I was busy last night leaving snips of rage and erudition at various places around the ‘net. The topic is important enough that it deserves some more attention. I touched on it at Fertile Ground. It is the relationship of PTSD to politics. All I can telly you from a personal perspective is that if you are in the 90% that haven’t had severe PTSD (longer than a year) or are among the 80% who can never get it (it is in part genetic) you have no idea. None. I have touched on my own contact with the “problem” from time to time but you will have to root around to see if you can find it. I’m not going looking nor will I provide a recap. Let me just say that through intense personal efforts (beyond the capability of most – I had to take 5 years out of my life – on the road so to speak) I was able to fix it. Mostly.

But since most people have no intimate contact with PTSD I thought it might be good to delve further into its influence on politics. Thus my efforts in the comments at various blogs last night. So let me start:

Revolutionaries and outlaws have a thing in common.

They tend to be abused children.

They have in common a grievance against a civilization that failed to protect them. A source of infinite discontent. Because once traumatized the trauma lives on in persons with PTSD (to varying degrees) for life.

Do you want to do something about politics AND crime? Do something about PTSD. Did I say crime? Yes. Because the rage comes out in anti-social acts. You can get a rather good education on the subject by looking at the wanted posters in any American Post Office. In about 1/2 the pictures the beatings, rapes, and who knows what else clearly shows in the faces of the perps.

There is a political party that caters to PTSD sufferers (drug users, the sexually ambivalent, the sexual deviant etc. ) the Democrat Party. Now I don’t object to any of those behaviors from a principled stand point. They are adaptations.

What I do object to is that the Right is doing exactly zero to dry up the wellspring of its opposition. Child abuse.

Oh. The Right is perfectly happy to fight the symptoms. With negative results (how will the traumatized react to further trauma?). But dry up the well? Not even under the dimmest of consideration.

So there you have it. The Democrats are powered by grievance and those with the strongest grievances tend to rise to the top. This is especially true in the “feminist” political industry. The system promulgated by them is exactly what you would expect from women who have been sexually molested and who there by have acquired life long PTSD. The difficulty is that the “rules” are good for those who have been molested or raped but counter productive for those who have not encountered a rapist (usually a family member) or or a molester (almost always a family member).

Funny thing is: I just asked the First Mate “which Party is the PTSD Party?” Now she is not an avid reader of my blogging so she is not up to date with my writing on the subject. So she didn’t have a crib sheet so to speak. She chimed up at once, “The Democrats.”

So there you have it: my prescription for dealing the left a death blow. Greatly reduce the incidence of child abuse in America. Dry up the well. Because you will never defeat people with such ingrained rage with politics. Now it might be possible to pacify them with drugs if drugs were legal. But the Republicans in all their towering stupidity continue with their insane war on drugs. It is almost as if they didn’t understand the problem. They don’t. They treat the PTSD Party as if it was full of normal rational people. But people with PTSD are not “normal” or rational. They can not be reasoned with. When my PTSD was full blown you could not reason with me. So I’m fully aware of the situation.

The Republicans (as I pointed out above) do tend to see the irrationality of such people. But do they dry up the well? No. They make laws against symptoms. Like that is going to work. Like it is not going to provoke a backlash. Idiots.

And I’m not proposing laws. Education about the subject should do the trick. Not perfectly, but well enough.

So let me explain it in the simplest terms:

You can not beat PTSD with politics

To even try is IMO a fools errand.

Update 21 Feb 2012 2013z

I was discussing this with one of my Republican friends by e-mail and he wasn’t getting it. As I predicted up thread. [All I can telly you from a personal perspective is that if you are in the 90% that haven't had severe PTSD (longer than a year) or are among the 80% who can never get it (it is in part genetic) you have no idea. None.] So here is a BIG CLUE:

Bill Clinton “feels your pain.”

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