SATURDAY MORNING THOUGHTS

To those of you, my AOL Journals friends and companions, who have been so kind and caring during the hard times i've been having, i want to send my deepest gratitude.  you have been a great solace, comfort, and help.  I also want to let you know how much better i am, certainly than i was a month ago.  it was a crash that was creeping up on me over a considerable period of time. i ignored the warning signs, until they couldn't be ignored any longer - because there i was hitting bottom.  my physical health was very bad during this same time, which also contributed to the waning of my mental health.  during the ensuing weeks i have been paying a lot of attention to becoming a healthy mind in a sane body.  or, no, a sane mind in a healthy body.  you know what i mean..  i think my teaching may have suffered because of this, but not terminally. 

so, i've been walking, doing T'ai Chi, eating in such a healthy fashion that i amaze myself, taking the time - as in Thursday's post - to pay attention to the good things in the world around me.  not to mention having been on a strong dose of effexor for the past four weeks. 

i was even able to sit through a three-hour faculty meeting yesterday without screaming.  or only very low-key screaming.  once.  restraining myself from getting up and leaping out the window several times.  no way to tell you how i hate those things. i always go with the firm intention of keeping my mouth absolutely shut, but inevitably end up opening it.  then regretting it.  because, really, it does no good.  i'm usually in a fringe minority in my opinions, and i end up looking like a wacko.  mmmm hmmm. 

but i came home and recovered from it by hours of mowing, clipping, weeding, heaving and hauling out in the bright windy spring sunshine.  so, now i feel fine. 

except, of course, for the extreme sadness, verging on despair, i feel when i read the news.  i just read news here on AOL before coming to my journal, my next stop will be to go see the political cartoons that Progressive Musings sends me daily (in, i think, his effort to help me keep some sanity).  the cartoons enable the despair to lift slightly.  but how can we not feel déjà vu all over again when we read the stories, see the pictures, of the torture of prisoners by American GI's in Iraq?  i remember the horror stories from Viet Nam in such stark detail, and i know the damage caused to the very guys who performed the torture and brutality.  it ruined not only their victims, but their own futures.  they still wander our streets as homeless vets, inhabit our veterans' hospitals in psych wards, have committed suicide,  or even if functioning they still wake up sweating from nightmares of brutal horror.  it's being trained to regard the enemy as "the other" that enables decently brought up young Americans to become torturers and brutes.  and it's an evil evil thing.  i despair to see it happening in our history yet again.

then, there's the refusal on the part of a tv station conglomerate to show the Nightline program with the recital of the names, showing of photos, of those who have thus far lost their lives in this insane conflict.  what could they be thinking?  what ever political stance you take towards this war, do you not feel some compunction to know the truth?  to see the toll in human life?  and that's just the American toll.  were an Arab station to do an equivalent honoring of their, mostly civilian, dead, it would last for hours.  we don't want to see the coffins come home to their final rest?  we don't want to see those youthful smiling faces, now missing from their homes, their loved ones?  what kind of cowards have we become?

Cynthia, at Sorting the Pieces, was equally outraged this morning by these same two pieces of news.  she has an excellent entry here.