Official Urged Fewer Diagnoses of PTSD

Of course, you realize, this isn't news.   It's true, but it's not news.   For it to be news, it would have to be, well, new.  And different.    It's neither.  This is exactly what I knew was going to happen, because it's what has been happening all along.   Some day I'm going to be tired of saying "I told you so."   But not yet.

Current Mood:

enraged

This is because innovation and advancement come from imaginative risk-takers, and those people have more latitude to work within if they are not under so much pressure to survive that they can't afford to take risks.

Items: The relationship between bohemians and real estate previously noted; the number of geniuses who died in poverty (and who could have produced more if they hadn't); the fact that the kind of person I'm talking about will do what they do regardless, even if they suffer, so the supposed motivation that comes from the struggle to survive doesn't matter; the fact that innovation and creativity are continuing to come from those European social democracies that all have a higher standard of living than the US does, while the US is starting to fall apart and fall behind.

Notion: Leading an ethical life means leading a good life in all senses, individually and collectively, and the individual cannot be separated from the community; the idea that you have to keep other people down in order to advance yourself is a pernicious flaw in our thinking. It might work temporarily, but the bill always comes due.

I actually really hate Mother's Day.  I've always hated my birthdays too.  After I turned thirteen my parents stopped celebrating my birthday.  Just....stopped.   This might sound trivial, except that my brother was murdered when I was twelve.   So my whole life, I really want someone else to make my birthday for me, but I never think anyone will, so I go around reminding everyone that's it's my birthday soon and I throw a party and make a big deal about it myself.   This is one part empowerment and one part pure fear.  The gumbo is good, though.

So Mother's Day is like having an extra birthday that I'm always paranoid no one will notice.   Except that it's no one's job to notice except my own spawn and He Who Fathered Him, and they are a bit alike in that....Huh?  What day is it?  Was there something going on today?  Oh.

Mind you, the Wonder Boy is the kind of kid who will march up to me and say out of the blue,  "You know what, you're a great mom."   At his tenth birthday he made a speech about it.   (Yes.  He really did.  Weirdest kid ever, and you can't have him, he's mine.)   Those spontaneous moments are worth any number of Officially Recognized Holidays.  Except, you know, sometimes I'd like for someone to plan things other than me.   Except I'm so sure that no one will that nobody ever gets a chance.

Becoming a mother for me was a near-death experience.  My own mother is gone, and her going was not kind.  I love my son and I'd trade no wealth or fame or any good thing for him, not even the daughter I thought I wanted.  He is the only, the still turning point of the world, like no other human being, bright and beautiful.  But I bought him with pain and fear and three days in nothingness.  It changed me, in ways that are hard to disentangle from the ways he has changed me.   Being a mother is being a handmaiden to death; I brought death into the world, his, birth and death and all the things he does in between.  They are all his, but I brought them.   All mothers do this; but I know it.

My mother's birthday was May 14.  Expect more of this around then.  It will be five years in June and I'm over the worst of it, except every now and again, like now.  If my mother was alive, I'd be complaining about how she ran me crazy but she'd have my back.  My father likewise.  If I run out of money (which happens when you're a grad student) or have some other small calamity...I don't have anyone to turn to.  I know lots of people never do and some are worse off than I'll ever be, but I did have that and more than the backup I miss the people who provided it.

Anyhow.  I told mtn_hermit to come visit me next weekend when he could stay the whole time and I thought it didn't matter much.  I was over my holiday princess anxiety, and my bitter reflections about the hard granite core of motherhood, all the hard things that you do because you have to.   There isn't a choice.  Any more than I could have chosen to refuse to sit by my own mother's bed, to leave her alone even though staying meant watching her suffer and die.  The choice of being less of a person is no choice at all.  

There is a real part of being someone's mother that is like being the source of life and compassion, a divine mother in truth.  There is another part that is like being made of stone.   There is another that is like being a wild creature with sharp teeth and the will to rend any threat to the beloved small one.  No wonder "civilization" alternately reveres and reviles mothers; worship us as goddesses, despise us as vessels of corrupted flesh, flip a coin, you are somewhere on the arc of history.    There is an awful lot written about mothers but for the most part there is a yawning chasm where the experiences of mothers, especially the mothers of young children, lie; a distinct echoing emptiness where their expressions of it should be.  It is papered over with advice books.  They all stink of fear.

I don't know where I was going with this, so I'll leave you with a picture of Sheila-na-Gig.   Remember where you came from, and don't be afraid.

EDIT:

This is the note I sent my representative...

I noticed you voted against tabling the request to reconsider House Res. 1113, after it had already passed unanimously.  As a mother, I am deeply offended.  As a constituent, I find the insinuation that I wouldn't notice or am not smart enough to figure out what you're doing deeply insulting.

Seriously, it's obvious that the Republicans are wasting taxpayer money playing stupid games instead of actually doing the job you are getting paid for.  Cut it out.

So what am I going to do, with all that FREE TIME????   Go to Cancun and meet dancing girls?  Drink margaritas?  Go to Cancun and BE a dancing girl?  What?  O what, elorie, what?

Er.  Well, first I'm going to do laundry....then I'm going to read some books.  Oooh, and I rented DVD's of The Muppet Show to watch with my kid.

• Know what you are talking about.   This means keeping informed and current.  Having taken some biology or chemistry at some point in the past is not enough.   Even people with Ph.D's in the exact subject matter read up on it all the time.  You don't have to read all the journals, but Science and Nature have nifty websites, and so does New Scientist.
  
• Don't presume expertise in a subject you don't actually know about (evolution and anthropology under the guise of "human nature" are perennial faves; also it seems like everyone is a climate expert these days).  Having a degree in a different discipline doesn't automatically give you a pass, but it ought to give you some perspective.  And, contrary to popular belief, "computer science" is not actually science.  Anthropology, on the other hand, is.   
  
• For the sake of all the Gods, if you are going to run off at the mouth about evolution, please have a basic understanding of what the theory of evolution actually says, and how evolution actually works.    Be cautious and circumspect when speaking of our ancestral hominids and their habits, and please do not ever utter the phrase "survival of the fittest" unless you are actually quoting Darwin at length.
  

From my own experiences as a research assistant for a cultural anthropologist, having held administration jobs in a genetics lab and also in an R&D lab for industry, and my current position in academia as a graduate student in the humanities...Yeah, some serious bullshit can go down, especially when money and egos are involved.  But even in the worst situations there are always people who care about the science or the knowledge being produced, and in most cases I've seen, the ones who care prevail overall.  It works, on the whole, because people who do science care about science, and the people who work in academia generally care about what they are doing.  There's not really another reason for spending tens of thousands of dollars on a degree in order to earn the privilege of staring at flatworms all day, or studying fossilized mastodon shit, or getting shot at while you're trying to do field research on West African dances, you know what I mean? 

Are you being told in patronizing tones that there's a real scientific controversy about global warming, or that climate scientists were predicting another ice age a couple decades ago, or that it's a conspiracy between Al Gore and (fill in the blank)?   Here's your handy guide to debunking the arguments of global warming deniers, all based on gen-u-ine, grade-A, peer-reviewed SCIENCE!   Sorry, can't help you with other cranks like creation scientists, but keep reading.  It's science!  Science is fun!

Current Mood:

snarky

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/104/47/18866 (link is to abstract, you can get the full text and supporting data from there)

Abstract:

The growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), the largest human contributor to human-induced climate change, is increasing rapidly. Three processes contribute to this rapid increase. Two of these processes concern emissions. Recent growth of the world economy combined with an increase in its carbon intensity have led to rapid growth in fossil fuel CO2 emissions since 2000: comparing the 1990s with 2000–2006, the emissions growth rate increased from 1.3% to 3.3% y–1. The third process is indicated by increasing evidence (P = 0.89) for a long-term (50-year) increase in the airborne fraction (AF) of CO2 emissions, implying a decline in the efficiency of CO2 sinks on land and oceans in absorbing anthropogenic emissions. Since 2000, the contributions of these three factors to the increase in the atmospheric CO2 growth rate have been {approx}65 ± 16% from increasing global economic activity, 17 ± 6% from the increasing carbon intensity of the global economy, and 18 ± 15% from the increase in AF. An increasing AF is consistent with results of climate–carbon cycle models, but the magnitude of the observed signal appears larger than that estimated by models. All of these changes characterize a carbon cycle that is generating stronger-than-expected and sooner-than-expected climate forcing.
****

I wish for everyone to note a few things:

• The article is from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.   Meaning that it is hard-core, straight-up SCIENCE.   *cue echo-chamber effects*.   These folks are from such bastions of radical political activity as Oak Ridge National Laboratory and NOAA.  They are so very not interested in screwing up their career trajectory by espousing bad science or unpopular political hot potatoes. 
  
• The article takes as given that climate change is anthropogenic  (that is, caused by PEOPLE) and that CO2 emissions are the major contributing cause.  For an article like this to take something as given, it has to be pretty damn well established.  As in, not a controversy.  Not in serious doubt.   Anyone who says otherwise has a political or emotional stake in doing so
  
• Their main focus and assertion is not to question IF "climate forcing" due to carbon emissions will happen, but to state that their data indicates that is happening faster and more strongly than expected.
• There is a veritable avalanche of evidence for global warming and the human causes thereof out there, all Real Science (tm).   Copious amounts of it are available ONLINE, for FREE.    There is no excuse for not being informed.