I didn’t interact as well as I might have last week. Many years ago, I funded & ran a speakers bureau of a high PTSD population with a human rights focus. It ran for about 3 years and I’d sent about 5 previously getting the experience to do so. It featured survivors of torture, long term political imprisonment, relatives of disappeared, etc. Mentioning that at the time would have been one-upping Courtney’s experience. It really is impossible to remove all mental association / memory trigger events. It’s a very sophisticated subject, involving not only how to talk about the events, how to ‘testitfy’ but also what happens in both telling and re-telling of the person’s story. Some bits should never come out, others become liturgical in nature as the are retold.

The trauma itself, post or otherwise, behaves like a broken ankle..the mind looses capacity to accomodate to even minor stressors, the ankle can’t take normal weight for a long time. The peculiar location of the net for the discussion is trouble. I can imagine a net without Facebook, Google, or even IP, but I can not imagine one without flame wars.

How I think language works, isn’t directed toward empathy, it’s tough ground to work over. I recall the story of Molly Ivans being put on the New York Times editor’s shit list (and subsequently forced out) for describing a west Texas chicken killing competition as a Gang Pluck.

What’s at odds here is the safety of topics under taboo, to be addressed in a ceremonial safe place, a suburban gated community of the mind, or the street corner / subway platform that is the open net, or still the most challenging and fruitful place of Salon, with a table of cookies & coffee at the back of the room.