Just got back from dinner at the folks:
I’m glad they all get along so well.
Always Have A Buddy At Your Back
From today’s New York Times, “For the Battle-Scarred, Comfort at Leash’s End“:
[…] In August, Jacob Hyde got his service dog, Mya, from Puppies Behind Bars, a program based in New York State that uses prisoners to raise and train dogs for lives of service. The organization has placed 23 dogs with veterans with P.T.S.D. in the last two years, training them to obey 87 different commands.
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“If I didn’t have legs, I would have to crawl around,” said Mr. Hyde, 25. “If I didn’t have Mya, I wouldn’t be able to leave the house.”
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If Mr. Hyde says “block,” the dog will stand perpendicularly in front of him to keep other people at a distance. If he asks Mya to “get his back,” the dog will sit facing backward by his side.
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The dogs are trained to jolt a soldier from a flashback, dial 911 on a phone and even sense a panic attack before it starts. And, perhaps most important, the veterans’ sense of responsibility, optimism and self-awareness is renewed by caring for the dogs.
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The dogs help soldiers understand “what’s happening as it’s happening, what to do about it, and then doing it,” said Joan Esnayra, a geneticist whose research team has received $300,000 from the Defense Department to study the issue. “You can use your dog kind of like a mirror to reflect back your emotional tenor.”
[…] Under a bill written by Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, veterans with P.T.S.D. will get service dogs as part of a pilot program run by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Training a psychiatric service dog and pairing it with a client costs more than $20,000. The government already helps provide dogs to soldiers who lost their sight or were severely wounded in combat, but had never considered placing dogs for emotional damage…
While it’s not the focus of this article, these service dogs are helping rescue two sets of lost human souls. My dog guru in the Midwest helped start a different program to pair “throw-away” shelter dogs with… well, “throw-away” humans in the prison system, selected prisoners who earn a coveted slot for schooling as dog groomers and trainers. She thought that after twenty years of dog rescue, she’d be immune to horror stories, but it breaks her heart all over again to find out how many people have never known anything but coercion, force, and threats in their lives. Thank Goddess for dogs, who forgive.
(Photo swiped, with permission, from commentor Yutsano‘s Flicker; hat tip to commentor Mai Naem for the article)
CBS Sunday Morning
Still a little sore about the outcome of a certain game last night.
Early Morning Open Thread
In honor of Eostre, She Who May Not Actually Have Been Worshipped, I intend to eat a Godiva dark chocolate bar for breakfast later.
Daffodils are blooming on all four sides of the yard now, and one defiant knee-high lilac bush is starting to bloom six weeks ahead of its fellows. I’ve got some three dozen boutique tomato plants on order for mid-May, and it’s time to start pulling the mulch off the raised beds (not to mention looking for the sandals I never got to wear in all of last summer’s rain).
It was this, or Watership Down: “All the world will be your enemy, Prince of A Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first, they must catch you… Be cunning — full of tricks — and your people will never be destroyed.”
Pretty good philosophy for Democrats in general, actually…
(For our Antepodian correspondents: The Easter Bilby!)
Open Thread
Obviously, in the history of WVU sports, there have been better nights.
On the upside, CBS did not cut to a commercial with a close-up of Darren Studstill’s facemask twisted sideways.
*** Update ***
For those of you who do not understand the Studstill reference, watch this:
If I remember correctly, around the two minute mark was when I started doing shots of grain.
Open Thread
Went through all the papers and I have nothing to talk about. Off to the store (out of tuna and wheat bread) and then to do who knows what today.
I hear there is a basketball game tonight.
A commenter on the Catholic Church abuse scandal
Longtime commenter ThymeZone has written here about his own experiences with abuse within the Catholic Church. I am passing it on because it is a courageous and thoughtful comment.
I’ve recently retired from my longtime career-job-occupation, so that gives you and idea of the age group I am in. And in the 50-plus years since the aforementioned mistreatment, I have spoken of those events with maybe half a dozen other people, including two shrinks and a few other people I was close to at one time or another. Let’s just say, I really don’t enjoy talking about much. And from adolescence until about age 40, a period of around 25 years or so, I pretty much blocked out the entire experience and all the events around that time in my life, so that the thing just was a dark blank space in my memory.
So, to the topic at hand, which I address here with some trepidation. Over all those years and some considerable therapy, I have come to only a very few conclusions. One of them is that I long ago forgave the person who mistreated me. I compared my own pain at being a part of his pain, with his, and decided that there was a good chance that he was more tortured by it than I was. Maybe, maybe not. I really have no way of knowing that for sure. But the point is, I don’t know, and I couldn’t see the point of carrying anger and resentment around with me for the rest of my life. Life is hard enough without adding to the inventory of painful things. I just let go of the anger, forgave the poor man, and over a not very long period of time my own shame and fear of the thing faded away too. A fairly effective pill, forgiveness, and for me, without much in the way of side effects.
I have no dog in the fight over what is happening the Catholic Church, but when it comes to the simple matter of how people treat other people, when it comes to the mysteries of sexuality, I refuse to be judgmental and carry grudges. At the risk of seeming odd and being unpopular in an age of triumphant sex police on every corner, I just don’t want to join in the condemnation of other people unless there is some really compelling reason to do so. The Church has its own work to do, and I have no advice for it on how to go about doing that work. I wish it well, I hope it turns out as well as possible for everyone under the circumstances. In my own experience, by far the most painful part of what happened to me was the hysterical reaction of adults around me to the events. If they had been okay with it all, I would have been much better off. A seven year old can’t understand much about sexual behavior, but he can sure understand fear and overreaction on the part of adult figures in his life. Whatever value there is in that message, I hope it helps somebody else. I’d have had no reason to feel horrified and ashamed of what happened to me if the adults around me hadn’t been so sure that horror and shame were what I ought to be feeling.
A commenter on the Catholic Church abuse scandalPost + Comments (72)