Hi, y'all:  I've been caught off guard on coming back from a walk to see rioting in Washington, DC on the evening news.  I immediately was triggered and had a panic attack that led to sobbing. 

Why?

TRIGGER WARNING

1. As a missionary kid raised overseas, I survived a protester's car bombing during a riot at age 9 when my family went out for ice cream.

2. At age 10 my dad took me with him on a routine bank errand and this time I saw a mounted policeman shoot and kill a protester standing next to our car parked outside the bank.

3.  At age 11 in revenge a protester came to my neighborhood in the suburbs and murdered the father of the only other US family there.  I went to the funeral.

4.  At age 15, riots had escalated into full civil war and on a summer Sunday afternoon a military patrol in my suburban neighborhood mistook me for a rebel and tortured me.  Its commanding officer then failed to execute me twice only because the gun jammed when it was put to my head twice and the triggers was pulled.  The split second delay allowed me to convince the patrol they were about to execute a US citizen so I was released alive.

5.  The civil war did take a close friend of mine who was not so lucky and was shot dead in the face by a military patrol at his school.  I spoke at his funeral.

These and other experiences are why I have PTSD, why I became a hospital chaplain at Chicago's busiest ER to help gunshot victims, and why I'm a Community Leader here at DS PTSD.  They were hard experiences, but they also taught me PTSD Wisdom about learning to be fair and non-partisan when others become divided and lose their heads giving in to violence.  I processed my experiences in a book.  Here's a review of it below.  To preserve my anonymity here I substituted my DS username for my real name in the reviewer's article.  

I post it here not to brag about my book, but to show my work at processing my PTSD that leads me to go on to ask you now for patience and for support I need now from you.  I do my therapy, I take my Prazosin PTSD medication, and I have an appointment with my psychiatrist set for Tuesday.  I'd like your help in addition to all of that because I'm having a hard time seeing the rioting I survived as a missionary kid overseas come home now to the USA with rioting here now.  I live only an hour and a half from Washington, DC and often take my nursing students in my death and dying classes there by bus for field trips to the Holocaust museum there.  The first book ever written on death and dying was by Elizabeth Kubler Ross, who volunteered in those camps helping survivors when the Holocaust ended.

I realize I will be OK, but I also know that part of the reason why I'll be OK is that I am willing to open up and admit when I need support to get through times when my PTSD is triggered.  It's really triggered tonight more than I has been in my 45 years since I fled to the US as a refugee.  I'd been born here in Pennsylvania before my parents went abroad for missionary service so I could get a US passport and take refuge here with the rights of US citizenship.

I'm shaken up at seeing rioting of the kind I survived repeatedly happening now not far from me in my US homeland where I took refuge.  It's not rational, I know, but PTSD isn't, so I'm writing here to admit that I don't feel safe and would like support in restoring my sense of safety once again.  By the way, in support please make no Democrat or Republican references.  Because of my own traumatic past, I am an Independent registered voter very intentionally.  Thank you.

FindArticles / Reference / Utopian Studies / Spring, 1997

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7051/is_n2_v8/ai_n28700456/

Review of book:  Utopia Undone: The Fall of Uruguay

by Oscar R.b Marti

Book's author: Mujicaptsd. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1994.

THE DOWNFALL of Uruguay's twentieth-century utopian democracy has been well documented by

historians....   In Utopia Undone, Mujicaptsd undertakes the difficult task of presenting to the American public an

analysis.... Mujicaptsd is a capable author. He has the academic credentials, he

grew up in Uruguay during the military regime, and... this first hand acquaintance is essential....

Uruguay's history is, indeed, relevant to such understanding. In 1903, under Jose Battle y Ordonez, the

urban liberal Colorado party began a major program of social reforms, that ended a protracted struggle

with the rural conservative Blancos and began a fifty year period of social peace and economic stability.

A worldwide demand for beef and wool assured a continued prosperity for the middle class, managed

by a growing bureaucracy at the expense of the ever present poor and much needed agrarian reforms

(16). Changes in the world economy during the 50s were not met with internal adjustments, and

Uruguay suffered a spiraling cycle of economic stagnation, massive inflation, monetary devaluation, and

the accompanying popular dissent, student protests, and strikes. Invoking stability, an increasingly

conservative government imposed progressively sterner measures to be thwarted, in turn, by well

organized insurgent groups, such as the Tupamaros, espousing the cause of the poor and the working

classes. 

Polarization and social unrest continued to spread, and now invoking national security, the

government handed the reins to the military who, between 1972 and 1973, suspended constitutional

guarantees, declared a state of internal war, overthrew the civilian government, and imposed a savage

repression in which mere suspicion landed citizens in concentration camps or caused their

disappearance.

Utopia Undone pays close attention to several...themes.... In concrete, historical

terms, it refers to the twenty year period of decline in Uruguayan democracy that ended in military rule;

in personal terms to a loss of values, to that intimation that past, present, and future have no meaning,

and to the inability to change or the realization that one can't (129).

The first chapter of Utopia Undone is a good biographical and historical account of...the

period. Subsequent chapters are devoted to...analysis....   

This reviewer found...[the last] to be the most interesting.... 

....This is one of the scariest...I have ever read. 

However, Mujicaptsd does an excellent job of balancing thehistorical, biographical, and literary elements while not neglecting the larger philosophical issues...the morality of violence...the causes and sense of

decay.... The book is...worthwhile reading for historians, political scientists, sociologists, or anyone interested in Latin America and the tragic decades. More importantly, it is faithful...and succeeds in reminding us of the dirty war, the desaparecidos, the unknown or superfluous victims that rotted in that inferno whose true colors that author is trying to reveal to us.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Society for Utopian Studies

COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning