The most disturbing part of the film to me was the way that soldiers treated other soldiers suffering from mental issues. With rates of mental disturbance among soldiers so staggeringly high, it is shocking that soldiers still treat the issue with such malicious behavior and misunderstanding. Maybe it is because they are feeling it themselves--hinted the younger blonde soldier in the video, and are jealous and regretful that the other person had the courage to seek help. This is ironic because when the soldier is courageous enough to seek help, despite the social sigma, they are called "fuckin' pussies." I think war--especially war the way it has become in modern eras, with killings occuring at mass scale and anonymously. It is hard to tell enemy from civilian and civilian casualties have been accepted as an inevitable part of war. I don't think that the human psyche evolved to deal with such a chaotic, destructive environment and naturally there is a certain level of break and change when it is introduced to the situation. I can barely understand how people can come back from war and not be traumatized. My grandfather fought in world war II, though he never showed any signs of PTSD, I realize that the war was 50 years ago when I was old enough to talk to him. In his day, it was called "battle fatigue", that sounds like someone is sleepy after being in a fight--highly euphemistic for the actual nature of the disorder. The image that most got under the skin for me during the video was when Sgt Lucis father found him hanging from a garden hose, looking peaceful as a hindu cow, despite months of agony--that and a walking fox head. BTW--how did they have interviews from the sgt before he died, were they doing some type of documentary before?

I believe this would only apply to the paranoid. When I am sitting on the back of the Cata bus, and a group of foreigners descends upon me to jab happily to me in sounds foreign and unfamiliar. I almost feel more curious and awe-struck than uncomfortable. I can see the facial emotions, make out angry scowls, hear the witty sarcasm, and the high pitched tone that someone speaks in when they finally realize something. It makes me think of all of the american immigrants who never got a formal education/ who are still relatively inexperienced at speaking and how much of their personality it is holding back. I think as native speakers, we automatically assume to a degree a level of stereotypical simplicity and stupidity to people who speak our language poorly, not realizing how hellishly frustrating it must be to listen to a hundred rapidly speaking american's a day while you rely on a basic understanding of the language and are stuck with an inability to express eloquently your actual thoughts and feelings. I frequented Taco Bell often in my home town of Reston, next to DC. I assumed they were all low-level, uneducated immigrants. One time I talked to one, he told me about how he was a computer engineer in Ecuador, but during the civil war he fled and in America they wouldn't give him a student loan, nor would they accept his credits as transfer. I went to Taco Bell maybe once a week and every single time he was there. "No money," he told me. I strongly believe there is no reason to believe that language barriers should make people uncomfortable nor should they ever, unconsciously or not, allow a person to stereotype on another person. I like to imagine if I was in there country, and had to learn their language.
I can recall one time another language made me uncomfortable, in the fifth grade I was returning home from sleep away camp. The camp hosted a bunch of French kids. I went to pee on the back of the bus, they violently chanted some french word and pounded their fists. They did when I was done to. That was weird.

Well I am a whiteboy. I do not feel guilty about my race for a few reasons.
A. I think it would be philosophically absurd to hold myself responsible for what happened during events such as American Slavery, native america Destruction etc. Because no soul really chose the body it would inhabit. Assuming that we had, probably, we all had an equal chance of being put in the body of any race, we would either all have to feel guilty or none of us would. If reincarnation existed, I could have just as easily been the slave as the slavemaster.
B. In our area, there is barely any treatment difference between minorities and whites. There is nothing in the present to be guilty about. Further more, within my own race, there is so much variation of treatment by peers and authority figures that it would be irrational to think it was because of race, and not because of personality, predisposition, attitude, tendencies, etc.

I do not believe that is hard to relearn racist ideas. I think that the reason that people are racist is not so much because of society as it is because of the way we evolved to survive in groups. To feel cohesive as a group there has to be a degree of negative sentiment towards people outside of the group/other groups. It fosters unity of members and makes people feel more inclined to help feed clothe and shelter those that were in their own tribes back in the prehistoric day. As such, when placed in the right context people will reinvent racist ideas all the time to make outsiders and insiders. If one day everybody woke up with identical green bodies apart from a an X, a Y or Z on their chest, it would probably only be a few months before X's mainly around with X's, Y's with Y's etc, etc. WIth the X's the bosses, the Ys the middlemen, and the Z's as loser worker troll slaves (or some combination)
However, in the way the brain is wired to be in exclusive groups, it is also wired to remember stuff and be hard wired for certain facts. If for your whole life you have been told that whatever group is inferior, smelly and lazy, then naturally it will take a good amount of re-teaching and presented information to undo this, not to say it can't be done. So in summary, it can happen, but the circumstances must be right.

So what about the writer's sexual promiscuity actually lead the reader to commit a crime deserving a life sentence. As Sam Richard's refers to "invisible strings", external forces shaping our decisions and molding us into the people we become and the lives we live, the writer also seems to hold this type of ideology in the fact the he is whole-heartedly convinced that some outside influence put him in jail. This is ironic as what he calls "look inward" actually seems to be more of a hunt for an external scapegoat.
I think that this story does echo good things about the correctional system, over time potential activities dwindle and in time the only place for a lonely prisoner has to explore is within his mind. This will lead to the self-reflection and even regret that could put an inmate on the track to "rehabilition." I am still very curious
about what this man did to earn his life sentence. For some reason he withholds that from us, even though it is obviously the most important part. Also, again how did being horny as a teenager lead to this. It is sad that even though this man could be completely changed and cleansed of his former criminal intentions, LIFE means LIFE.
Maybe the next step in this man's inner journey towards redemption and genuine understanding of his current incarceration would draw heavily from the mental step of not tracing "invisible strings", but rather blaming himself solely. If he was born in a completely different city to a different family, There is still a high probablility that he would be twiddling his thumbs in a jail cell. Maybe he can get parole.

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