Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Support Group
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Good Morning, Friends! I am wondering what "Freedom" means to each of you? For me, it is, first of all, not being in jail. Most people get in trouble with the law when they are young. I was fortunate to avoid real problems when I was being a serious criminal. But between 40 and 50 years old I was arrested 17 times. Most of it was misdemeanor offenses- DUI, or not showing up for court dates. But I stepped into some deep water when I was working undercover and at one point was facing charges of extortion- a 15-year sentence. It was dropped, but it took a two years and a lot of cash to get there. And I also was on trial for Battery on a Law Enforcement Officer- a charge that carried a 20-year sentence. I was on trial for two days before the jury returned a "not guilty" verdict. That was a hair-raiser.
The longest I ever spent behind bars was in New Orleans- 31 days for peeing behind a bush in a deserted part of town. After all the crimes I had actually committed, this seemed too ludicrous to imagine. But the jail was the "old NOLA jail" from before the Storm, (Katrina) and it was unholy. I won't go into details, but I never expected to live through that experience. However, it proved to be a turning-point in my life- because it actually brought me back in touch with my own spirituality. I resumed yoga and meditation, and have continued with my Practice ever since that Spring in 2006.
Freedom also means living independently for the first time in my life! I have always been under the "authority" of my male lovers, or my husband of 20-years. Now that I live alone in my beautiful Studio on the River, I thank God every day and night for a home of my own.
I am also grateful for my freedom from addiction. At one point in my life I could not live a day without alcohol. My life was such torture, I needed to escape. I could not cope with the realities of what my life had become. Now I am grateful for my waking and sleeping hours.
How do you define "Freedom" in your life?
***Don't hit the nice (or not nice) police officer. They're really not paid enough to take that sh*t. Don't swear at them either (Russ...yup Russ...talking to you.) And if you live in a really, really, really small town, and the parking tickets are 50 CENTS...pay the d*mned things. Don't stuff them in your glove box and throw them at the (nice) police officer when he pulls you over for not having an inspection sticker on your windshield (because it's a replacement windshield and the square of glass was sliding around too much so you threw it in with the tickets...)***
So anyway. Small town. We go into the county jail to visit Russ (who the judge let "pay" off the tickets by sitting in jail....) So we walk in there...and my ex runs into the Captain of the Guards, who it turns out went to high school with my ex-husband.
So hey, it's just a Good 'Ol Time playing cards and catching up on old times.
Yes, a lot of people do make mistakes.
I'm thankful that I've resisted the urge to do most of the things that have crossed my mind. I tell my kids often...you'll very seldom regret the things that you didn't say....
Happy 4th.
He built a concentration camp for his enemies that's now featured in a Netflix movie called A 12 Year Night. I interviewed one of the leading political prisoners upon his release from there, one of the 3 featured in the film. The dictator's name for his concentration camp? "Liberty. " I kid you not.
Like I said, we had to build up a good sense of irony.
Irony is good, but sometimes you have to cry, particularly when history repeats itself here and there over and over again......
I guess miracles do happen. There was a book about it called "A Miracle A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers" because it all was just so exceptional. Most of the time there is no justice, and then once in a blue moon there's an exception like Uruguay's comeback. Wish it happened more often, but I'm never going to forget it happened for Uruguay once.
Is that so very different than United States soldiers nicknaming their tanks/airplanes/bombs?
Wars are easy to start.
Peace is hard, and anything but a miracle...it takes real people making real hard choices to achieve. They deserve our respect and their efforts to be remembered.
Let me know what you think. Peace is hard, as you say, and yeah, only a miracle that's humanly made, it doesn't come from on high, it's an inside job. I use the word miracle because I see it as so exceptional to the usual continuing of cycles of violence I've seen.
I was lucky to get to know one of those people who made those hard choices personally. He was one of the 3 former political prisoners in Uruguay who came out of captivity and torture to set the nation on a new course, like Mandela did in South Africa. Huidobro was one of the 3 characters portrayed in the Netflix movie A Twelve Year Night; if you've seen it he's the one who makes the inmates erupt in cheers playing soccer in the yard with an imaginary ball when he's finally allowed out of his cell for a solo recess.
I knew Huidobro was on a new course when I interviewed him right after his release from those 12 years of being tortured. In my barrio in Uruguay there was only one other family from the US other than mine, the Mitriones, and Huidobro had shot and killed the father of that family. It wasn't my father, and I didn't bring it up, though it's what Huidobro had gone to prison for. He wouldn't have been released ever if not for the fact that the prison authorities had tortured him while there; that's what got his release.
Freedom being the topic here, Huidobro used his freedom to work against the very earlier legacy of violence he himself had created before prison. So he shocked me by apologizing to me for shooting Mr. Mitrione. I don't think he was just apologizing to me personally, I think he was apologizing to the country as a whole through me. He helped me write my book that got published a few years later.
He went on to be elected Senator, and then be chosen to be Minister of Defense over the very army that had tortured him under the military dictatorship that put him in prison as seen in that Netflix movie A Twelve Year Night. Like Mandela, when in charge of the people who had harmed him, Huidobro rose above. There was no revenge.
I think Huidobro's life story would make a great peace movie, as dramatic as those war movies I mention like Saving Private Ryan.
I'm thinking of this...way differently than you.
I think of peace as something that is or isn't across different (for lack of a better word) situations.
World Peace
Peace between countries
Peace between cultures
Peace within Work Culture (Armies have it easy...an absolute structure and the legal power to courtmarshall workers, I can't do that at work. Remotely, as my son has hit his first (real) leadership levels...he's finding it harder than he thought, and I'm guiding him)
Peace within Organizations (from Firestations to Churches...groups can fight over remarkably petty issues. The two fire stations in town...that the town wants to unite...were fighting over how to mark the Junior firefighter's hats.)
Peace within Families (raising two kids is an ENTIRELY different experience than raising one, but all families have drama)
and last Peacewithin Oneself. (I can't change the world...but I can change myself). In someways this is the easiest and in otherways the hardest.
With kids...parenting is HARD. There are no ADA accomadations when they're your own children. And no matter how fantastic your children are, they WILL find and WILL push every button/trigger/sensitivity that you have. It's so universal...that it has to be genetic. I hate my stomach being blown on...and that became one of my 3 year old daughter's favorite things in the world. Exposure therapy on steroids. Smile...go into the bathroom and SCREAM. As a kid, I was always talking too loud in the ear with my dad's hearing aid, and too softly in his other ear.
Authoritarian parents...send their kids to their rooms, spank them, and when it goes to far lock them in and beat them. The battles between my mother and sister, although I don't believe they ever legally crossed the line...were legendary. My son who understood English late....the battles (one of my greatest regrets in life) were also rather extreme.
Fixing that...fixing the relationship with my son...took ALL of the parenting/ peacemaking skills that I had. It flipped a LOT of my beliefs on their heads.
Saving Private Ryan...was in many ways easy. The real challenge would be dealing with his guilt about surviving, and the guilt about the people who died trying to get him home, and within his parents hearts in dealing with all of their other children who died.
Who's to say that Ryan wasn't the Black Sheep of the family, the one that always pressed/stomped on the wrong triggers in his parents. Why couldn't David to have been the one to live? He's the son that I always loved spending time with? The one that agreed with me on life issues (politics, religion, etc). Or Sam...he was going to go into the family business, Ryan wants to move to California. In the movie, these issues don't matter, in real life...they usually come up...even in the best of families. (Why can't you be more like your brother? I've said it too. All parents of multiple kids have said it at one time or another out of frustration.)
Back to Countries: Between countries with similar Cultures (the US and Germany), after a war...peace is easier to attain. While between countries with differnt cultures (the US and Russia) even if you were on the same "side"...peace can struggle for decades.
Peace...is complicated. I think of Ericson's Trust vs Mistrust. When my kids trust me...it's easy. However....athoritarian parenting, boundaries, threats of courtmarshall, of being fired, of lawsuits...all undermine trust. They work really well short term, or if you've got a legal right to beat your wife/child/slave to death or put someone in Levenworth....but sow the seeds of conflict in the long term.
Dismissing peace as a miracle...makes it sound like it can't be taught. Like it's not a skill. Undermines diplomacy. While I won't take full credit for the close relationship my kids have with each other, I also know (from my own childhood) just how impossible it is if parents don't foster it (my mother drove my sister and I into a constant war...that's another book to explain). Did it suck to be alone in my room crying while listening to my kids together in another room laughing and plotting against me...yes, but I had my priorities.
Apologies, such as Mr. Huidobro shooting Mr Mitrione, count. Tone of voice. Body language.
The people that have the power to make peace...are the socially popular "victims". The US after WWII, the Amish after their schoolhouse was shot up, my son after Joe tried to get him kicked out of school, me after my ex was a first class a$$ in the divorce, (hopefully the one fire station). When you CAN take revenge, and you don't...it's a chance to make peace.
Anyway...way too long. I agree with almost all of what you write, except for the label "miracle".
Peace?