Hunkering down
June 30, 2009
I am agitated today. Another national advocate who has been doing MST work for years is sending me all the evidence she has been collecting for years, proof of decades of military rape cover up.
This is the woman who was raped and when she reported the rape to military investigators the investigators came to her home and raped her again in retaliation for reporting. Her case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where she lost because of the Feres Doctrine. This is the woman who has been working for years, alone, unaffiliated and with no financial support, just like so many of us.
I need to go through all these documents and disseminate them to the nation. I need to do so much. I feel as if so many people are looking to me, and I need to step into the role I have been unwittingly preparing for for so long.
It was actually a relief, a month ago, when I realized that my role — after so many years of being a political advocate — was now one of healer, that the shenanigans in Congress were nothing compared to helping our veterans get rid of decades of pain. I used to spend all my time haranguing people about the Feres Doctrine and the denial of our First Amendment Rights, and it was so peaceful to realize that what was more important than any laws or nations was letting go of our hurt. So I began to dig down into that, accepting my new place.
But today I think there is a reason it is important to enforce the laws of this country, and that is for no other reason than our laws help prevent causing others pain.
The tiz’s best friend Teacher (a wonderful girl with a laugh that makes you whip your head around with surprise) and I sat in Stumptown Coffee today on Pine after her first day as an instructor at Seattle Central Community College. Stumptown is sterile and a little acerbic, just like their coffee, and we perched ourselves in the window to be as close to the sun as possible while still attached to electrical sockets.
Teacher worked on slides for her next class, and I chugged away at Pack Parachute volunteer applications and some accounting/donation work. Then, more than usual, I talked to other people with MST — wives of men with MST, ladies who were raped 30 years ago and have never recovered; I read emails detailing decades of abuses on thousands or even millions of victims of MST, and, above all, hope and encouragement from all of us who keep on fighting and who keep on trying; I wept in the middle of the cafe when I read an article Pat wrote about Irish’s death and which was published at Veterans Today.
These abuses must end. Not for the sake of legal justice or for any vengeance or even the “redress of grievance” which I always discuss, but so no one else suffers the pain that we have suffered and are still trying to heal from.
Oh, I am stuck in my head this evening, obviously. I am honestly hunkered down in my room, not able to leave. I used to be this way all the time, and then a little less than two years ago I began crying out old pain and it happened less and less. I haven’t hunkered down in a couple of weeks, but this evening, without any impetus to cry out this fear of my own strength and power, I am stuck in my room and in my head.
