That second paragraph sounds like you're associating PTSD with stay-at-home-moms, the way it's written.
Have you ever spent a full day with my kids? Well, HAVE YOU?
O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, go away";
But it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play,
Why do you hate the troops, heebie?
For God's sake, VW, haven't you figured it out yet? We are your kids.
We're also your parents. It's kind of complicated.
True, it's easier and cheaper to give them some almost illegible and misspelled cardboard signs and let them beg at busy L.A. intersections.
I think maybe the VA's efforts aren't being fairly considered here. It's hardly perfect or available to all who need it, but "nothing meaningful" is too far.
Disclosure: I may not be entirely neutral on this due to various relationships.
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That second paragraph sounds like you're associating PTSD with stay-at-home-moms, the way it's written.
I agree with this. Coping with a crying child may be stressful but it isn't really in the same league as seeing your buddy get his legs blown off by an IED.
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I think maybe the VA's efforts aren't being fairly considered here. It's hardly perfect or available to all who need it, but "nothing meaningful" is too far.
And with this. Veterans also have a significant advantage when seeking many forms of government employment.
I made a funny and LC and JBS both took it earnestly!
I am actually a big fan of the VA and don't mean to shit on it.
1: So you're saying we can't trust the FPPs to be straight with us? After all this time?
I thought it was just a stylistic quirk, actually. I didn't think you were seriously saying that SAHM's have PTSD.
11) Heebie is into math, can't expect her to do words well too.
14: They use the worst tp ever so I can see why.
15: Indeed, there is something rather queer about those FPPs.
Still, I'm down with FPP. (Yeah, you know me...)
(Don't tell me everyone's forgotten that song...)
Heebie, if someone were to ask you, "What's the point of this post?" would you be able to explain it, hypothetically speaking?
The original post is entirely correct.
This is off-topic, but for the people who actually want Obama to win and aren't just pretending to want that, how will you react if Romney wins and the electronic tallies don't match up with the exit polls? Or if a bunch of votes keep disappearing from high population precincts?
I agree with this. Coping with a crying child may be stressful but it isn't really in the same league as seeing your buddy get his legs blown off by an IED.
"I've... seen things you people wouldn't believe; attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those... moments... will be lost... in time, like... tears... in rain."
Nurses?
And I thought the PTSD thing was funny.
Not that nurses have PTSD, just that they are lauded as angels and aren't exactly supported by this government.
27: Nurses in the neonatal ICU used to burn out pretty quickly. Too much emotional investment, too much death. I don't recall any long-term follow-ups though.
24:how will you react if Romney wins and the electronic tallies don't match up with the exit polls?
Cry, cry, masturbate, cry.
mcmanus, wouldn't you just masturbate? that sounds like the best possible outcome for you.
Fucking foster parents, yo! And there are some PTSD-inducing bits at times, but I don't talk about them much.
Teachers?
No no, teachers are bad guys now. Unions and all that.
Governor Etch-a-Sketch fake-loves teachers to bits now. So there must be some proportion of society that still lionizes them.
Speaking of moms, my sister just got a foster-to-adopt foster child! Like, tonight! How exciting! I hope it works out, and I will finally be a real uncle. (Obviously, if by some chance the baby's biological family can work it out to provide her with a good home instead, then that would probably be the optimal outcome, but failing that, I think my sister will be a good mother.)
34: Yeah, I was considering that (and there are pretty strong nurses' unions too, which are vilified in some quarters), but per 35, I'm not sure the winds are blowing fully in that direction. A lot of people are still given pause.
The OP is weird to me regarding SAHMs insofar as those of them who are valorized tend to be white UMC types -- see Ann Romney, of course -- while those who really are economically vulnerable tend to be framed as 'those people' in one way or another. I'm not sure that distinction holds for nurses or teachers, much less soldiers.
36: Good luck to her. Also, your great-grandson is very thin, considering.
36: Please feel free to email motherissues at gmail if you/they have general questions or need support, recommended secret facebook groups, etc.
We are two years and two days post-Mara's entrance into our home and it is of course the best thing ever. We just had birthday dinner with her dad, will have her siblings to her birthday party Saturday, and will see her mom Sunday, possibly at the restaurant where her dad cooks. Her parents were not particularly adept at parenting but are pleasant people and I'm so glad they're able to be an ongoing part of her life. The way her eyes lit up when we surprised her with her dad tonight was just awesome.
36 cont'd: regardless of the baby's biological family's fitness, being in a loving and accepting foster home is such a good thing and I'm so glad to hear that your sister is playing that role. Babies need love and love and love! And other stuff, like at least marginally sober caregivers who actually attend to their medical and other neds, but definitely love.
O hei, going back to soldiers for a sec: some of you might find this interesting.
Anyway, how do I get some of this excessive praise? In this country I would say it's seen as an indulgence not to work after your youngest is about 1.
42: Move to a swing state in the US. You will get praised effusively by powerful men conspiring to make your life objectively worse if they get elected. Empowerment.
41. That is appalling and alarming. It is also the inevitable outcome of the American centre/left marching in lockstep with Dick Cheney since 1968 on the question of "having other priorities at the time".
Was the American left prior to 1968 full of people enthusiastic about joining the Army? Or are you referring to the end of conscription?
44: Sort of seems to me more like the inevitable outcome of attempting to deploy an army on the all-volunteer model in an obviously crazy war for which only the most desperate would volunteer.
But I agree that it's appalling and alarming. That the supremacist right -- which is still hard at work on out-doing 911 -- essentially got a ton of combat training in Iraq and Afghanistan on the government dime is particularly messed up.
I agree with 46.1. Rowan was very keen on joining the military to give his life meaning or something. I was strongly opposed since he already has complex PTSD and has spent his whole life having much less autonomy than the average kid. But I'm afraid they'd still take him.
In other kid news, Colton and his girlfriend just broke up. I'll see how he lands, but he may be ready for his money soon.
45. Mainly the latter. There's always a danger/likelihood that a volunteer army will be forced to recruit disproportionately from the layers that Karl Marx defined as the Lumpenproletariat, and that that will impact on its morale and effectiveness. I don't know why people think the problem is bigger in America that elsewhere, but it seems likely that it has to do with the monstrous size of the US forces but also with the proportion of working class/lower middle class people who think joining up is a viable career option is lower.
A friend of mine who is a commercial business analyst was delighted when his son joined the RAF; another who is an executive with the BBC, encouraged his daughter to join the Navy. But the feeling I get from places like this, is that on the rare occasions when somebody's nearest and dearest are thinking of enlisting the default response is "Oh shit, what can I do to stop this?"
The British forces aren't at all a shining counterexample to the stuff in that article, but they do seem to be less infected. and I suspect that's part of the reason.
My family would have been happy if I'd joined the Navy.
45: Well, I don't think it was seen as a left/right thing. My father enlisted in 1960 or so for no particular reason other than that he'd dropped out of college and it was an ordinary thing to do for middle class men, and he was as left then as he's been all my life (which is, very very left by US standards, fairly reasonably left by any standards). I don't know that his presence in the US armed forces was particularly a benefit to them, but he enjoyed himself.
And of course it's not nearly as ordinary a thing to do now. I'm pleased that my niece joined the Marines, but mostly because I couldn't figure out how else she was going to get out of running a Pizza Hut in a horrible little town in the middle of nowhere -- she'd rejected college, and I didn't have any better ideas for her that she was going to go along with.
48.2: when somebody's nearest and dearest are thinking of enlisting the default response is "Oh shit, what can I do to stop this?"
Only a common response when the troops they're enlisting in are deployed in crazy places on visibly hopeless missions, I think. That's why it's the Iraq mission specifically that broke the American model. (Which gets into the much larger problem of the post-WWII military industrial complex's endless and largely fruitless quest to manufacture wars it can pass off as worthwhile...)
Vietnam must have started a few cracks.
That's why it's the Iraq mission specifically that broke the American model.
While that is probably true I will say that in my particular band of brothers there were very few of us that didn't think we would be back after Desert Storm. Real sense of unfinished business.
Vietnam must have started a few cracks.
We still had a draft then. Nixon specifically eliminated the draft so that well-off kids wouldn't care about the war enough to protest it anymore.
Real sense of unfinished business.
Which after all was a form of silliness that a whole bipartisan sector of American politics was dedicated to promoting. There's always somebody who won't know when to stop. But quite an tragedy that it was precisely this silliness that would top off the prudent, successful and politically canny Desert Storm with the perverted, humiliating, catastrophic farce of the Iraq War.
Thank goodness we now have some closure.
but it seems likely that it has to do with the monstrous size of the US forces
The US military was a good third larger thirty years ago. Over the same period the population has grown by close to a third and it's become more common for women to be in the military. Somehow they managed.
We still had a draft then. Nixon specifically eliminated the draft so that well-off kids wouldn't care about the war enough to protest it anymore.
Sounds like a fairly wide "Oh shit, what can I do to stop this?"-style crack.