Another thing that I disagree with about this article is the way the information was presented on the internet. I did not like how the article had the pictures and videos from the deployment so easily available on the website. If I was a parent I would not want my child to see the things posted on the website. I understand that it is up to the parents to censor information from their children and there are things like parental controls on televisions and computers, but a parent cannot be watching a child all the time.
The article does not accurately represent this case. I feel that the article is trying to blame everyone involved in this case. I am not sure if everyone is responsible or not but I am not going to jump to conclusions about the people involved in the case nor any armed service member. I feel that this article creates a group of people that read these articles and believe that this pertains to all armed forces members. The way the article was written seemed to just pick put the guilty parts of the case without giving the chance of another side to what happened. There are facts that you can't get around but many of the parts of the article seemed to hint at a completely guilty platoon of soldiers. I know that there will never be an article that will tell both sides or tell the complete truth but I feel that this article breeds a skewed and negative view of the military.
This article is a good and bad thing. The contents of the article is good and bad, but the way that the information was presented is poorly executed. I believe that the citizens of the United States deserve to know the truth and have a right to know what they want to know. The information is also something that I don't believe should be exposed to the public. I hope that someone that reads this article will try to gain all the facts from both sides and try to fully appreciate the situation before making a decision about what to think about the topic. But there are a lot of people who will take the information they are presented at face value. This is Rolling Stone and they have a liberal slant and there are other slants to the this article.
The way to solve the problem of people fearing being seen as a coward and being afraid of coming out about their problem is by making the problem a big deal. The military can make testing for PTSD mandatory and provide services to deal with stress. But the only way to get people to be totally honest about their problem is to have them want to talk about their problem. By having more people who talk openly about PTSD who have PTSD in the military might encourage people to seek help. By showing that PTSD isn't a weakness is one way to prevent people from silently suffering alone.
I believe that post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an under evaluated illness of returning veterans of Operation Iraqi and Enduring Freedom (OIF/ OEF) and the war in Afghanistan. I believe that the reason that PTSD has been recently a problem is because of the new acknowledgement of this disorder as a problem. The problem of PTSD has always been around but only recently has the military accepted this problem as serious. The problem of PTSD is not only because of the lack of acceptance by the government and the military but also due to the service members attitudes towards weakness. The military has an atmosphere of never showing weakness and always putting away your problems to help the greater good. This atmosphere was created to emphasize that the military is a team and to teach unselfishness in combat. The consequence of these lessons is a culture of fear of being seen as a weak person. This is what prevents a lot of people from readily admitting to having a problem.
Even further is how does this woman plan on implementing all the ideas she is putting forth. She wants to have women involved in fifty percent of the peace talk. How would she suggest going about finding the women who best represent the desire of the women populous and putting them into the peace negotiations. She mentions how much money the United Nations spend and speaks about investing in women. How does she plan on attaining these funds and getting the money and how to use it. Using the money to build schools and improve neighborhood. What makes men incapable from doing these jobs and using the money this way. I don't believe that she gives men enough credit where credit is due. I can understand that she wants peace and wishes to take a kinder and gentler approach to war. And that women are very important to building nations and peace negotiations and probably if women ran governments they'd probably run better. But what I feel she is missing is that we sleep peaceably in our beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf.
I think that the speaker has good and bad points about her talk. As she said, we only have one view on war. She makes a good point that women are underappreciated in the peace negotiations of war. And also that women are the ones that do seem to hold down the home front while the men are fighting. But what I feel she's missing is that each culture is different when it comes to war. Even though the "fear" may be the same, the way countries go to war is different.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, there were plenty of civilian casualties and many were women and children. But the combatants of both wars decided to blend and hide with the civilian populous. The coalition forces are not the ones that asked the enemy to use the civilians as human shields.
The main point that she is trying to make is that women do not have enough say when it comes to war. I believe that this is true. In most militaries and governments today, women are the minority, especially amongst the higher ranking personnel. But what I don't understand is, what makes the men in the military who do talk about the peace treaties less capable of coming up with an adequate or successful plan.
This brings me to anomic suicide. When people lose their social norms and begin to feel alone is when they feel tempted to commit suicide. When a person goes through a hardship such as prison, or boot camp, or even high school, it is important to have connections with others in order to cope with the ordeal. Even greater than the friendships people have is the feeling of being important in someone's life.
This man in prison talks greatly about how he likes feeling important and being a parent figure to the younger inmates. If a person can feel important in someone's life, it can help a person endure hardships.
While thinking about this letter, the lecture about anomic suicide comes to mind. This man makes an emphasis on the importance of relationships and I believe this directly ties to anomic suicide. He talks about how it is hard to keep in touch with people outside of prison and as time went by the number of letters he received became fewer.
The relationships that this man has made in prison are very important to him and the letters he gets from his friends and former teachers mean a lot to him. I believe that when a person goes through hardship, it's important to have relationships. When my friend went through boot camp he said that letters are the things that picked him up when things were rough.
I can understand that this may not sound like a good idea to some people. That there is a chance that if we let a murderer out of prison because it is believed he has repented for his crime and wishes to move on with his life that there is a chance that he might kill again. And that could have been another life that could have been saved. But it is up to society and the citizens to take that chance. To realize that ruining one man's life in order to get payment for a life lost is not always the right answer.
This poem and these blogs have shown me a side of these men that I would not expect when I think a convicted felon sentenced to life in prison. I cannot be totally certain if these men are genuinely expressing their true feelings or not but I believe that people can change and that these men have changed in one way or another.
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Medley