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I could probably write a book about my experiences related to my own PTSD and the PTSD of the war veterans and survivors who have crossed my path since 1991. There is truly no accident about who meets and when, nor is the power of a human mind that wants to heal itself something to be underestimated.
But there comes a time in every person’s life when the physical and neurological requirements of recovery from PTSD become too great to be attempted by an aging sufferer and certainly should not be attempted outside of close, experienced therapeutic supervision. I have learned from bitter experience that underestimating the damage caused by psychological trauma and the gravity of the processes required to treat or heal the disease can have effects that are, of themselves, traumatizing.
The fact that I, a PTSD sufferer, can mention even in a general way that the treatment for a disease that I did not cause can itself cause further harm without a great deal of rancor or resentment is truly amazing to me. Novel. Unheard of in my former life as someone who didn’t even know what PTSD, depression or mental illness might feel like, or how I might explain it to the normal majority of people who were curious enough to understand or care. I wanted you to feel sorry for me and my extraordinary lot in life because that was the one feeling I could clearly associate with my traumatizing experiences – self pity. I wasn’t much but I was all I could think about.
But before I go down the path of regurgitation, my friends, I need to make very clear that I have a much clearer, stronger sense of who I am and what makes me tick than ever before as a direct result of the treatment I received, flawed though it may have been. I have greater empathy for humans whose lot in life seems to be one of tragedy, unrelenting fear or self-imposed isolation from society. So much so that I can understand and respect those who choose not to recover their lives and obtain the wholeness that should be everyone’s birthrite. Therapy designed to resolve trauma can be extremely disorienting and trigger a host of abnormal reactions and unexpected or unpredictable “meltdowns” that seem out of context to normal people who observe this phenomenon in those who are trying to resolve their trauma.
All this to say that I am troubled by the public evidence of unresolved PTSD I see displayed by John Sidney McCain. The man is clearly not well on a number of different levels and the stress brought on by the thankless tasks awaiting our next President make a public meltdown while in office highly likely should John McCain find himself in the job of President of these United States. And I am certain my opinion, or at least my conclusion, is shared by actual licensed professionals who actively work in the field of traumatology.
An order of magnitude more troubling is the malignant mentality of those who would prey on the extraordinary need of a PTSD sufferer to find meaning and purpose in their lives, post trauma. It goes beyond mere catnip to a feline and has all the appearance of a psychological trap from which McCain can not extricate himself. Imagine, if you would, a person in the throes of the loss of a child being told that they could have their child back as if nothing that caused the death of their child had ever occurred. Reanimation of a dead child, while pure unrealistic fantasy to a disinterested third party observer, can easily become a driving, obsessive irrational want of a grieving parent. Unaddressed, this same want becomes a psychological need, not unlike an addiction. Tempting John McCain with the purpose and meaning that most everyone associates with becoming President of the United States only drives him farther from the healing that his injured brain needs, sending him down a path of further trauma and self-injury. What normal people might see as a meaningful and purposeful life of great worth is not where John McCain should go to obtain stability or greater healing from his trauma. Sick people should get well before they attempt a climb of Mount Everest. Indeed, overcoming PTSD is, of itself, a climb at least as great as such an ascent.
I have difficulty trusting an apparently healthy person who might actually want to be President of the United States at this time in our history; as for individuals who might need to become President under the present circumstances, I can only suggest that that someone must have fallen, “out of a the nutjob tree and hit every branch on the way down.”
Barak Obama wants to be President of the United States. He believes he has a grasp of what it might be like to live for this country, 24/7, for four to eight years and obviously believes that this is a good choice for him to make at the age of 47. I think he’s going to regret his choice from time to time should he become our next President, but overall I believe he is the most capable leader we’ve had available since the days of Abraham Lincoln. And I am not being hyperbolic when I make that statement; a leader of Lincoln’s caliber would not be able to navigate through our present-day instant-media awareness culture after one of our party primaries, let alone a full-blown campaign. Yet Obama has done very well in spite of some huge obstacles that had been placed in his path.
By way of contrast, John Sidney McCain needs to be President of the United States. It is the highest office in the land, it is among the most powerful positions in the world that a man can occupy, and if he does not obtain this position, his entire life experience will have amounted to immense overkill. The son of a high-ranking Admiral and a Naval Academy graduate could easily obtain a seat in Congress with a little effort; he certainly would not need to end up as a Prisoner of War for several years, nor would he have to have survived the worst naval disaster since World War II on top of that. But, taken all together, if John McCain does not become President, his entire life would seem to have been ill-spent. And that is because even as a Senator, John McCain is still profoundly ill, his PTSD driving him to self-injure and then project blame and his own guilt onto those around him.
I am not suggesting that I think John McCain’s life has been ill-spent, I’m suggesting based on his recent behavior that John McCain will come to believe his life has been ill-spent if he does not become President. I am not trying to explain normal disappointment here; I mean to say that while anyone who runs for the highest office in the land might become disappointed, John McCain would become homicidal, suicidal or could invent something even more vindictive and obscene in order to project his own guilt and remorse onto the world around him. McCain is more than willing to engage in all manner of character disesteeming behaviors in order to improve what he is told his chances for becoming President actually are. Whether it’s lying about his own record, lying about his running mate’s record or lying about his opponent’s record, McCain has shown no sign of remorse for engaging in serial dishonesty. In short, McCain needs to become President and is willing to sell his very soul in order to obtain this esteem for himself and his loved ones.
And that, my friends, is absolutely crazy on its face. The job of President is apt to make a sane person’s skin crawl; for someone as unbalanced as McCain it is likely to be fatal. For all of us. Being President will not heal John McCain, it will make his PTSD worse, causing him to project further guilt, blame and shame onto others. Ultimately, he will project the cruelty of his own life circumstances onto the world around him. As President, he will have the power and authority to do precisely that. So far from being able to accept the responsibilities and duties of a President, John McCain will simply blame the rest of us for his every failed policy or mistake. When a problem is kept from its ultimate solution, it is impossible for that problem to be solved. No root cause analysis is possible because an individual who suffers with PTSD can personalize any cause and effect relationship, making its concealment a matter of great personal moment.
Finally, there is ample evidence to suggest that much of what McCain claims to be true about his military career and his experiences is at least distorted and is probably false. Witnesses on the USS Forrestal who survived the worst naval disaster since WWII suggest that John McCain committed a frat-boy type prank with his A-4 Skyhawk, causing an extraordinarily large tongue of flame to shoot out from the back of his jet, engulfing the jet behind him in heat and flame. It was from this jet that the Zuni rocket came that ultimately punctured the fuel tank of McCain’s A-4 and began the catastrophic chain of events that lead to the deaths of some 134 sailors and twice as many injured on board the USS Forrestal. One would expect that a pilot in such a circumstance would have been unable to escape uninjured, and yet John McCain did precisely that, according to his commanding officer at the time. John McCain was also the first sailor to be reassigned to the USS Oriskany, a move that seems odd given McCain’s involvement in the conflagration and the fact that his father outranked even the commander in charge of running the naval aspects of the war in Viet Nam at the time. Not to mention the fact that the senior McCain outranked every officer in charge of conducting the investigation into what caused the disaster onboard the USS Forrestal.
If John Sidney McCain’s role in the conflagration on the USS Forrestal was as benign as he suggests, then why did he not achieve at least a flag ranking as an officer, as did his father and grandfather before him? One would think that if John McCain’s imprisonment as a POW in Viet Nam was as heroic as he likes to portray it, such a promotion would be forthcoming from a father who would be in a position of great influence in such matters. And yet nothing of the kind ever took place.
In fact, this naval aviator of privilege was, by more than one account, given special treatment by his captors owing to his father’s rank within the US Navy. The last thing an enemy as wise and wily as Ho Chi Minh would do would be to subject such a prisoner to the kind of interrogation techniques that would anger a father whose position on the war in Viet Nam was clearly “hands off” – the senior McCain even outranked the theater commander, a fact that did not go unnoticed within the US Navy. John McCain’s later treatment of his captors, post imprisonment, seems either to be an extreme case of “Stockholm syndrome,” or the reuniting of old friends whom one would expect to be bitter enemies.
McCain’s treatment of POW-MIA families also raised more than a few eyebrows as he became volatile towards several hundred family members whose only crime was that they were never told of the actual fate of their loved ones who went to war in Viet Nam, but never came home. His lack of empathy towards these families was stunning and inexplicable, causing many of them to suggest that Senator McCain was actually attempting to protect his former captors.
All of this to suggest quite strongly that John Sidney McCain is not only not neurologically capable of carrying out the duties of a President of the United States, but also to strongly suggest that he is not at all whom he has been portrayed to be in our corporately controlled media. War heroes of the kind we were taught existed at the close of WWII, or even in Korea, were not disrespectful of their wives, calling them “cunts” in public places, or even privately. War heroes did not disappoint their fathers by leaving extraordinary, hard to sanitize messes behind for them to potentially sacrifice their careers cleaning up. War heroes did not shirk responsibility for wrongdoing, nor did they accept plaudits for undeserved actions. War heroes certainly did not make a point of trotting out their injuries and claiming that they were caused by fierce interrogations when they could just as easily been caused by the plane crash that lead to their capture in the first place. Flaws in character are not always caused by PTSD. In fact, it is generally the person of good character who identifies this “invading organism” of mental illness well enough to seek outside assistance in combating it. People of good character realize when their continued attempts at “self management” are causing more harm than good to the people around them and will ask for help. John Sidney McCain has attempted no such treatment as anyone who has participated in PTSD recovery can plainly see, and yet he has inflicted a lot of damage on the people around him.
A John McCain presidency would simply widen the radius of the blast area where this broken human being could continue his pattern of breaking other people around him so that they might feel more like him.
Make no mistake about it, John McCain is an abusive, dissembling, volatile human being who not only should never be elected President of the United States, he should not even be tasked with representing large numbers of people or business interests. He is not executive material at this time.
However, if John McCain were able to spend a year or two dredging up the injuries of his childhood and war experiences and could physically survive such a process, he might prove himself to be as extraordinary a person as he is fond of telling the media that he is.
