in our first steps on the moon in 1969.

Both of us developed Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Systems (ICBMs) to deliver nukes. We both developed sophisticated anti-nuke systems to shoot down ICBMs. We had enough missiles to destroy each other 30 times over – this is called “overkill.”

In 1962, JFK had a standoff with Russia’s Khrushchev over missile sites in Cuba, just 90 miles away from the US. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest we ever came to Thermonuclear Armageddon.

In the 1980′s President Reagan wanted to fill the sky with killer satellites. My favorite idea was “Rods of God,” in which satellites would carry up huge titanium rods that they could drop out of the sky on our enemies. These people were so wrapped up in it that they’d destroy the world if they had to.

Needless to say, we had a worldwide spy network to keep tabs on all this.

Fortunately for us, and devastatingly for the citizens of the USSR, they ran out of money before we did. I guess that means we won, but winning put the US so far in debt to foreign investors that we’ll still be paying it for another generation.

War, even a Cold War, is expensive.

That’s the cold war, the technological rivalry. We never actually fired a shot at each other, but we spent 40 years trying to prove our cajones were bigger than theirs.

Putin seems to trying to reconstitute the old Soviet Union. This time around, we’ve already thrown billions of dollars at the non-war in the Middle East and it is crumbling our economy. I don’t know where it will go.

I worked late Thursday night because I’ve been having trouble getting there on time. Typically I leave at around 8, and it’s a 45 minute drive home.

I’ve been in that place where… well, it’s as if I need to stop and let my mind catch its breath, if that makes sense. Instead, I just keep putting one foot in front of the other and trudging onward in this death march we call life.

Of course, my mind is taking this opportunity to slap me around. Self-defeating thoughts like:
I’m a fraud, I’m only pretending to be an engineer.
Everything I’ve ever done was stupid
or hurtful
or self-destructive.
My husband only stays with me because he made a promise to my mother to take care of me when she was on her deathbed. (Nice dramatic touch.)
Creationists don’t want their children to be more successful than they are, because that would support the theory of evolution.
Pro-lifers love rapists almost as much as they hate women.
Millenialists are working on bringing about a utopian, agrarian 1000-year peace through war in the Middle East, and are too unsophisticated to understand that a 1000-year global interregnum doesn’t equal peace, it equals The Dark Ages.
Evangelicals want to kill non-believers just as desperately as the Wahabbist Islamics want to.

I mean, rationally I know it’s all BS, but that’s how I FEEL. As long as I don’t let it suck me in intellectually too I’ll be fine.

But let me clarify, That’s what my neurotransmitters are trying to do to me. *I’m* ok. It’s the bipolar talking, it’s pessimism.

Just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Well, that’s the point of going to support groups, right? To learn how to move forward even when we don’t care about any of it. We don’t have to get sucked in. It’s about having a rational, objective observer. Yes, so I have a shitload of training in how to be logical and objective.

:roll:

I wish everybody took four years of science and five years of math in high school. It’s a good start. It teaches you how to think and how to form conclusions. If you let it, it also teaches you how to be objective.

Eh, well, I can still feel it and the thoughts are there when I’m not thinking about anything else.

On Thursday I told the boss I’d be taking a mental health day Friday. Cranked out the first version of Friday’s work and tested it on the hardware. Updated a test document. RARed the whole mess, dropped it into my shared docs for review. Sent the boss an email with a 9:30PM timestamp so he knows when I left. Heaved a sigh of relief and headed home.

I was in an accident on the way home. I was on the turnpike about a mile from my exit. There’s construction near the exit and some fellow came flying down and rear-ended me.

I’m ok, got the wind knocked out of me by the impact and breathed in some Hybrid nastiness. Contusions on my chest and abdomen from the seat belt, nausea, vertigo, and a neck sprain, but nothing life-threatening.

I suspect that my car is a total loss. It’s a classic Prius. The rear was crushed in so deep it cut through the tire and jammed the wheels. The auxiliary battery was crushed and exuding a visible a cloud of acid. Fortunately most of that got sucked into his car, not mine. The Prius avenges its own death. I don’t know how the hybrid battery fared. It may have taken out a cell or so on the left side.

Standing in a construction zone on the turnpike at 10:15PM with all the sirens and flashing lights and cars flying by just a few feet away was the most frightening thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. I had to hang onto the concrete barrier to keep myself from running away.

I was looking for an excuse to buy a new car. Maybe a Toyota Matrix. I playing around online this morning comparing prices.

Mishaps are like knives. They can cut you or they can serve you depending upon whether you grab them by the blade or by the handle.

Mental Health Care Failing At-Risk Troops, Related Study Finds Battlefield Ethics Also Suffering – CBS News

This story on CBS shows an ongoing problem in Iraq. Overworked, stressed-out soldiers start to fall apart due to long deployments and irrational (if any) strategy. I question labeling someone as mentally ill when it’s due to long-term stress.

Think about it. You get sent to the Middle East on a six-month deployment. 18 months later they still won’t let you go home. Your kids think you lied when you said you’d be home in six months – and again when you said you’d be home in a year – and are showing behavioral problems in school; your mortgage is in arrears because you took a pay cut for what you thought would be only six months; if you owned a business it has long since failed; you’ve missed 18 months worth of family get-togethers; you have to climb over a half-dozen Jersey Barriers to get to your ratty, noisy little home-away-from-home. And every day you drive highly-paid civilian contractors up and down the road to the airport like a duck in a shooting gallery. You start to envy the ones who get to go home in a body bag.

You see no progress being made, and you no longer believe that your efforts can make a difference. It creates a lot of confusion.

And in frustration you start lashing out at people. This is not good. We are literally driving thousands of our best citizens insane with our irrational policy and complete lack of strategy for rebuilding the country we tore apart. For someone with a degree in History, Bush seems incapable of learning from the mistakes of the past. Perhaps he was AWOL for history class, too.

I would like to remind everyone that we are not at war over there. Bush declared that the war was over years ago. Let’s get the other Islamic countries involved at the political level – their citizens are already in there helping the “insurgency,” as we like to call their freedom fighters. Whether you like Iran or not, they have what passes in the Middle East as a Democracy. So does Turkey. You’d have to get all kinds of agreements to stop the sectarian violence, but we knew that before we started this whole thing.

Technorati: Bush civilian+contractors Democracy freedom+fighters insurgency Iran Iraq Islamic stress mentally+ill Middle+East politics sectarian+violence