Why getting divorced taught me respect for the military

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So I’ve been gone from the blogosphere for a month as will sometimes happen when the work/life scale gets overweighted on the work side.  Getting back some of the groove now and I offer up this blog post I actually wrote about a year ago but never posted. ______________________________

I think back to the person I was in high school and I wonder sometimes who that was.  And then I remember that despite the many experiences I had had that were beyond the general scope of my peer group, I was still emotionally immature.

I suppose it can’t be helped.  We are all young in the beginning and that means so much more than young in age.  I remember back then I couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever enter the military.  Why would anyone want to become part of an organization that systematically broke down an individual in order to recreate them as part of a group?  We spend so much of our time in Junior High and High School trying to figure out who we are – why would you give up that hard-won identity?  Why in the world would you let someone yell insults at you, force you to exercise into a state of abject misery and then ship you off someplace where you might get killed at the whim of some suit in Washington D.C.?  I just didn’t get it.

A few of the kids in my graduating class of about 100 joined up immediately. One was even part of the group I ran with that took all the college-prep classes.  I always figured he joined up because his home life wasn’t great and he’d never been told he could go to college, even though he took all the same classes we did.  I never got it, but I figured it was his way out.  Already my prejudice was set:  smart people went to college, not into the military.  I never stated the inverse, of course:  not smart people go into the military…  that just didn’t seem PC at all.  But that’s what was lurking in the background.

But then life happened.  About 20 years passed between graduating high school and the finalization of my divorce.  It wasn’t the divorce itself that made me respect the military.  It was the year after.   Sure, as a country we’d had Desert Storm and Operation New Hope, we’d had 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.  And I’d had a whirlwind romance,  the wedding of my dreams, two amazing kids and a marriage that collapsed into the shitter as my spouse descended into the morass of addiction and I became a person I didn’t even recognize in trying to cope with it all. Life had hurled insults at me and made me exercise my psyche into complete and utter exhaustion.  And it had been my choice to enter into the situation at every step along the way.

It was only then that I became aware of something I’d missed in my growing up process – an understanding of how to depend on others.  I’d never really had to.  I was able to handle ALL the challenges that had been thrown my way by using niceness, native intelligence and that college education I’d gotten.   I didn’t need to depend on anyone else.

But then came the kids and I finally realized how arrogant I had been up ’til then.  Having someone else be utterly dependent on you is hard, no matter how much you might love babies in general (and I wasn’t one of those), or how smart you might be in how you go about raising them.  The weight of the responsibility and the grind of meeting the daily needs are overwhelming.  You need help, even if you don’t admit it.

And then came the divorce and the realization that I couldn’t do all that I had to do with respect to growing my kids into responsible adults without some outside help.  And I don’t mean the kind you pay for like counselors and babysitters, though I have made use of both of those too.    I mean the kind where you depend on someone else to help you for no reason other than that you need help and they’re willing to give it. I didn’t really know what it meant to be part of a community that extended beyond the bounds of familial relationships.  But I had no option but to build exactly that community after the divorce because I have no blood family here and I’d made the choice that it was more important to keep the kids near their (now sober) dad than it was for me to be near to my family.

I won’t ever be able to say that I fully understand the ‘bonds of brotherhood’ experienced by those in the military.  But having experienced a bit of life that broke me down and the life-changing community that grew around me and lifted me up in the aftermath of my broken marriage, I now have a great deal more respect for those who choose the military experience.  I know, just as they know, that my community has my back and that if I ever fell, it would carry me to safety.

And that’s a really nice feeling that I’m not sure I would have ever understood the importance of before divorce.

Earth 2.0

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Image Credit: NASA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

What name have they assigned to this most recent batch of kids?

I’m Gen-X; I teach Millennials and Digital Natives.  Is this newest crop of prepubescents still considered part of the Digital Native tribe?

I could see that since despite the fact that I programmed dynamic websites for a living during the height of the Internet start-up bubble, my eldest actually schools me on occasion in the functioning of my iPhone, which is just plain embarrassing.

The reason I ask is because of something the almost-7-year-old said today.  Any time we run an errand, the chatter in the back seat is almost constant and as long as it’s not arguing I tend to tune it out.  Today they were taking turns adding the next sentence to an extended story that started as a riff on Star Wars.  I happened to tune back in just in time to hear the little one say: “Well, why don’t we just move to a new planet and call it Earth 2.0?”

Seriously, a first-grader thinks in software versioning terms?

What can violent video games teach us about reintegrating returning vets?

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As a mom I’m always weighing the benefits to my sanity of letting the kids have more time on the Wii against the negative effects of video games with violence in them.  Sure, at this age it’s just Lego figures cartoonishly battling with light sabres, but it’s still battling.  I’ve heard it said that it’s no worse than the Road Runner and Looney Toons cartoons we watched as kids and we turned out alright, right?  (Uh…right?)

But still, wondering about possible consequences makes me feel like a responsible parent and so I do.  Last December Time Magazine came out with an article on this subject showing that the behavioral differences that have been observed in kids that play these kinds of games actually have physiological underpinnings.  The parts of the brain that deal with emotion, attention and inhibition are all less active after playing violent video games.  Luckily, this change didn’t seem to be permanent and after some time off from the games the study subjects regained most of the brain activity that had been lost.

This got me to thinking about returning war veterans.  These men and women have witnessed and participated in real violence and it makes sense to me that the human brain evolved a coping mechanism that reduced emotional activity as a way of getting through violent and stressful times.  But for individuals who are shipped off to war, or unwillingly find themselves in the middle of one, simply surviving the experience often means prolonged exposure to sometimes unimaginable violence.  Can those parts of the brain dealing with emotion be regained?  We all want that answer to be ‘yes’.  But I wonder if the repression of the 1950s had something to do with the men returning from WWI and WWII resuming their expected positions in society without ever really emotionally reconnecting to it.

But more importantly I got to wondering about how this research related to violent video games could be used to help the veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.  If witnessing and participating in violence disconnects us from our emotions and inhibitions, how can we reconnect?

This is the part where experiences collide in my brain.  Wondering about this got me to thinking about how a friend of mine once told me that one of the best ways to get her teenage son out of those frequent teen funks was to have him help in buying, making and distributing a bushel of baked potatoes with all the fixings to the homeless that gather on the front steps of our main library branch.  I think we can all remember how isolated and emotionally distraught and disconnected we can feel as teens.  But making the effort to help those less fortunate helped to reconnect this teen his community, pulled him out of his self-imposed isolation and lightened his mood.

I think we’re doing a much better job this time around with helping our veterans return to society both at the government and community levels.  Could this idea of service to others be a further path to full reintegration?  If observing violence decreases neural activity in the parts of the brain that deal with emotion and inhibition, could observing kindness increase that activity?  If participating in violence further dampens the ability to emotionally connect, can engaging in kindness to others be the way to reanimate that activity? And if it is, how best to facilitate that?

But now my in-between time is gone and I must get to sleep.

The Slinky as a model for the Housing Crash

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I stumbled across a story about slinkies from the interesting folks at Radiolab the other day.  I’m always amazed that a radio program can do an entire show about something as visual as a slinky.  Though I guess it shouldn’t surprise me since I spent 6 years getting two high-end degrees writing papers about visual art. But I digress.

So anyway, it turns out that a slinky can do this amazing thing that you wouldn’t expect.  When you hold it high off the ground by just a couple of the rings and let it extend to it’s full length, a bit of magic happens when you actually let go of the top.  Well, the top does just what you would expect it to do.  It starts falling.  But the magic part is at the bottom.  After you let go of the top, the bottom does…nothing.  It just hangs there in mid-air with nothing holding it up while the top of the slinky races toward it.

I’m including below the great video they had at the online version of the show in case you don’t believe me.  There’s even a scientist of some sort who was as fascinated by this phenomenon as the story writers and he works out the math and computer model for how this can be physically possible.  So here’s the part where my in-between moment happened.  As I was watching that computer model it struck me that the physical laws that govern the magic of the non-falling bottom of the slinky are probably the same ones that governed the U.S. housing crash and Great Recession.

Now I like math as much as the next person (well, OK, maybe a little bit more), but definitely not enough to work out proof of this theory. But here’s my reasoning.  The computer model shows that the center of mass for the stretched out slinky is way toward the bottom.  That’s were most of us in the housing market or general economy are.  We rely on whatever’s got the top anchored to keep us from crashing into the ground.  We trust that someone else is keeping their eye on that ball because we’re busy down at the bottom making sure bills are getting paid and maintaining the status quo of the bulk of the coils.

In the video you can see as the scientist runs the model forward that from the moment that the top is released the center of gravity actually does start to move downward, but at a sleeping snail’s pace compared to the top section.  Something tells me that there were economists or banking experts or regulation gurus somewhere who saw that the top of the economic slinky had been released and probably made loud noises about it, but those of us at the bottom didn’t believe them (if we made time to pay attention to them) because we couldn’t feel anything happening. I mean, we’re seriously busy down here getting things done, right?

So, to the doctoral candidate looking for a dissertation topic, have at that math for me, OK?  I’ve got to get to carpool line.