PERPETRATORS OF AFGHANISTAND AND IRAQ OCCUPATIONS USE FLAWED LOGIC

Patriotism is a funny thing. It’s often used for a hyper vigilant cover for ignorance and fear. The current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq follow the same, sick pattern of thinking we’ve always followed when conflicts are the result of the imprisoned, colonized mind, consumerism, racism, and power. It’s unconscionable that President Obama has just ordered 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. This on the heals of pious promises to the American people that we would drop troop occupation, bring the troops home, and focus on the real problems: universal healthcare, insuring all Americans a living wage, and prosecuting members of the prior Administration for war crimes or crimes of lying and falsifying information.

Patriotism may be a bias that creates a commitment to denial and the glory of imperious empowerment at the expense of smaller countries that are rich in natural resources, like oil, and have suffered under the jackboot of occupation and injustice. These occupations are wars of the rich, the connected and the elites, and the rest of us who oppose them aren’t being listened to. One organization, March Forward, urges all troops to refuse orders to go to Afghanistan. A sad result is that more troops back from Iraq have committed suicide than have been killed in battle.

Those claiming to be patriotic appear to have cases of selected memory. They will claim to be loyal to the U.S. Constitution, following the Commander-in-Chief’s orders on blind faith, but they ignore the constitutional imperative that both Houses must declare a legal war.
They intone that recruits signed a contract to unthinkingly follow all orders. They say that those who refuse to go to war, after experiencing the reality of way, should have never signed those contracts, and have full knowledge they’re now breaking the law.

This is an example of Western, white-based, linear reasoning; it’s rigid and doesn’t allow for any change on the part of Conscientious Objectors to military service and war. The way the world works is that it’s in process constantly of change, death, and growth. It’s dynamic is cyclic, not linear. The fact that a soldier has fought in Iraq or Afghanistan, seen the death of innocents, participated in interrogation techniques that may be torturous, and have known the racism and injustice firsthand has every right to respond like an intelligent human being and change his/her mind from a political, philosophical, or spiritual motivation. This is dissonant to the super-patriots’ tunnel-vision view of patriotism and sacrifice, so it cuts no ice with them; in fact, it creates division within themselves, and all they can do is to push back with paranoid, parroted, reactionary ideas, given to them by their social conditioning and the corporation’s cry for help!

I would argue that dissenters and COs are living out the real definition of patriotism. A loyal person isn’t one who never rocks the boat. True loyalty is born out of living out one’s truth even when under attack; true allegiance is not found in a ‘go along to get along’ philosophy. It’s found in the minds and actions of the nitty-gritting saying “no” philosophy in order that truth and justice has a tangible and demonstrable example of a person who believes that an illegal war will take more life in the end.

I know. I was a Vietnam Era Vet who became a CO. I was a CO when I was ordered by my local draft board in 1969 to be inducted into the U.S. Army. Did I remain the same throughout my entire military experience? Absolutely not. I grew as a human being in my core beliefs. In the final analysis, this is what it’s all about. I was a human being first, and a soldier second. I took personal responsibility for my own life, and the position in which I placed myself in: would I be a mindless, subservient killer, or a thoughtful person who had to consider whether any form of violence, abuse, or colonial domination would save lives. The ethical adage of do no harm was one guideline I followed, and almost forty years later I’m glad I did. Patriotism that feeds off illegal wars has never worked and it never will.

If you aren’t military or ex-military, you as an ordinary citizen must decide how you come down on this issue. If you decide or have already decided that we must get out of these racist, illegal conflicts, you must act. You can partner with other anti-war groups in their efforts to stop the war machine, or you can act alone by whatever means you choose. This is your choice. This is our choice, and choose we must. Do not let your speaking truth to power be shut down. Life is the most sacred essence we have, so we must take life by the horns, and pass it along in whatever form of protest we think is best.

© Christopher Bear Beam, M.A. December 2009

PULL DOWN THE VEIL OVER YOUR FACE WITH TWO HANDS

FAMILY SECRETS

If you go up into the attic of the house of the U.S.A., and poke around a little, you will find an old, musty chest. It’s maybe a chest from the 1880s I would imagine. Slowly you open the creaking top of the chest, and inside you find a box labeled in faded black charcoal Family Secrets.

Every family has its secrets—some just have more than others. But this find is special, I mean it’s unique; it’s historic, isn’t it? Yes, it is. The U.S.A. Family Secrets is mixed in with a bucket of mortar to patch the brick of the house. It’s mixed with denial, doublespeak, and hypocrisy. Granted this kind of covert hype makes it easier to control children, because the chest of family secrets is like Santa’s bag of goodies at Christmas time. As long as we don’t let the family secrets out, our kids are happy, and ignorance is bliss, ‘what you don’t know can’t hurt you,’ and they think they’re going to live in the Garden Land of America.

We are the nation that purports to be a “Christian nation,” aren’t we? How is it then that we have trained ourselves so well to turn away, to turn our eyes towards the ground, to avert looking into the eyes of Mother Truth? This makes us a nation of dishonesty. Dishonest about the cruel oppressions of the past, their causal effects on the present, and their prophetic link to the future. Hypocrisy is being one way on the inside, but changing the outside to project our rightness in our own eyes. It’s wearing a mask like an actor who takes on the “face” of the person she’s portraying. We want the audience to see us with the mask---to see through the real face to only register the one portrayed.

We have “falsies” and “truthies.” They are all around us. It’s hard to get close to people when they have eyes in the back of their heads, but they have ways of watching. The “Truth Police” can only exist where there is no trust or a little trust. Since our forefathers (for me white, Scottish American) began this sewer of hypocrisy and doublespeak, to get what they wanted for themselves (shall we get real?) isn’t it for us to attempt to bring some answers and confessions to the public domain. Using doublespeak means we say one thing but mean another for our own purposes. It’s a clever distortion under cover in a land where statistics can lie depending on who is running the numbers.

To rationalize and continue our denial about what we actually did to human beings who don’t look like us or have the same color of skin hue, we must pretend that truth is stranger than fiction. We’ve created “sincere fictions” (Joe Feagin) to hold up the whole lie for somehow we have to, I mean just have to keep it held up. We like our fiction on CDs, movie theaters, DVDs, and draft houses, where we can suck our beer and punch more pizza into our mouths. We have to have it pretty to justify ourselves in our own eyes. We are the innocents! Our previous, familial generations could never have rapaciously ripped off the naïve and weak Indians in the way some people argue? The slaves from Africa were brought her to civilize them and bring them into another form of consciousness, out of savage wilderness, lonesome lands were only wild dogs and two-winged ones can exist. Their masters took care of them. Sure, you had the occasional rape or children out of wedlock coming from the consensual unions of whites and blacks. Indeed, they were happy and provided for by their owners and the plantations, were they not?

These are the fantasies that are fatal. When children wake up to the fact that the ones who love them the most (the “gods”) have lied to them for years about the truth of a being named Santa Claus, this is a rude and traumatic shock to a child’s entire conscience, brain chemistry, cognitive processes, and affective education for their sentiments and emotions.

Family secrets are closed off from public view, and peculiar masks and hypocritical means must be found to keep them hidden; the light hurts their eyes as they lie in the attic with chains of invisible silk.

© Christopher Bear Beam 11/09

Are You a Conscientous Objector?

On Saturday, September 26, 2009, in Austin, Texas there was an assembly to honor Conscientious Objection. This included having CO values and commitments to any thing that one chooses to make a stand to oppose. One panel had a group of Desert Storm and Iraq Occupation occupations, with panel members describing how their combat experiences triggered PTSD and its concomitant symptoms.

The purpose of the assembly was to honor all those who are Cos; this may include being conscientiously opposed to paying taxes to pay for the U.S. Military or to a service member who takes a stand against the Corporation-Military Complex by making application for Conscientous Objection. Honor is a vital key to creating any sort of community; many cultures practice honor as a regular part of their deep and surface structures by their honoring traditions, notably Native Americans in North America. Men can honor their elders who came before them; women can honor their sheroes who took stands against various injustices perpetrated against them and others. Seems like it’s a good practice to honor anyone older than we are or who come from the generation that came before us.

Unfortunately, our culture highly values the ‘glorious deeds’ of military service and war. We want to be triumphant in all we do and say; the propaganda of the state rolls out its script whenever a war happens, giving the entire society the norms of what it means to be patriotic in our day and time. Sadly, the war spirit, with all of its emotional content too many times keeps people in a mental state of inertia with the symptoms of narrow definitions of patriotism. Would it not be patriotic, as happened to one WWII CO, to do some kind of alternate service? Instead, the residents of the small town he lived in thought he was crazy, a slacker, and not patriotic simply because he didn’t want to kill anyone.

As we have seen recently, from the narratives of “Bush and Cheney’s War,” many lies concerning the facts on the ground were told to the American people. Clearly, there was no respect shown to us here. And having telecom companies spy into our phone conversations is the antithesis of a free and open society and flies in the face of the Constitution. There have been many allegedly illegal acts foisted on the military and the citizens, all in the name of the War on Terror.

Personally, this entire experience was deeply moving and refined my thoughts and memories to some new insights. One of those is that being a CO may be seen in a very broad panorama, and goes way beyond the boundaries of being a military CO. One can be a CO who is opposed to globalism, and dissents by choosing to live an alternate lifestyle. A friend of mine is adamant about helping to keep his community environment clean and spends hours cleaning up trash. He is conscientiously opposed to a non-hygenic and ugly landscape in the city where he lives.

For me, when I was discharged in the beginning of 1971 there was no hero’s welcome; I had been a member of an unorthodox church denomination that had a lengthily tradition of pacifism going back to the Civil War. It also espoused various other religious practices that more or less drew a line in the sand between orthodox and unorthodox Christianity. I was a relatively new member in this denomination when I faced my own crisis of conscience at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. With their assistance, I wrote my application for CO.

When I was released, after spending time in house arrest, and a minimum-security prison within the confines of the military base, I was clinically depressed, and my spirit had suffered severe pummeling. Not one minister or administrative member from this denomination really sat down with me to debrief the experience, nor counsel me about the kinds of symptoms I might see in myself due to this trauma. The term PTSD wasn’t even created yet. Going back to WWI and WWII PTSD was called battle fatigue or shell shock, but what about COs who never saw combat experience but were just as much impacted by the system as they were. Combat vets could show their physical wounds, but I could show my psycho-spiritual ones.

In 2007 or so I decided to write a book called The Invisible Warrior (2008) (available by going to http://www.xlibris.com/, http://www.amazon.com/, or http://www.bn.com/). This was a chronicle of my journey as a Vietnam Era Vet CO, and the kinds of experiences, both humiliating and scintillating, that I encountered in my resistance to military service and war. It’s a collection of reflections of what I learned. As time went on, I noticed more and more PTSD symptoms in my life, even though I didn’t wear that diagnostic label. At the very least I was diagnosed as having a Depressive Disorder accompanied by an Anxiety Disorder.

It was then that I decided to make an appeal to the Department of Veteran’s Affairs. However, the military system is based on really not trusting your own instincts (I realize this may vary with the kind of superior you’ve got), but those of the powers above you. It is courageous and brave to be so counter-cultural to trust yourself that you’ve had certain symptoms you can read about in the Diagnostic Manual. We, after all, know our bodies and minds better than anyone else; you may ask, “Yes, we do know ourselves the best, but someone who is dealing with an assessed mental illness is out of touch with reality, so how could this person trust herself to make a clear-thinking diagnosis?” That’s a very good question. But there are various kinds of psychiatric diagnoses, many of which don’t include psychosis, meaning a break with reality.

It’s true that some may not be able to function enough so as not to be able to do this, but for many of us, who are functioning enough can see the tree that is squarely in front of us. Needless to say, my application was denied, but I had to follow my own conscience here too.

Honor is the tonic we need to restore trust and community. Respect and honor are two curative properties for healing trauma. A drink of honor is equal to a gallon of cure. Most importantly we must honor ourselves; guard against shame (“I am a mistake”) and guilt (“Oh no I did something wrong; I’ll be punished; better not to do anything else than what I’m told to do. How high was that you wanted me to jump?”). When we take steps to put our true selves on the line, after thinking about the many consequences this decision will engender, the voices of doubt, uncertainty and self-hate will try to take over. Speak the truth first by loving yourself in all your nobility and warrior-like qualities. We are the pure gold found in a rock at the bottom of the streambed. We have shined beautifully.

© Christopher Bear Beam, MA 10/09

A VIEW FROM EL PASO

I recently went to the border town of El Paso, Texas that is just on the other side of the river from Cuidad Juarez.

I am not familiar with many of the issues that affect those who live on the U.S. side nor the Mexican side. I know what people told me. I do know that there is a great deal of traffic between both cities, in work places and domiciles. I do know that since about April of 2008 there has been a major increase in cartel and gang-related violence; American citizens have also been targets. Murders have taken place in broad daylight, and sometimes bodies are found decapitated.

The “narco wars” have taken more than 11,000 lives since it started to heat up in intensity and frequency. Juarez has now become known as “Mexico’s deadliest city” with 800 drug-related deaths so far this year. This isn’t only happening at this crossroads, but is occurring at many areas along the U.S./Mexico border.

I went to El Paso to be a participant in a training conference. One mental health professional from Juarez told the participants that the residents have few options to deal with this trauma along the border. She said what is needed is activism and hope. She related to the audience that ‘this is all we have—hope.’

What does any community do when their main resource is hope, and when deadly stressors and community-disruption now are the way of life? Any organism will respond by seeking more creatively how to survive. But if the societal breakdown is maintained over a long period of time, research indicates that the kind of behavior we call “normal” doesn’t return. It’s replaced by a new, more violent sort of behavior.

According to the stories—from those who are aware of this regression—this significant trauma is affecting the social, physical, emotional, mental, and religious domains of life in many ways. For one thing, the violence is just one more reason for people to want to migrate to the U.S. for something better for their families. Last week, however, the Barrera family was returning to their home deeper into Mexico, after living for a while in Juarez, and was attacked with gunfire. Three of the family members were murdered, while the two youngest children watched in psychic shock. The violence is more and more affecting innocents who have no connection with drugs, crime, or anything illegal.

Which brings me to an important point: many of you have heard that we’re attempting to build a wall all along our border with Mexico. Now, apparently, we’re trying to keep out illegal aliens (there are no illegal people by the way) and drug-runners who are competing for the market in the U.S. In my mind, this is an archaic way of dealing with these two problems. The U.S. and Mexico will never even come close to solving this problem, by the use of power, force, the military, or money. Fear is an incredible motivating factor; no one wants to live in the middle of this kind of chaos, so believe me, they’ll keep coming.

And why shouldn’t they? The United States of Europe has already been using a model of porous borders, and people cross from one country within the EU as freely as we go from one state to the next. Europe has not experienced the same kinds of consequences that we have by using an “old brain” approach to a “new brain” dilemma.

Of course migration is built into our human natures. People have been migrating from one place to another ever since humans have been on the planet. People can migrate to get away from something such as political unrest, or migrate to get somewhere such as employment.

A famous eco-researcher, Jack Calhoun, predicted years ago, that the nations of the world would be facing these kinds of staggering problems; he said that immigration is the problem, but it isn’t the problem. His research demonstrated that there were predictable human behaviors that occur when stress reaches a certain maintained level. Any social order will do what it can to retain its own culture and way of life within the parameters of social networks and social connections. This is survival for the need of community, closeness, and support. One of the worst spin-offs of the immigration quagmire is the separation of family members, and this adds more tension to an already tenuous situation.

The experience of history indicates that we need a new adaptive focus to problems like what we find on the border between El Paso and Juarez. These problems call us to look at all the factors involved in a systemic fashion. Sometimes the smallest of changes within any system can have huge consequences; these changes may be for better or ill.

Fear causes people to seek out single causes expecting single effects; behavior becomes reactive and many tend to lean towards biases against the groups involved in the conflicted paradigm. In other words, they use a means of stereotypical thinking, and by this I mean they view the groups who they feel are parts of the problem by using stereotypes as a form of fact. “If we don’t put that wall up, they’ll keep coming over and take all of our jobs! That’s a fact.” Usually, immigrants do the kind of work others don’t want to do, they pay taxes, and add monetary influx into the economy.

We’ve been trying these methods for some time, and we must acknowledge that they simply don’t work; “the war on drugs” has been a dismal failure. Many law enforcement officials now come down “anti-drug war” because we spend far too much money, and the models being used leave out much that is needed to correct the problem.

El Paso seemed like a quiet little town; for me it was peaceful, and a restful escape from the heat and humidity in East Texas. Cooler winds are the natural, airy fans to maintain comfortabililty. It’s nestled in the mountains and seems like a laid back place. Unless you seek it out, you may not hear much about what’s really going on in Juarez—it’s such a different environment. That’s why you need to make it your business to obtain news from good, perhaps alternative media sources, so that you can view the border situation in a systemic and facts-based way.

© Christopher Bear Beam, M.A. August 2009

THE WOMEN'S HOLOCAUST

THE WOMEN’S HOLOCAUST

By Christopher Bear Beam, M.A.

There are many holocausts that many in the West – and all over the planet – have not much heard about. The article “War Rape” in Wikipedia cites that 500,000 women were raped in the Rwanda Genocide of 1994. War Rape was first recognized as a crime against humanity when the International Criminal Tribunal tried the Former Yugoslavia. It was evidenced that Muslim women in Foca (southeast Bosnia and Herzegovina) were subjected to the systematic and widespread gang rape, torture and sexual enslavement by Bosnian Serb soldiers, policemen, and members in paramilitary groups. Crimes against women are also recognized as integral to the strategy of war in some cultures.

We must never forget that rape is a crime of violence. As far at its effects, a recent study (cited by Wikipedia) lists STDs or VDs, (including HIV) and pregnancy. Another two physical effects are incontinence and vaginal fistulas. The short-term or long-term psychological wounds may include depression, anxiety disorders (including PTSD), multiple somatic symptoms, flashbacks, difficulty re-establishing intimate relationships, shame and persistent fears.

We have forgotten about the African holocaust that took place in colonial, slave-trading days. The millions of Africans, who were stolen from their homes, put on floating coffins in absolutely deplorable conditions, where men, women, and children, in the millions, died in the Middle Passage. All people need to learn this history, and remember it.

I say this in the spirit of “identificational sorrow,” a concept that means that we do have a link to our European ancestors who were culpable in this African Holocaust. It doesn’t matter if our defense is “Well, my family were never slave-owners,” because we were the ones who benefited from this genocide, and we still, even today, are reaping the benefits. The largest slave-traders in America lived up north of the Mason-Dixon line: the duplicity of the DeWolf family, who amassed a fortune from the bestial treatment of African slaves, made us all culpable, so that we can no longer turn away our eyes to escape our shame. This was another one of our own white-driven holocausts.

Then there are the indigenous peoples of the land in North and South America who have been the targets of genocide and holocaust. Native Americans had their land taken by theft, were dispossessed to places other than their homeland, slaughtered, tortured—men, women, and children. Eventually, their children were taken from their families by ‘good Christian folk,’ housed in boarding schools, stripped of their language, their names, their native clothing, sometimes of their womanhood by forced sterilization, their spirituality (you can only really strip a person or group of their religion, but their spirituality may become more impervious through resistance), and made into the image of the white man. The saying, as a rationalization for their abuse, was, ‘Kill the Indian, save the man.’ This was both a physical and a psycho-spiritual holocaust, since the psychological trauma, poverty, lack of access to resources, internalized oppression, and intimidation of beatings, lynching, and rapes were seen as its consequences by future generations.

When the early immigrants came to America, they created a political moment (a moment for European American history) by inviting the leaders of the American Indian Nations to come and meet with them to see if any kind of strategy might be engineered for peaceful co-existence in order that they might take more of the land and resources of America. The white men noticed that Native Americans brought women with them to these assemblies; in Native culture, women were viewed as equals to men, so they were in leadership responsibilities. The white leaders were horrified because of their sexist views of women, so they counseled the male Native American leaders to leave them at home. After all, Europeans reasoned, they weren’t intelligent enough for the business of ruling, controlling, and stealing what wasn’t theirs to steal, and this was, in the end, what leadership was all about, right? I doubt if the Native Americans took their advice.

We never have to look too far away for historical examples, once we wipe the historical denial from our eyes, and can use our special vision called ‘remembering the past and our part in it.’ The examples are there. I suppose one could even dispute the term genocide or holocaust (there are various interpretations and definitions); in my mind, we don’t need to limit it to the extermination of targeted people. The forced and coercive transfers of any group of people from the land of their ancestor’s kills their spirit… Dislocation leads to the decimation of people’s identities.

If we research very far in the distant past, we can locate the almost invisible, yet primeval, string of yarn that stitched the ideology of Domionism--the design of the chain of the hierarchy of life. Dominionism (growing out of European philosophy and theology) espoused the ideology that men should control nature to make it habitable and productive. For this, they cleverly twisted the theological word stewardship. At the top of this ladder reign men, and at the bottom they placed the ecosphere. Next on the hierarchy, one step down from men came women, but they were viewed as pretty far down the ladder, closer to the earth, which is base, wild, and savage. Women were made invisible, seen as seducing men and leading them into moral depravity, the essence of physicality and sexuality; impudent, easily persuaded by evil spirits (the Devil), unintelligent, in need of control and guidance, etc., etc., etc. You can see the close connection the way Europeans viewed animals.

During the “Dark Ages” the majority of criminals brought to tribunals and village kangaroo courts were women. Is there any reason to wonder about the Women’s Holocaust and how it could happen? Author Rossell Hope Robbins writes about this era being a “shocking nightmare, the foulest crime and deepest shame of Western civilization, the blackest of everything that Homo sapiens, the reasoning man, has ever upheld” (cited by Jim Mason in An Unnatural Order: Uncovering the Roots of Our Domination of Nature and Each Other, p. 226). This emerged as a power struggle between women and institutional male power. Eighty-five percent of the victims during this time were women.

Mason reports that victims of this holocaust range between 200,000 to a high of two million women burned at the stake during this 300-year period. The sordid paradox of the Women’s Holocaust is that it happened during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. This is just another example of how male-dominated power and extermination is truly crazy making.

Women were already cast in the role as being complicit with the Devil, so it was no stretch to level accusations against them for behaviors the church claimed as heretical. But really the causal factor behind this holocaust was that of sustaining the power of men and the church. If the church had been holding high the truth of the dignity and sacredness of all people, things, and every created being, why would it be torturing and killing so many women who they ruled were guilty of spurious charges?

Women were accused of witchcraft; some were covered with burning oil, or burned at the stake. No doubt, there were many terroristic rapes as well. Women were butchered or drowned, with their children forced to watch these insane and demonic acts; imagine, children forced to see their mothers killed… What else could this have resulted in except PTSD thousands of years before it was labeled this by contemporary psychologies? Women were also killed at the hands of church and state for being herbalists or healers. They were seen as evil because of their love of the earth and its restorative powers.

The mistreatment of women as inferior to men was part of the Holocaust of Women, and its practices migrated into the New World. It resulted in the Salem Witch trials in the New England states. It has continued to migrate by way of many more covert and subtle ways of oppression: at one time the suppression of civil rights such as voting, abusiveness, murder, rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment, discriminatory treatment, and a culture that still lives in many places steeped with sexism as a normal part of its life. I use the words “its life” advisedly because now sexism and misogyny are a part of our overall system. Systemic sources are bigger and more powerful than individuals. But it’s still a holocaust, no matter how you look at it or try to defend it.

I was so moved by a homiletic of a woman in our community Betty Duff that I became physically ill when I listened to her remarks: like a dredged out well with nothing left inside. All of us men had a mother; we may have sisters, aunts, girl cousins, and grandmothers we knew, yet each of us as men has assisted the White Male System to continue to live and breathe. I think of my own social conditioning growing up as a boy, then a young adult, and now an older adult. I am now recovery from this sickness of the male-dominated, sexist, and superior system; I listen more closely to my inner conversations around female stereotypes, as I have become more conscious and aware. My brain registers thoughts and ideas that I picked up in the land of domination and power. Now I’m moving through the plane of acute awareness, deconstruction, and reconstruction, and the old thought processes and behaviors are often hardened like fossils in ancient burial places. Healing is a dirty and messy business, but the end results are cleansing and lifting.

© Christopher Bear Beam, M.A. August 2009

Many, many thanks to Betty Duff who researched this time period and shared it with our community, Marilyn Douglas-Jones who offered help in editing, and Deborah Levine who gave me helpful feedback prior to the publishing of this blog on the American Diversity Report.

INTERNAL DISARMAMENT (POEM)

INTERNAL DISARMAMENT

DL says/not talkin’ Hughley,
Talkin’ Dalai Lama/now that’s some real chewy\we all got this thing
From a negative cell……that’s called our brain/name it Internal Disarmament
For me, the news heaven-sent
Scraped off on my cranium cement/

Told me you can do something good
That’s coming from a bad ‘hood
And do it out of anger or another
Dark feeling that can smother
Every sight in your binoculars
High decibel mono-culture and
Mono lens/you drive away friends
Draw the haters to you/means and ends/ all scrambled it’s
Stubbing your toe on weeds brambled\

Message comes over the fire drill
Sound system/get yo act together
Says, “Enemy at hand!,” like PTSD/
Got to align yo inner and outer
Self and get ready to “T”
Off the ball at the first “T”
Just forget ‘bout me/you see/
Because in my denial I’m trying to not see the memory that brought
On this inner attack, just keep comin’ back/doing the same ole thing
I always done, so I ain’t aware
Of the big noise scare for the need
For Internal Disarmament
So go plant the seed

© Christopher Bear Beam, M.A. August, 2009

INTERNAL DISARMAMENT

Some Buddhist activists were sitting around discussing a project they had worked on in Tibet (cited in Dharma, Color and Culture edited by Hilda Gutierrez Baldooquin, 2004, pp.205-208); some of the participants just didn’t feel right about how the project went that had been initiated and successfully completed years earlier. As they dialoged about this, a major self-reflection came to the fore. Some of the group suggested that while they were working on the project they felt they were coming out of an inner space of anger; because of the nature of anger dissipating what otherwise would be positive energy, they had fallen into the trap of overemphasizing their activism, and losing the emphasis of their spiritual practice.

The writer of this short article described the need for internal disarmament, a phrase borrowed from the Dalai Lama. The world does need external disarmament in terms of our addiction to possess nuclear weaponry to kill off our enemies. But maybe we need internal disarmament in an even more cogent way.

When I read this, it resonated with me right away. I thought back to my hippy days, and how I would relate to the establishment. I remember the strong and raw feelings of anger, disappointment, shattered expectations that I experienced towards the systemic problems of our culture. My solution at the time was to get in the face of anyone who seemed to be a symbol of this misguided culture we call the US of A. My protesting ways were laced with the fuel of anger, and this also colored many of my assumptions and biases that I felt toward society in general, but particularly those who claimed to be authority figures within the White Male System.

I have had similar reactions (leading to semantic reactions) towards conservatives, Christian fundamentalists, and anyone I considered anti-progressive. I have had a lot of anger towards people within these movements, and I know that this has lessened my ability to listen and to dialog with people who hold to some of these views. Perhaps I’ve missed some opportunities to get to some action steps. The old saying rings into my mind: ‘There are a lot of people against something, instead of being for something.’

Don’t get me wrong, there’s much to protest, and to raise awareness about right now; in fact, we may live at a threshold time when there are more social injustices grabbing the jugular veins of people who have the least resources, and even those others who may not be labeled as “disadvantaged” who are ordinary human beings simply trying to survive, while the wealthy and powerful, continue on in their bliss of denial and lack of accountability to society.

What I learned I had to do was to take a step backwards in detachment, and then look at my own motives and rationale for doing what I do. Do I resist the inequalities of society out of vengeance and retaliation, or do I think and act out of a well thought-out and honest critique of what’s wrong about the way our institutions function?

As I’m experiencing life presently, what is the most difficult thing to comprehend is how the employees of big corporations just ‘go along to get along’ for the security of their jobs. I know that unemployment is a stressful factor, but to deny our own integrity and collude with the monsters that put food into our mouths is for me totally inappropriate.

My daily interactions with representatives of the power elites, aka politicians, corporate systems, insurance systems, are often conversations of neglect and indifference. When I write letters I almost never get a human reply—usually it’s just some form letter. Rarely do I find someone that actually thinks for herself, and isn’t just trying to get over on my needs and me. So I guess what I’m angry at is the omission of humane treatment. I want to see corporations, companies, organizations and other groups simply meet me on a human level, display some humble accountability to me because I pay their salary, listen to me on that level, and then try to be an advocate for me when possible.

Part of the solution for me is doing the hard work of transforming my own heedless and self-oriented conditioning to one of humanistic dignity. If I don’t continue to do this kind of healing for myself, I will continue to react in anger and anxiety. Societal retrogression is in exponential movement, and is largely based on societal anxiety run wild. So I commit to be centered in my own humanity so that I can empathetically confront and comfort those in need. So I see my need for internal disarmament—do you?

© Christopher Bear Beam, M.A. August, 2009

Houston Chronicle columnist Randy Cohen, in his August 1, 2009 On Ethics column, wrote an article commenting on a query by a general contractor whose workplace has been infected by one of his contractor’s employees: this worker makes racist statements, and when confronted by another employee gets very volatile (“almost violent”) and defends his or her own actions by saying that he/she has the right of free speech.

Since this is probably a common experience by many in the workplace, it’s fitting to ask how far does free speech go in what people say on the job in a public setting? The employer and boss has the right, in fact, is under the legal precedent of insuring that all workers can work in a safe environment free of racialized harassment. How does one resist this negative kind of hate speech, and interrupt this behavior from occurring?

Perhaps the simplest way to put it is that just because we have freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment in the U.S. Constitution, this doesn’t give someone the right to walk into a crowded theatre and yell in a blood-curdling wail, “Get out quickly, the theatre is on fire! Run for the exits!” This, where no fire actually exists. Would this kind of speech promote safety and health or would it intensify the possibility of the patrons getting hurt in the rush to get out of the theatre? Certainly, there is an ethical responsibility to not create fake scenarios so that more people might be injured in the confusion that would follow.

On-the-job discrimination rears its ugly head at various times, but as cultural competency has increased overall in our society, it’s harder and harder for people with racist, and an emotional commitment to ignorance perceptual lens to go unchallenged, and the possibility for discriminatory practice is more easily observed. The perpetrators may be fired for propagating racist auras around their person and into the air space of co-workers.

A personal example illustrates this well. Several years ago in my workplace, a co-worker who seemed to have many personal issues finally showed them in a very aggressive way, and I was the main target. One day as I was setting up some tables, he said angrily, “Hey, what are doing man? Those are my tables.” My retort back to him was, “I don’t see your name on them.” The man went off on me, yelling, and walking towards me in an intimidating way. I was sure he was going to assault me. He began yelling words at me that didn’t make much sense, and told me that when he saw me outside of the work place, on the street, he would get even with my by some kind of bodily injury.

By this time, security had been called, and they escorted him off the premises. I was asked to tell about the incident to others in management, and the police came to the premises to file a report against this hostile employee. My point here is that most companies won’t tolerate this kind of hostile action by one employee against another. In some places, the charge is called a “terroristic assault.” So most people have zero tolerance for these kinds of actions towards others in the workplace.

There are strategies we can take preventatively as well as following anti-discriminatory polices that the company already has in place. If you aren’t aware of these within your own workplace, take the personal responsibility to find out. Another way to say this is take your responsibility seriously to interrupt racism, sexism, able-ism, cultural or religious racism, heterosexism, discrimination, etc. wherever you see it going down. Hate speech flourishes where there is silence and denial. Hate speech always flows to the lowest place because there’s not any hint of truthful compassion to stop it. Make it a priority for your place of work to be a place where these kinds of discriminatory behaviors simply can’t live or gain momentum.

If someone is using hate speech, racial slurs or racial jokes, one simple way to interrupt them is to tell the person, “Please don’t communicate this way in my presence.” Another one is “No in my presence, please.” Not here, and not now. If you happen to be European American and a white co-worker is using negative innuendos or racialized jokes on you, you might think about responding by saying, “Why are you telling me these things, and automatically expecting that I am just like you? Why are expecting me to agree with you? Is it just because I’m a white person?” These sorts of questions will initially be a switch from the place of an emotional commitment to ignorance. They may shock the person into stopping to think about the questions. The other side of this is that the individual will resist the answers he or she might find in their heart and head that someone else has told them about. We have to expect this reaction, too. The truth will be denied at times.

Any answer you give to the perpetrator might sound easy, but actually doing so takes bravery. It’s going counter-to-the-culture. Bystanders do see the truth in what you may do to confront the offender, but they are afraid to be open about it. They may fear repercussions from superiors or co-workers. When we follow through we provide a social example of peer-modeling a format for interrupting racism.

Since whites are still in power and possess privilege in our social environment, it’s our particular role to initiate interruptions of racism with people who look like us. When we do this, it helps open up a dialogue with persons of color in the workspace. We gain more of their respect, because it’s hard for persons of color to tell a white person that they are engaging in racist language or answers, because they come from a “one down” position; sadly, many whites won’t even listen to persons of color. They get angry and defensive, and find they are very stuck in their own definition of reality. The complexion changes, however, if a European American stands up for truth, and challenges any kind of racist behavior. It’s at this point that whites can do ally building with persons of color or of different faith traditions.

By interrupting racism, we take an active role in the design of a safe and secure workplace where everyone may work towards common goals.

© Christopher Bear Beam, M.A.

THE LOUIS GATE'S INCIDENT:FROM A EUROPEAN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE

All the media ingredients were there: an African American male, a neighbor with stereotypical glasses thinking ‘black equals criminal,’ The African American suspect becomes belligerent towards police found breaking into his own home. Mind you, this was after it was determined that it was the African American’s home.

Louis Gates, well-known scholar, writer, professor at Harvard, gets put into a cop car, I can imagine his head held down so he doesn’t hit the top of vehicle frame; it’s obvious that when Gates is accosted by police at his own home, that he gets angry at the police force’s unpleasant etiquette of arrest on a black man. White law enforcement on black homeowner. There’s your story for the front page.

Some social scientists have called these kinds of daily harassments and biased actions towards people of color ‘microaggressions.’ Each day many people of color are assaulted with these ‘microaggessions,’ and they add up. Their sum is health problems, and emotional consequences. A chiropractor will tell you that all of the countless traumas that have been perpetrated against our bodies finally reach a traumatic place of breakage, finally our pain yells its devilish invectives, so that we take action and go seek a solution.

Louis Gates is probably no exception to the affects of ‘microagressions.’ Whites never have to think of these actions because, for the most part, we are not victims of them. And due to our whiteness, most of us don’t possess the art of empathy to place ourselves in similar dilemmas. Most whites never have to even think of racism or police work gone awry, because we don’t deal with it every day, as do people of color.

In the coverage I read in the New York Times there definitely, in my observation, was a pro law enforcement bias; there were accompanying articles about the courage of police persons every day when they put on their badges and guns, and confront the obnoxious behavior of citizens. I would admit that probably the majority of the time, they do their jobs, do them well, and protect the community. But the story about Louis Gates had little to say about the unprofessional work of the police in checking out first who Gates was, where he lived, and questioning with more specificity the caller who reported this so-called “crime.”

It’s no secret that incidents of police (especially white officers) brutality, negligence and plain old unprofessional police work, have been a consistent problem in communities of color for as long as I can recall. There is a huge credibility gap between those who ‘protect and serve’ and the residents of communities, mostly in the inner cities. Our culture still idealizes law enforcement, because it gives us the illusion that we are safe and secure, when we know we aren’t really. In general, my assessment is we want to give a “bye” to law enforcement departments, systems, and personnel so the white population can bury its head in its own blindness to the problem.

President Obama’s first statement about the Gates’ incident was most likely from his heart. The President said that the police department acted ‘stupidly,’ which it did. Then after the police department organized a formal protest, Obama made another statement which was much more apologetic and conciliatory. This one was from his political know-how and ingenuity. Like myself, many people who are keenly aware of racism in this society hoped for a stronger stand against an infraction by police that has become a regular part of our nation’s social injustices. I can imagine as well, that some African Americans will view Obama’s action as ‘uncle Tomish.’

At some point, with the power, influence and the platform, Obama will need to bring racial issues to the fore, and plant them squarely in the middle of the table. As a European American, I hope this happens. I’m ashamed for the Euro demographic in showing such ignorance and omission about the roots of its own white supremacist history, and how it continues to be perpetuated into our own time, i.e., the Louis Gates incident is just another example of racism with a new pair of clothes. It saddens me to see the incomprehensible gap between knowledge and action that exists as a part of our own social disease today.

© Christopher Bear Beam, M.A. July, 2009

It Is Not Just a Matter of Apples and Oranges

The House is now tangling over a bill that has been purported to be a law of health reform. I’d like to suggest to you that there is a deeper issue which has far more unhealthy consequences. It’s what has held up a national healthcare reform, and and kept it captive as a hostage.

In our nation we have approximately 47 million people without any health insurance at all, and another 100 million people who are insured by their employers, but must use some other form of payment to pay off the balance of their medical bills. As you might guess many of these millions of people are the poor, those who have jobs but still are poor, the elderly, peoples of color, the homeless, etc. There’s something obscene when U.S. Senators have 110% in healthcare insurance coverage and 147 million have next to nothing to help them receive adequate healthcare. The elites and supposed “representatives” don’t give a damn about the lower class rung on the perpetual ladder of oppressive hierarchy.

What is the “bottom line” issue that I wrote about in the first paragraph? In essential terms we have a White Male System (WMS) that holds power, privilege and possession as a class of rulers. The English call them “Lords.” The only ones who fit into the category of this Democracy or Representative Democracy are the ones who took power at the beginning. The U.S. Constitution specifically articulates white males who own land that is worked by 3/5-of-a-person slaves stolen from other lands and brought here in the most despicable conditions. Since then de jeur equality may appear to be a reality, but where the rubber meets the road, it’s an illusion.

It’s always been about a white-designed-and-structured social, political, religious, educational, medical, legal and governmental system that has as its mission statement: never give up what you got so you can keep it and pass it along to your progeny so they can have the same privileges. At the heart of racism, for example, is the across-the-board enrichment of whites by the hands of those who serve them. Just like the Bob Dylan song goes, “You gonna have to serve someone….” This has always been the real motto of racism in our nation.

If the lowest classes of people (Hitler didn’t just persecute Jews, he aimed his Germanic spear at Gypsies, Homosexuals [they used to call “these kinds of people” by this label, right?! Did you know that?], Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled, or anyone else that didn’t fit the super strong Aryan person of the Third Reich. A healthcare system like the one we have, divides classes, engenders internalized power struggles, and generally keeps those in this lower class sick, weak, having chronic diseases, fatigued, in financial debt, along with all of the psychological traumas that go with fearing for your life.

It keeps the poorer class dis-empowered, without advocacy, vulnerable, and often there is a transgenerational factor at play as well. Genetic factors and social environmental conditions, over generations, may open up progeny to similar illnesses and diseases. Unless you’ve lived the life of a fourth generation single mother in the projects you have no idea what kind of life this is. Or what living in these circumstances are like. The tension, stress and anxiety must be discharged somehow, then life is supposed to go on, only it’s the white supremacist class that doesn’t have to dirty their hands with this kind of life. After all, most of them are living in the burbs in big, empty houses.

This is why I say that the ruling elites will fight genuine health reform that will help every single human citizen of the U.S., but hurt those who have the most to lose. Threatened with a loss of their control and power in the healthcare arena, they will resist and fight all the way. Sad thing is that you’ll hear Ignorant Igor saying, “You see, I knew it. I knew all those _________________would eventually get all of their healthcare needs met. Now we’ve got universal healthcare for all! The next thing you know, they’ll want all of us taxpayers to pay healthcare costs for the whole freakin’ universe.” This response is the typical, parroting of self-deluded ignorance you hear all the time. President Ronald Reagan fueled the fire in his infamous speech about all black women being welfare queens.

The U.S. plays fast and loose when it comes to picking and choosing which international laws, declarations, covenants, conventions they give legitimacy and assent, and which ones to ignore claiming they don’t exist; and choosing which ones are to our advantage as the Empire dictates. The UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights (you remember, don’t you, a body of all the nations of the world?) was ratified in 1948 as a convention to guide relationships between people within and without the nation. In our discussion of universal healthcare, the WMS needs to seriously change their perceptions of who they are, and who the rest of us are as well.

Article 25 of the Univerrsal Declaration of Human Rights,
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
You can’t make it much plainer than that, can you? In the legislation currently in front of our House Lawmakers, I hope there a few brave people. I hope they get the kahunas to speak truth to power. The powers-that-be want to keep on getting, and the best way is to keep a system in place that delivers the goods—to them. And they don’t mind if the poor don’t get what they’re asking for. Yellow is the color of the eyeglasses they’re looking through.©Christopher Bear Beam, M.A.

Vets Paradise

I remember the dude\
Met him at McCabe Center
In Austin/the Center composed
Of three groups: Vets, dudes released
From the Feds, and TAIP folks/all
Thrown together/incarcerated/in
rehabilitation

This dude was a Vet, and when
He talked about the Domicile in
Temple, his eyes lit up, passion
Looked like it was flushing his
Soul out his eyes\talking in
Animation, words gyrating,
Pure object language

Talking about how he was so
Close to going to the Vet home,
As if it was a celestial paradise,
And when he arrived there, God,
He’d really arrived\free of all
Terrestrial torments/arrived at
Eden, where all Vets go to
Prepare to die

And I used to cringe at his joyous
Proclamations, hoping that I would
Never end up there, one of them/

I sigh/within myself, at this boring
Pictorial/this possibility/my thoughts
Grew revolutionary/I’ve been in too
Many institutions to call any of them
Home, much less heaven/I hate them\
Their sterility/conformity/clinical bland-
Ness/in my mind/they are more like the far
End of a polar expanse on a continuum/
Something that kills spirit and lifeblood
And dreams—frozen in hypothermia
Somewhere in the Islands

© Christopher Bear Beam, M.A. June, 2009

Another Contradiction Between U.S. law and the Blind Spot of Self-Aggrandizement

The other night I happened to be listening to the Monitor program on KPFT FM radio out of Houston, Texas. One of the interviewees was Marjorie Cohn, a lawyer and president of the National Lawyer's Guild. Ms. Cohn is also a very enthusiastic activist especially around issues that relate to the military, the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and other wars inspired by a system engulfed and consumer by Empire. Marjorie Cohn, along with Kathleen Gilberd, have authored a book entitled Rules of Disengagement. I really enjoyed this interview, and learned some new things.

The book Rules of Disengagement speaks to the issues of people who want to disengage from the military-industrial-digital war machine. One chapter deals with Conscientous Objection. This peeked my interest because I was a CO during the Vietnam Era. Most don't know that that GIs and other military personnel, from the inside, were some of the prime catalysts of resistance to cause the eventually pulling out of U.S. troops in Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of troops deserted because they knew the system would stand against them. Some fled to Canada, and some went underground. Discussions about the philosophical, moral, economic, and ethical sources of resistance were held in coffeehouses in many cities nearby military installations in this nation and in others across the globe. The rebellion against fighting an illegal war was slowly but surely instigated by many sectors of the anti-war movement until it reached a huge conflagration and the government had to take some kind of responsive action to the voice of the people.

One of the most salient points made by Marjorie Cohn in this Monitor interview is one of the best-kept-by-reason-of-intention-secrets to be hidden from the American people: the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is illegal. It's illegal for two reasons: first of all, to be legal war, and country has to be attacked by an aggressor state. To use 911 as a precursor to the so-called Iraqi Freedom invasion is to continue to be mired in the deception used as a reason for the attack in the first place. The attackers on 911 were mainly Saudis, and disconnected from Iraq, and even Afghanistan. If we are to take the administration's presumption as a bonafide real argument, it wasn't the attack of the Iraqi people on the U.S., but it was the attack of a group of terrorists led by Osama Bin Laden. To invade and occupy a country, setting up a hand-picked government, making it possible to realize huge rewards of oil to U.S. oil companies, by cleverly and deftly getting that set-up government to pass laws that would guarantee this legal theft to fall into the hands of people and systems that can only see profits, the murder and heinous crimes to civilians by military personnel, the continual torture of Iraqi civilians and soldiers, etc. is illegal under international conventions and laws.

The consequence of this, as Cohn has argued in many courts, it that there can be no real military justice if the orders given to those dissenting from the occupation are illegal. It's like habeous corpus. The military is in actuality holding military staff against their will if they don't want to follow the U.S.'s illegal course of action. War is horrible enough, but to try and foist off this kind of deception and seduction onto the American people is a war crime in itself.

The other reason this is an illegal war, and orders to go anywhere to support or fight it are illegal is that treaties created by the U.N. were in place. These treaties have to do with the protection of human rights of all peoples in all countries. No one country has the right to contravene these conventions and ratified treaties by the international organization whose purpose it is to insure the human rights of the world's citizens.

At the heart of U.S. imperialism is the notion that the Empire can make or break international laws and compacts at will. To use the excuse 'we are protecting our national interest' simply won't cut it any more. Neither will any one nation riding roughshod over any other nation's protection of human rights. The U.S. chooses what laws it sees fit to call legitimate or illegitimate is sort of like a bird in a bubble with no air. For awhile it lives in the bubble (with its residual air supply) thinking everything is ok. This bird thinks it has got it made. But eventually the needle of actual legitimacy of all human beings will pop the bubble, and down it will go.

This state of doing business is slowly dying off in that it's obsolete in our new age. When will the U.S. decide to truly come into the company and community of nations who value everyone's human rights, not just those of its own citizens? The resistance given to living the Universal Treaty of Human Rights, first ratified in 1948, at the grass roots level, both in and outside the nation, by the U.S. imperialistic presumption of superior power and cultural racism, has wrapped inside of it its own demise. As the prophet of the Bahai faith (I'm not a Bahai by the way, but I know truth when I see it) once said (parphrasing) 'the nations of the world are like a huge tree. The branches are many and diverse, but they are hooked into one tree.' If I may extemporize on this saying, our root system is the internalization of our oneness as human beings. When we ignore this truth, we live in a world of peril. This is our wake up call.

The Process of Words as Symbolic Communication in Healthcare Settings

WORDS AS SYMBOLIC COMMUNICATION IN THE HEALTHCARE SETTING
By Christopher Bear Beam, M.A.

I wish I could take language
And fold it like cool, moist rags.
I would lay words on your forehead.
I would wrap words on your wrists.
“There, there,” my words would say—
or something better.
I would ask them to murmur,
“Hush” and “Shh, shhh, it’s all right.”
I would ask them to hold you all night.
I wish I could take language
And daub and soothe and cool
Where fever blisters and burns,
Where fever turns yourself against you.
I wish I could take language
And heal the words that were the wounds
You have no names for.
Julia Cameron


I have worked in healthcare and social service settings for about three decades. In fact, when I first became interested in General Semantics, my motivation was for very practical reasons. I was working at that time for a small, community-based social service agency that served youth and families. What attracted me to General Semantics in this setting was how practical and “down to earth” GS principles could work in the everyday lives of adolescents as they moved through this part of their human journey.

Essentially, as I now view it, General Semantics assists us in aligning ourselves with the evident and observable structure of life existing in our environment and the rest of the universe.

Then, over two decades later, I worked in a highly clinical setting: I was a resident, hospital chaplain. Much of my role was being a ‘non anxious’ presence in the lives of people who were going through healthcare crises in their lives. It was in this setting that I began to realize how our intensional models of thinking contribute to more stress and anxiety in our lives. For example, to say, “I’m a cancer patient,” may be highly problematic for someone who thinks that this is all they are in every domain of their life: a sick person who is lives with a death sentence.

The use of extensional models of thinking, on the other hand, may help a person to “incrementalize” their illness. For instance, to say, “I have a tumor in my lungs that the surgeons need to remove; a consensus of my doctors say that this can be done
Effectively and successfully through surgery. I have elected to do this surgery.”
Extensionalizing and incrementalizing are ways of thinking that bring us to more manageable and realistic expectations; the AA concept of ‘one day at a time’ is a good example of this.

The difference, General Semantics teaches us, between intensonal and extensional reasoning is that the former focuses on what we think about the abouts. By that, I mean if a person is told they’re terminal, and have six months to live, there may arise feelings of vulnerability, loss of autonomy and control, loss of one’s body functions and health, and fear. Where do I go in my own mind with these thoughts as I interpret them? Extensional reasoning uses more of a scientific, rational and objective form of evaluation. Eastern traditions would perhaps use the word detachment from our emotional reactions and acceptance of the world as it functions. This is also an acceptance of life viewed as sickness, health, stress, peace, birth, life, and death. These are all realities of the structure of how life functions in natural systems and human systems. Humans do have emotions and reactions to stresses, and these aren’t to be minimized, but just accepted and given liberation by detachment and letting go.
Emotional attachment leads to compulsive assumptions and behaviors that leave us stuck in unhealthy places.

As a chaplain I would often try to help people in the hospital, who happened to be sick in various ways, to “think out loud,” by asking them questions about their illness, how they felt about it, what they were thinking about what the medical staff had related to them (this in itself gives a helpful understanding since it leads to thinking “about the abouts”), and how others were relating to them due to the illness. This might encompass what friends, family members, and healthcare professionals were saying and feeling about where they were in life in that present moment. Then, I might reframe the illness by using different symbols and metaphors hopefully leading to a new way of perceiving the illness itself. Finally, if there were scientific data available that could be used to point the realities of the illness, I would use that information.

Today, after a number of years of doing this work, I have concluded that those people who work in the field of the Healing Arts often are not equipped with the understanding of how their words are symbolic forms of communication having great import in their client’s minds. Since they are often seen as the experts in the field (this is starting to change as healthcare moves to more of participatory process, but there still are huge gaps in its practice) there is a primary accountability for taking the lead in communicating in a healthy way. I guess what I’m also saying is that it would be helpful for medical professionals to learn the principles of General Semantics that would give them more tools to work with in dialoguing with the people they serve. Another way of saying this is that it would give them a supportive means of symbol making that leads to more healthy outcomes.

Since the patient-doctor relationship (healers together)--points towards the need for trust and respect, the consumers of healthcare services need also to understand about how they react to what they hear from those in the healthcare field. Staff is responsible for this as well. People who are patients have a need to trust the staff who, for the most part, want to use as an emblematic credo ‘do no harm;’ they also need to trust how they think about what information they are given. For this to happen it’s helpful to develop critical minds for understanding one’s own emotions and thought processes, and a way to evaluate and interpret the messages they hear from the staff. Of course, this is one of the missions of General Semantics.

I have learned from the field of Family Systems Theory, developed by Murray Bowen, first working with schizophrenic families in clinical settings, that stress and anxiety can cause incredible role and communication patterns to be put in place in the family system. These patterns reach stages of concretization that set in motion ways of being in the family and the world. They often do lead to “crazymaking” thoughts and behaviors in the way they are demonstrated in the family and outside of it. Natural Systems educate us to know that humans are amazingly resilient and highly adaptive to surviving life’s stresses. Often illness itself may be used as a coping mechanism in a dysfunctional family system.

Another component to how things go down in a healthcare setting is the ability to catch an overview of the entire communicative context. Items such as the medical environment, one’s conditioning in perceiving hospitals and doctors, one’s mood at the time of diagnosis, whether a person has strong or weak family and social support, the manner in which the medical staff treats a sick person on a daily basis, an individual’s private non-verbal feelings and images about the doctors and other medical staff (does the doctor look like your mean Uncle Joe or your sweet Aunt Betty?), the scientific data about one’s illness at the time, the procedures and prognosis of various regimens of healing, one’s religious beliefs about healing and illness, and perhaps most importantly, is the food good or bad at the hospital?! All of these factors present themselves in transactional processes between patients and healthcare professionals.

To illustrate an example of what I’m getting at I would like to share with you a personal example. I’m hoping that you see me as a credible witness to the symbolic communication involved in these interactions, because I, too, am a Qualified Mental Health Professional. I am always changing, testing, observing how these dynamics are being played out as I attempt to serve people with major Mental Health diagnosis. Person A is not the same today as he/she was yesterday, or will be tomorrow. So dating is a positive strategy that may be used by those of us who work in the helping professions.

I have a serious diagnosis. I have liver disease, clinical depression and Hepatitis C. I have been going to the VA system for medical care for these chronic illnesses. A system also communicates a cultural way, an emotional process evolves within the system, and people are impacted by it. Most people recognize that the Department of Veteran Affairs is under funded by Federal monies. Many services have been trimmed back, and even returning Vets from Iraq question whether they will receive sound treatment for physical injuries as well as PTSD (Post Traumatic Shock Syndrome). Rates of suicide are on the rise among military personnel returning from Iraq. So there is a natural “push back” by many clients of this system, and a wondering whether the system itself really appreciates the service they gave their country.

I am a Vietnam Era Vet, and have been attempting to receive effective treatment for my Hep C. I have noticed that continuity of care is lacking if one moves to different places, and transferring to other VA clinics. In my case, I have concluded that I have ‘fallen through the cracks.’ I have between two cities in Texas.

Recently I had an appointment with a Nurse Practicioner (apparently they have no liver doctor at this clinic) who is the main staff person in the clinic who works with patients who have Hep C. As she reviewed my latest blood test results, she told me, “Looks like you have advanced liver disease now. It also looks like you have a tumor on your liver. It’s inoperable, but there are some other treatments available.” She mentioned nothing to me about the possibility of a liver transplant. But she did tell me in somewhat of a matter-of-fact way, “You should get your remains in order.”

The whole conversation took me by surprise and left me feeling numb and off-balance. In short, I found myself speechless. At a time when I should have asked her a lot of questions, in my mental confusion, I couldn’t find the words to articulate what I wanted to know. She made an appointment for me to have a CAT Scan done thirteen days away; I would have to travel to another VA hospital for the imaging services since mine didn’t have the equipment to do the test.

After I left her office, I felt fear, and began to think in very intensional ways. I also began to simply “be” with what I was feeling at the time, and tried to let my fear drift away like smoke from a fire that was burning out. Gradually, I began to accept whatever emerged as my own personal reality. I thought of the Serenity Prayer: God help me accept what I can’t change, to change what is in my power to change, and the wisdom to know the difference (my paraphrase).

What did she mean by the phrase, ‘Get your remains in order.’ What does “remains” mean? If I’m supposed to do this now, I’m not a bag of assorted remains, but it’s a given that I am a whole person who can choose, plan, make a plan for death, tie up loose ends in my life, say good-bye to my family, etc. Even upon death, we are still persons, perhaps in some other form, but still persons. The word “remains” triggered the memory of my mom and sister and me taking my deceased dad’s cremated ashes to a park overlooking Lake Michigan in a suburb north of Chicago. Feelings of sadness for the loss of my dad were mixed, sensing of incompletion in our relationship, with feelings of release and liberation as we scattered his “remains” into the lake.

On the other side, the word “remains” may be seen as the lowest common denominator of human constituency. There are the parts of a corpse or a biologically alive being that can be labeled, categorized, and observed. Other aspects of one’s spiritual essence are not scientifically observed, even though we’ve learned much from recent mind-body research.

The intensional part of my thinking that poked out its nepharious head was first of all fearing the words I had just listened to; I had a negative and critical attitude toward the Nurse Practitioner and her sterile, and what seemed to me to be, indifferent demeanor. I felt no sense of caring compassion. In terms of General Semantics, I think many healthcare professionals view this kind of news as a kind of package they must give to the patient. ‘Here it is—I’m giving you this package of bad news aka your diagnosis.” This is objectifying an illness as if it’s a being or object, rather than an organic or inorganic process at work in one’s body. It’s a play on the idea: sickness is like a marble that you swallow. It becomes an integral part of you, even though it has no shape or form we can point to and say “this is cancer,” like we might say, "this is a dog," or "this is a horse."

I am a person that is constantly dealing with and trying to manage my own anxiety about life and its events. One of the most experiential and qualitative ways I know of is to think more extensionally. It’s a way that helps me to counteract my own intensional spirals that are running downhill; so often the outcome of this thinking is a feeling of hopelessness, demoralization, depression, and immobilization. My wife and I realized, in this case, that we needed more extensional information and data so that we could see a more scientific picture of the effects of my liver disease.

We drove to the clinic that was about an hour away, waited six hours in the ER, and finally saw a doctor. This doctor also happened to be a liver doctor. He was calming, compassionate, and answered our questions. He ordered an Ultrasound for me, and afterwards, he came back to give us the results. He reported to us that there was no mass that could be seen in the liver. Both Pamela and I let out sighs of relief that felt like hot air under pressure being released from a balloon or tire. Compacted stress and anxiety was released into the universe. The doctor told us that he wanted to still have me do a CAT Scan because it’s a different kind of test from an Ultrasound,
but he assured us that the Ultrasound gave a ninety-nine percent view of what was happening in my liver.

I write about this personal example of a health crisis in order to show that we can process such news utilizing General Semantics principles. I emphasize the word process because any illness of influx of life-giving energy is in process, just as we are as human beings. We are not events, but we are organisms-as-a-whole-in-environments that constantly flow, shake, move, ebb-and-flow, grow and degenerate. I encourage everyone to do more study on the nature of intensional and extensional forms of reasoning, especially using them when given news of major, life-changing proportions. Bruce Kodish and Susan Presby-Kodish’s book Driving Yourself Sane gives an excellent explanation of these two modes of thought, and would be good supportive reference to my explanations here. With more knowledge of General Semantics we may be better equipped with the tools to confront stressors revolving around our personal health and that of others who we love.

References
Cameron, Julia. (1992). The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. P. 204. New York: Tarcher/Putnam Books.

© Christopher Bear Beam, M.A. June, 2009


Biography: Christopher Bear Beam has been using General Semantics constructs for over thirty years as a Human Services professional and Qualified Mental Health Professional. As a group facilitator he co-leads anti-racism groups and integrates his knowledge and experience of General Semantics within the environment of transactional change in this area. He is the author of three books, and is a poet/spoken word artist. One of his books, The Golden Window of Silence: A Way of Becoming More Fully Human, explores the meaning created and communicated by silence. It can be ordered by going to www.xlibris.com. In 2008 he co-founded a Texas Nonprofit Corporation called Sunbear Community Alliance whose mission is fostering intercultural understanding through the Arts and Social education. More information a bout SCA can be gained by going to www.chrisbearbeam.com and clicking on the “training” icon. Christopher Bear Beam may be reached by email at cosmicbeam@hotmail.com.