Reply #34: "the receiving line for extraterrestrials"

[iverglas]

Yes, also an amusing turn of phrase. ;) Conjures up just the right image.


You said yourself, when I referred to my own experience as a victim of violent attack: "Unfortunately, your experiences are all too common -- particularly in those tranquil rural areas where firearms 'crime' just isn't a problem like in the big bad cities, but everybody needs guns within reach in case a big bad burglar busts in."

Uh huh ... but your experience wasn't with a big bad burglar busting in, the scenario in which everybody, I said sarcastically, needs guns within reach; it was with an abusive member of the household who himself had firearms, and the firearms in the scenario were not useful for averting harm.

I'm sorry, but I think the nature of your personal response to your experiences is very easily understood for what it is, and it is not constructive, and it is not a successful strategy for dealing with the afermath of trauma. To take it beyond a personal response and turn it into a political crusade, well, it's just the same thing writ large.

The hints aren't from me; I've been perfectly plain about it. When I was an undergraduate ... no, actually, I was a law student, probably about the same age as you ... I was abducted, choked into semi-consciousness, sexually assaulted and, I'm quite sure based on my assessment of the situation at the time and afterward, was going to be killed. I couldn't see any other reason for finally being released from the locked vehicle under close watch, at the bottom of an old quarry in a remote rural area, and invited to go for a walk in the woods. I ran in the other direction instead. The individual had done the same to two younger women two days before, succeeding because each sister feared for the other's life if she escaped herself; and attempted it with three even younger women the day before -- one of the group of three threatened him with her hairbrush and they were released. We were all hitchhiking, a common mode of transportation for anyone under 30 in southern Ontario at that time. I was with a man who matched me in height, weight and hairstyle, and who was unfortunately going only half as far across the province as I was that day, as we were attending different schools and returning home after a weekend visiting my parents. It was the bad guy's good luck.

My conditioned response (arising not just from that incident; other traumas have created complex ptsd, in my case) to physical stimuli like loud noises is still problematic. And I do very much have a conditioned response to perceived threats that is indeed in the nature of oh no you don't, you're not going to get away with doing that to me -- be it road assholes who endanger me or store managers who think they can pull a fast one. But I don't act on those responses, at least not all the time. ;)

I don't organize my life around not being a victim, around the world being a scary and dangerous place with people lurking around every corner trying to take advantage of me or hurt me. It isn't. It's a world in which sometimes bad things happen, but I know that if I organized my life around that possibility, I'd have no life. I choose to organize it around accomplishing things that are worthwhile, and not just for myself, not just to make sure that nobody gets what's mine, be it my stuff or my definition of myself. I'm a lot more than a crime victim, and the world is a lot more than the crime I was a victim of. To make one's trauma and one's fears as a result of that trauma the central focus of one's life is a waste; to try to make them the basis for public policy is inappropriate and selfish, even if innocently so.