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ICE-induced PTSD: Fascism is a Public Health Emergency
20 Plays14 days ago
State violence doesn't fade away with the day's end - it echoes down through future generations. The brutality we are currently witnessing is a full blown public health emergency.
Kids are being arrested; communities terrorized; streets don't feel safe anymore. People of all races and backgrounds are in constant fear for their lives, their jobs, their physical and mental health, or that of their neighbors, their loved ones, their community. Our nervous systems are constantly on edge. There is no moment of true, restorative relaxation under this administration.
This is the mental health legacy of fascism; and we've seen it before.
We must take a stand, for our own sake, but for mostly for the sake of our kids, who are living their innocent formative years in a constant state of fight-or-flight.
We must put an end to the marching songs, the war drums, the brutish yelling of these angry, power hungry men.
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Transcript
Deterioration of Societal Bonds
00:00:10
Speaker
A reign of terror has arrived in the United States. The bonds that normally hold Americans together are breaking down. Huge numbers are blaming those summarily executed in the streets by ICE for their own deaths.
00:00:22
Speaker
These events will have impact far beyond the daily headlines. We are seeing an entirely new set of traumatic memories being created daily in Minneapolis, in Chicago, in Los Angeles, elsewhere.
Impact of ICE and Trauma on Families
00:00:38
Speaker
For example, a generation of school kids is learning to associate the smell of tear gas with the abduction and disappearance of their parents, friends, classmates. If ICE really was a class act, by now they would have a marching song. Something martial, something stirring about the triumph of the white race intended to strike terror into the hearts of anyone they target, anyone opposes
Personal Memories of Neo-Nazi Songs
00:01:02
Speaker
them. Something that feels lively when you're goose-stepping in jackboots, Ramrod's straight arm raised proudly like Elon Musk showed us how to do.
00:01:16
Speaker
In Munich long ago, I heard three drunken neo-Nazi skinheads come staggering up a quiet, darkened street after midnight. Their arms slung around each other's shoulders. They were braying a marching song. Their girlfriends in black jeans and leather jackets were huddled together, following them safely from about ten paces behind.
00:01:38
Speaker
Their voices echoed and rang up and down the tall, narrow buildings and streets that lined the route near my hotel, which was near the train station in central Munich.
00:01:52
Speaker
I was in Germany in late August of 2005 at a scientific meeting and awake late at night because I was watching CNN's coverage of Hurricane Katrina drowning New Orleans. flood My hotel room was on the top floor of a six-story unbroken row of apartments and hotel buildings that sliced down Schillestrasse, which leads right from the main train station.
00:02:11
Speaker
The windows were open because it was a warm summer night.
Trauma and Memory Research
00:02:14
Speaker
And that's when I heard the singing and I suddenly felt the hair stir on the back of my neck. I know that feeling. These streets have heard that tune 70 years before.
00:02:24
Speaker
The group passed below my window and continued up the street. on Their raucous echoes were fading as they left. They didn't encounter anyone. There were no street fights or gunshots, no police sirens, no shouted orders.
00:02:39
Speaker
Only me, my heart thumping and my breath short. So i felt I had encountered a family memory from 1935.
00:02:49
Speaker
How much similarity is required to reawaken a traumatic memory? A tune played on a piano in the house next door, it's barely audible through the wall. You raise your eyebrow and ask yourself, wait a minute, is that... that... Some studies suggest that only 11% similarity between events is enough to trigger a traumatic association.
00:03:09
Speaker
For example, you catch the unique aroma of a roasting turkey, and then you're suddenly remembering something terrible that happened at a holiday when you were a kid. New research is showing that traumatic memories in PTSD are wired differently from ordinary sad memories. The brain does not treat traumatic memories as regular memories or perhaps not even as memories at all.
00:03:30
Speaker
There's been discussion that um traumatic events may be a kind of epigenetic event, like a reprogramming that's carried into the next generation, possibly beyond. For example, Holocaust survivor families and families of Americans who had been enslaved in the past have been studied in this regard. Such families often have higher rates of depression and heart disease and metabolic complications and it's intergenerational.
Call for Justice and Support
00:03:54
Speaker
ICE, in its lawlessness and cruelty, in its thuggish Nazi behavior, is creating years of emotional problems for children and parents nationwide who are now too frightened to go to school, to go to church, to go to work, to go to the grocery store.
00:04:12
Speaker
It's traumatizing for all ages, all sexes, all races, all ethnic groups, whether the person's a native-born American, a naturalized citizen, a refugee, here legally in flight from a repressive government, or who is undocumented.
00:04:25
Speaker
The nurses and the staff and the docs at the VA a hospital where Alex Preddie worked were devastated, crying in the hallways at his memorial service in the hospital.
00:04:37
Speaker
There will need to be a reckoning, a Nuremberg-style trial, a wave of very long prison sentences, a just punishment for murder. Without that justice, America's just a sad mini-series without a catchy tune, ready for cancellation.
00:04:54
Speaker
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who's having trouble sleeping.
00:05:08
Speaker
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00:05:21
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00:05:32
Speaker
See you next time.