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“ Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. ”
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (via kosdetermination)
“ Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together. ”
Anais Nin (via kari-shma)
Above is a picture of Omar Khadr, abducted at 15, now 25 years old, he has spent a third of his life at Guantánamo Bay for a crime he never committed.
“Khadr is accused of throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier in 2002 and conspiring with Al Qaeda. There is no credible evidence to substantiate the charges, some of which date to when he was 11 years old. Charges were not even brought against him until 2007. If convicted, the Obama administration will seek a life sentence for Khadr, prosecutor David Iglesias indicated.
Army Col. Pat Parrish, the tribunal’s presiding judge, on Monday denied defense appeals to bar confessions Khadr made under torture. In hearings held in May an unnamed U.S. military officer admitted that his interrogation unit threatened to gang rape and kill Khadr if he did not cooperate with an interrogation session at Afghanistan’s notorious Bagram air base in 2002.
A U.S. military psychiatrist has said that Khadr, who has now spent a third of his life at Guantánamo, is under extreme psychological stress after years of living through torture, abuse and appalling conditions. He has been subjected to stress positions, beatings, humiliations—including being used as a “human mop” to clean up urine, threatened attack with dogs, long periods of extreme isolation and sensory as well as sleep deprivation. (Read more here)How come we barely hear about cases like these in the news? If it happend to a white christian male, we would constantly hear about it, but when it happens to a muslim from Afghanistan, silence.
Omar Khadr has himself said:
Khadr wrote to his Canadian attorney Dennis Edney, on May 27. “And if the world doesn’t see all this, to what world am I being released to? A world of hate … and discrimination.”
Lt. Col. Frakt has said:
“It is appalling that the Obama administration is allowing charges to go forward in the military commissions against Omar Khadr. Clearly, Omar Khadr, as a juvenile of 15 at the time of his alleged offences, could not be tried as an adult in federal court, so they are allowing him to be tried as an adult in the military commissions, potentially making him the first child soldier to be tried and convicted as a war criminal in world history.” (Read more here)
did you know that rape is considered a form of acceptable torture at guantánamo? you heard me. ‘questioning’ at gitmo includes sexually assaulting and torturing prisoners.
About a year ago, I had the chance to attend a symposium hosted by Fountain House, a wonderful mental health charity. The honoree was Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, who spoke powerfully and unsentimentally about her experiences with bipolar disorder and the stigma she faced in going public with these struggles. (I recommend her memoir, An Unquiet Mind, to anyone.)
Dr. Jamison made one point that has really stuck with me. ”It’s only untreated people you see,” she pointed out. The “face” of mental illness is the schizophrenic man on the subway; the woman talking to herself on a street corner, the violent criminal. But here’s the thing: for every one of those people, there are probably a thousand living healthy, productive lives thanks to care and medication. The success rate is high. And yet, such is the stigma attached to mental illness that all these success stories will stay hidden and invisible, thereby perpetuating the fiction that mental illness is essentially untreatable.
Of course, there are degrees of illness, and I am not even going to get into the systemic problems with our health care. What I do want to talk about is the bravery of people like Dr. Jamison who, against the advice of colleagues, have gone public with their experiences. It’s only through people talking openly that these stigmas will begin to be erased - that we can realize how much medical technology has developed, and that there’s no shame in getting help or treatment.
My own struggles have been small by comparison, and my voice is a small one, but I too have dealt with the debilitating effects of manic-depression, and more to the point, the shame and sense of failure that went with it. But I am here to say that, thanks to good care and (yes) good drugs, I am happy, productive, well, and live a life filled with functional relationships and good friends. It makes some people uncomfortable to hear about such things, but I think it’s important.
Jamison quoted from her memoir in the talk I heard:
“I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one’s life, change the nature and direction of one’s work, and give final meaning and color to one’s loves and friendships.”
“ There is a silence where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be,
In the cold grave—under the deep deep sea,
Or in the wide desert where no life is found,
Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;
No voice is hush’d—no life treads silently,
But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free,
That never spoke, over the idle ground:
But in green ruins, in the desolate walls
Of antique palaces, where Man hath been,
Though the dun fox, or wild hyena, calls,
And owls, that flit continually between,
Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan,
There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone. ”
Thomas Hood, Silence (via fetishofsilence)
“ The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. ”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (via beautyisanillusion)
(Source: creatingaquietmind)
so there she was, descending into a city she loved away from the man she thought she always would. it’s funny really, the carelessness of desire, it’s ability to erase our most basic promises. but nevermind the past, on that day her seat-back was up, her eyes bright and the girl was falling falling 15,000 more feet into a new life.
“ I think it’s very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person. ”
“ Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore. ”
Yours in Good Literature: ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
