Crosshair in the Crosshair

Another one from AIGA...

By David Barringer January 18, 2011

Like the arrow or the circle, the crosshair focuses our attention and prepares us for a message. Unlike the arrow or the circle, both of which focus our attention but without yet suggesting why, the crosshair tells us exactly why: what's in the crosshair is in mortal danger. Even those of us who have never looked through a gun scope know from movies and magazines exactly what the crosshair is and what it means. It means someone's got a gun. Someone's aiming that gun. And someone else is gonna get shot.

A commonly used registration mark.

Aiming a crosshair at an object, even Photoshopping a crosshair over a picture of someone's face, puts that object in jeopardy. When the crosshair slides across the landscape until it locks onto the victim, the crosshair tells us from whose perspective we are looking. We are looking from the shooter's perspective. We too are in the position of power. We too can pull the trigger.

By itself, the crosshair is just a tool, a type of reticle. Not unique to gun scopes, the crosshair is used in layout software, in cameras, telescopes and microscopes. The crosshair appears in goggles and scanners, in surgical lasers and land-surveying equipment. Yes, the shooter can disable, destroy or take out the target. But the shooter can also focus a lens, guide a laser and measure a distance.

The crosshair is a tool that guides our vision, but the arrow and the circle also guide our vision. The arrow might reveal and reward. The circle might accept and embrace. The crosshair, however, dominates the object, sneaks up and subdues the object in a precise two-dimensional location. There you are. And you don't even know I see you. The crosshair transforms the independent nature of the object into the conditional, dependent nature of the target, without that target ever knowing about its own transformation in the eye of the viewer. Its transformation occurs on the viewer's side of the crosshair, and so the viewer too is changed. The crosshair changes the viewer from spectator to participant. So now that we see it, what do we do next? Has the crosshair transformed us into snipers or scientists, photographers or trophy-hunters, creators or killers?

Pop, pop culture: The crosshair appears in the artwork for movies, books, music and first-person-shooter video games like Halo and Call of Duty.

Shoot It. Sell It. Sex It. Slam It.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines a cross hair, or crosshair, as one of "two fine strands of wire crossed in the focus of the eyepiece of an optical instrument and used as a calibration or sighting reference." The word itself is metaphorical. The filaments that cross are not strands of hair but strands of wire, although the roots (sorry) of the word reach back to the earliest versions of the tool in which actual hair was used.

Literal uses of the crosshair signify a real tool being used, like a gun, camera or laser. In the artwork for The Bourne Identity (2002), the crosshair zeroes in on Jason Bourne (Matt Damon)—he's the prey. For the sequel The Bourne Supremacy (2004), the crosshair appears in the rifle scope wielded by Jason Bourne—now he's the hunter. (So much depends upon what side of the sights you're on.) Crosshair is the name of a comic book (soon to be a movie) about an assassin. The crosshair as a name or symbol is used literally to denote actual gun scopes in the branding for Crosshair Safaris and Crosshair Consulting hunting outfitters. The crosshair logo for stem-cell researchers Cell Targeting Inc. suggests microscopes; the one for 4 Seasons Pest Control, an exterminator's spray nozzle; the logo for Crosshair Exploration and Mining Corporation, an explorer's viewpoint. First-person-shooter video games use the gun-scope crosshair, and several websites provide software that enables players to design their own crosshair icons.

Stay on target: The crosshair, as logo and brand, is as popular with target shooters as it is with target marketers.

Figurative uses of the word and symbol in branding include Crosshair Oakley sunglasses, Crosshair Studios, Crosshair Golf, Tactical Financial, Crosshairs Trader, Snitch Killer Apparel and the Asus Crosshair motherboard. None of these uses refer to actual tools relying on crosshair scopes. Instead, they seek to co-opt a mood evoked by the crosshair: lethality, accuracy, technological precision, militaristic bravado. The most abstract crosshair logo is used by Dr. Reg Edward for his targeted, regional anesthesia.

One of the more ubiquitous uses of the crosshair is in the logo for the rap group Public Enemy, targeting a silhouetted stand-in for the band. It's a complicated, artistic use of the crosshair as a symbol, because it puts the viewer in the position of the government, targeting the artists, while the viewer knows this particular use is controlled by the band itself. Public Enemy directs the crosshair at itself in an attempt to win sympathy from the viewer: the implicit message being that what the band has to say is so important that they may be killed for saying it. This use of the crosshair works well in context because Public Enemy does indeed take on urgent, anti-establishment political issues. Using the crosshair would amount to self-aggrandizing parody, however, if, say, Public Enemy were a boy band singing about a cafeteria romance thwarted by an evil lunch lady.

The crosshair falters when used by marketing companies. Even though its use by companies such as Crosshair Marketing Services and Crosshairs Communication (there are many examples) is figurative (no one's using or selling a real scope), the crosshair derives from the literalization of the metaphor expressed by the phrase "target marketing." The use of the word target takes advantage of its associations with weapons. We are meant to think of marketing in a more serious, technical way. The metaphor falls flat, though, when marketing companies incorporate into their brands literal symbols like targets and missiles and the crosshair. The metaphor becomes literal, and we groan. We groan, too, at the machismo of trying to drape the world of the cubicle in the camouflage of the battlefield, especially when, taking the literal logos at their symbolic word, we might reasonably wonder why marketers are targeting consumers in the crosshair of a rifle scope.

Fire! sale: The crosshair plays well on products from caps to cufflinks.

In the branding for marketing companies, the crosshair means "See it. Sell it." But the crosshair means "See it. Sex it" when used on the cover for the Spanish book Sex Code (2007), a guide for seducing women. There the crosshair targets a woman's silhouette, specifically her hips. The woman appears to float, as if she leapt like a deer. Meanwhile, a guy in a suit stands coolly, hands in pockets. The crosshair quickly draws us into a world of slippery idioms: we are hunting bucks, blasting bad guys and bagging babes.

I find the crosshair is more successful when used figuratively, but the crosshair is busiest elsewhere: it seems to work 24/7 as an editorial and political symbol, referencing the sights on a gun scope. It's like the James Brown of op-ed clichés: the hardest-working symbol in the business. Slapped on anyone and anything, the crosshair is the lazy person's critique, meaning: there is no critique, just a crude graphic gesture meant to shock the viewer. See it. Slam it.

And the crosshair is used both ways. Recall the dual use in the artwork for the Bourne movies—the crosshair marks the hunter and hunted, prompting the viewer to identify with either, depending on context—and the sympathetic use by Public Enemy, in which the crosshair is a graphic strategy to gain sympathy. Used politically and editorially, the crosshair can attack someone who deserves it and elicit sympathy for someone who does not. (See how many books and articles are entitled "[Blankety Blank] in the Crosshair.") The user defines the context and plays to the prejudice of an audience. A baby in the crosshair illustrates a pro-life, anti-abortion article. The flag of Israel in the crosshair illustrates an article by a writer worried that Jews will be targeted by anti-Semitic forces. The crosshair represents an ideological viewpoint and implicates the viewer in that viewpoint. The crosshair is used so often in political imagery and op-ed illustration because the crosshair is so brutal an expression of an unyielding political or ideological allegiance. We are a god, or we are guilty. We judge righteously, or we have made a grave error. The crosshair divides us.

Sniping and griping: The crosshair serves editorial and political propagandists with its divisive power.

See It. Don't Slay It.

People are free to incorporate the crosshair into their graphic imagery nearly any way they want, thanks to the First Amendment (unless they directly incite violence), and I have no reservations about designers using the crosshair in figurative ways—the ways designers use the skull, for example, or images of pistols and daggers and the hangman's noose—on album covers and baseball caps and logos and skateboards. But as a viewer, I recoil from the crosshair as a graphic editorial tool.

Sure, I've played as a sniper in Call of Duty, but it's only a game reality. I win or lose with nothing but my own mood at stake. The graphic use of the crosshair is only a graphic reality, one of the page or website or whatever frame the crosshair is bisecting or quadrisecting—that is, when we look at crosshair imagery, we're not really using the crosshair in a rifle scope to aim a real bullet into a real forehead. But I resent being put into that position. As a viewer, I can ignore the lapel button or the website banner or the magazine illustration, but the designer or illustrator should worry that the crosshair might convey an unintended message. I see that crosshair, and, reflexively, I distrust the person who put it there.

As propaganda, the crosshair is a symbol of presumption, not persuasion. The crosshair narrows the world into a single viewpoint, into the x/y axes of lethal intent, and I refuse that Cartesian carnage. The crosshair can devolve into a tool of fanatic ideology, promoting a worldview so narrow that it contains nothing else but the object of derision. Someone who layers a crosshair over something or someone is basically shoving a scope in the viewer's eye and trying to say, "There is no outside world. There is only an object on the other side of the crosshair. See it. Shoot it."

Using the crosshair this way marks the end of thinking, not the beginning. The crosshair is the sentence, not the consideration. It's death, not deliberation, and so there's nothing to talk about. In this way, the crosshair backfires.

One Fate, Two Fates, Red States, Blue States

By Phil Patton September 24, 2004

One fate, two fates, red states, blue states—have red and blue replaced red white and blue as our national colors?

We refer to the red states and the blue states so regularly now that the association seems long established. But only the 2000 presidential election established the linkage of blue with Democrats and red with Republicans. In earlier years, the television networks and magazine maps had reversed the association. In 1984 rival networks associated red with Democrats and blue with Republicans. The Reagan sweep of that year was called "Lake Reagan" in one context.

In many ways the link goes against tradition. Red has long stood for the left and one has to suspect that the first usage of it to represent Republicans was inspired by an effort to seem non prejudicial.

The end of the cold war made red baiting and pinko artifacts of a time past; the critical mark of the change may have come when the old red baiter, Richard Nixon, visited "Red" China.

On the other hand, blue was the color of the Union army uniforms, by contrast to gray, and has a historical link to the party of Lincoln. But in the Revolutionary war blue was the color of the Continental army uniform: red that of the British, of course.

Wrapping the candidate in the flag is the hoariest cliché of bumper stickers and posters. Post 9/11, with every politician in the land sporting a flag lapel pin, even clothing seemed to aspire to flagdom: red tie, white shirt, blue suit became common.

The colors of the flag are more than ever the staples of campaign graphics. (And despite Nader in 2000, who today could imagine that Jimmy Carter in 1976 adopted green, a hue that these days is as likely to evoke Islam as environmentalism?) But this year's campaign graphics seem to have lost the traditional white of the trio. John Kerry's stickers show a hopeful sea of Democratic blue, with flailing strip/stripes of red and a single tiny white star. They recall the Bank of America's recent abbreviated flag logo.

It is as if in all the flag waving of the last few years the white in the red, white and blue had vanished. The blue-red opposition has come to stand for a wider sense of political and cultural polarization—between cultures, incomes and classes. Has white vanished out of fear of suggesting surrender? Does it mean all hope of truce or compromise has vanished?

Red and blue joins red and green—stop and go—and even Stendhal's red and black as a basic binary.

Each color has its associations. Blue is cool and dispassionate, red heated. But it is neither the red or blue alone where the meaning lies, it is in the combination.

It is a pairing with overtones of alarm. Light bars atop police cars strobe warnings in red and blue. Not long ago activists protesting gang violence in Irvington, New Jersey marched with mock coffins, alternately covered with red and blue representing the Bloods and Crips gangs.

Is our division into red and blue a new national emblem in itself, like Swedish blue and yellow? Usually it takes three colors to make a national color scheme: French tricolore, German black red and yellow, Jamaican green yellow black. Red and blue meet white in the Russian flag. Red and blue were the colors of Paris joined with the white of the King of France in the tricolor.

Any melding of blue and red suggests an impossible purple—the color of royalty, rich as the vain dream of national union hoped for by nation builders who bring shabby deposed kings back to conflicted nations—an early scenario for Afghanistan. But purple has also occasionally been used to indicate "toss up" states on this year's electoral map: the overtones of bruise are appropriate.

At best, red and blue might inspire a contemplative Rothko glow, a study of a wider and more profound opposition. The pairing was seen differently by the great blues singer Robert Johnson, who in his song "Love in Vain" considered a departing rail car and the loss it meant, rolling out of the station "with two lights on behind. The blue light was my blues and the red light was my mind."

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Original Sin

New York Times Essay
Sept 18, 2005

Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr
By ARTHUR SCHLESINGER Jr.

THE recent outburst of popular religiosity in the United States is a most dramatic and unforeseen development in American life. As Europe grows more secular, America grows more devout. George W. Bush is the most aggressively religious president Americans have ever had. American conservatives applaud his "faith-based" presidency, an office heretofore regarded as secular. The religious right has become a potent force in national politics. Evangelicals now outnumber mainline Protestants and crowd megachurches. Billy Graham attracts supplicants by the thousand in Sodom and Gomorrah, a k a New York City. The Supreme Court broods over the placement of the Ten Commandments. Evangelicals take over the Air Force Academy, a government institution maintained by taxpayers' dollars; the academy's former superintendent says it will be six years before religious tolerance is restored. Mel Gibson's movie "Passion of the Christ" draws nearly $400 million at the domestic box office.

 

In the midst of this religious commotion, the name of the most influential American theologian of the 20th century rarely appears - Reinhold Niebuhr. It may be that most "people of faith" belong to the religious right, and Niebuhr was on secular issues a determined liberal. But left evangelicals as well as their conservative brethren hardly ever invoke his name. Jim Wallis's best-selling "God's Politics," for example, is a liberal tract, but the author mentions Niebuhr only twice, and only in passing.

 

Niebuhr was born in Missouri in 1892, the son of a German-born minister of the German Evangelical Synod of North America. He was trained for the ministry at the Synod's Eden Theological Seminary and at the Yale Divinity School. In the 1920's he took a church in industrial Detroit, the scene of bitter labor-capital conflict. Niebuhr's sympathies lay with the unions, and he joined Norman Thomas's Socialist Party. Meanwhile, New York's Union Theological Seminary, impressed by the power of his preaching and his writing, recruited him in 1928 for its faculty. There he remained for the rest of his life. He died in 1971.

Why, in an age of religiosity, has Niebuhr, the supreme American theologian of the 20th century, dropped out of 21st-century religious discourse? Maybe issues have taken more urgent forms since Niebuhr's death - terrorism, torture, abortion, same-sex marriage, Genesis versus Darwin, embryonic stem-cell research. But maybe Niebuhr has fallen out of fashion because 9/11 has revived the myth of our national innocence. Lamentations about "the end of innocence" became favorite clichés at the time.

Niebuhr was a critic of national innocence, which he regarded as a delusion. After all, whites coming to these shores were reared in the Calvinist doctrine of sinful humanity, and they killed red men, enslaved black men and later on imported yellow men for peon labor - not much of a background for national innocence. "Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem," Niebuhr wrote, "are insufferable in their human contacts." The self-righteous delusion of innocence encouraged a kind of Manichaeism dividing the world between good (us) and evil (our critics).

Niebuhr brilliantly applied the tragic insights of Augustine and Calvin to moral and political issues. He poured out his thoughts in a stream of powerful books, articles and sermons. His major theological work was his two-volume "Nature and Destiny of Man" (1941, 1943). The evolution of his political thought can be traced in three influential books: "Moral Man and Immoral Society" (1932); "The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense" (1944); "The Irony of American History" (1952).

In these and other works, Niebuhr emphasized the mixed and ambivalent character of human nature - creative impulses matched by destructive impulses, regard for others overruled by excessive self-regard, the will to power, the individual under constant temptation to play God to history. This is what was known in the ancient vocabulary of Christianity as the doctrine of original sin. Niebuhr summed up his political argument in a single powerful sentence: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." (Niebuhr, in the fashion of the day, used "man" not to exculpate women but as shorthand for "human being.")

 

The notion of sinful man was uncomfortable for my generation. We had been brought up to believe in human innocence and even in human perfectibility. This was less a liberal delusion than an expression of an all-American DNA. Andrew Carnegie had articulated the national faith when, after acclaiming the rise of man from lower to higher forms, he declared: "Nor is there any conceivable end to his march to perfection." In 1939, Charles E. Merriam of the University of Chicago, the dean of American political scientists, wrote in "The New Democracy and the New Despotism": "There is a constant trend in human affairs toward the perfectibility of mankind. This was plainly stated at the time of the French Revolution and has been reasserted ever since that time, and with increasing plausibility." Human ignorance and unjust institutions remained the only obstacles to a more perfect world. If proper education of individuals and proper reform of institutions did their job, such obstacles would be removed. For the heart of man was O.K. The idea of original sin was a historical, indeed a hysterical, curiosity that should have evaporated with Jonathan Edwards's Calvinism.

Still, Niebuhr's concept of original sin solved certain problems for my generation. The 20th century was, as Isaiah Berlin said, "the most terrible century in Western history." The belief in human perfectibility had not prepared us for Hitler and Stalin. The death camps and the gulags proved that men were capable of infinite depravity. The heart of man is obviously not O.K. Niebuhr's analysis of human nature and history came as a vast illumination. His argument had the double merit of accounting for Hitler and Stalin and for the necessity of standing up to them. Niebuhr himself had been a pacifist, but he was a realist and resigned from the antiwar Socialist Party in 1940.

 

Many of us understood original sin as a metaphor. Niebuhr's distinction between taking the Bible seriously and taking it literally invited symbolic interpretation and made it easy for seculars to join the club. Morton White, the philosopher, spoke satirically of Atheists for Niebuhr. (Luis Buñuel, the Spanish film director, was asked about his religious views. "I'm an atheist," he replied. "Thank God.") "About the concept of 'original sin,' " Niebuhr wrote in 1960, "I now realize that I made a mistake in emphasizing it so much, though I still believe that it might be rescued from its primitive corruptions. But it is a red rag to most moderns. I find that even my realistic friends are inclined to be offended by it, though our interpretations of the human situation are identical."

The Second World War left America the most powerful nation in the world, and the cold war created a new model of international tension. Niebuhr was never more involved in politics. He helped found Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal organization opposed to the two Joes, Stalin and McCarthy. He was tireless (until strokes slowed him up) in cautioning Americans not to succumb to the self-righteous delusions of innocence and infallibility. "From the earliest days of its history to the present moment," Niebuhr wrote in 1952, "there is a deep layer of messianic consciousness in the mind of America. We never dreamed that we would have as much political power as we possess today; nor for that matter did we anticipate that the most powerful nation on earth would suffer such an ironic refutation of its dreams of mastering history." For messianism - carrying on one man's theory of God's work - threatened to abolish the unfathomable distance between the Almighty and human sinners.

Niebuhr would have rejoiced at Mr. Dooley's definition of a fanatic. According to the Irish bartender created by Finley Peter Dunne, a fanatic "does what he thinks th' Lord wud do if He only knew th' facts iv th' case." There is no greater human presumption than to read the mind of the Almighty, and no more dangerous individual than the one who has convinced himself that he is executing the Almighty's will. "A democracy," Niebuhr said, "cannot of course engage in an explicit preventive war," and he lamented the "inability to comprehend the depth of evil to which individuals and communities may sink, particularly when they try to play the role of God to history."

Original sin, by tainting all human perceptions, is the enemy of absolutes. Mortal man's apprehension of truth is fitful, shadowy and imperfect; he sees through the glass darkly. Against absolutism Niebuhr insisted on the "relativity of all human perspectives," as well as on the sinfulness of those who claimed divine sanction for their opinions. He declared himself "in broad agreement with the relativist position in the matter of freedom, as upon every other social and political right or principle." In pointing to the dangers of what Justice Robert H. Jackson called "compulsory godliness," Niebuhr argued that "religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values." Religion, he warned, could be a source of error as well as wisdom and light. Its role should be to inculcate, not a sense of infallibility, but a sense of humility. Indeed, "the worst corruption is a corrupt religion."

One imagines a meeting between two men - say, for example, the president of the United States and the last pope - who have private lines to the Almighty but discover fundamental disagreements over the message each receives. Thus Bush is the fervent champion of the war against Iraq; John Paul II stoutly opposed the war. Bush is the fervent champion of capital punishment; John Paul II stoutly opposed capital punishment. How do these two absolutists reconcile contradictory and incompatible communications from the Almighty?

The Civil War, that savage, fraternal conflict, was the great national trauma, and Lincoln was for Reinhold Niebuhr the model statesman. Of all American presidents, Lincoln had the most acute religious insight. Though not enrolled in any denomination, he brooded over the infinite mystery of the Almighty. To claim knowledge of the divine will and purpose was for Lincoln the unpardonable sin.

He summed up his religious sense in his second inaugural, delivered in the fifth year of the Civil War. Both warring halves of the Union, he said, read the same Bible and prayed to the same God. Each invoked God's aid against the other. Let us judge not that we be not judged. Let us fight on with "firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." But let us never forget, Lincoln reminded the nation in memorable words, "The Almighty has His own purposes."

Thurlow Weed, the cynical and highly intelligent boss of New York, sent Lincoln congratulations on the inaugural address. "I believe it is not immediately popular," Lincoln replied. "Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told and as whatever of humiliation there is in it, falls directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it."

"The combination of moral resoluteness about the immediate issues," Niebuhr commented on Lincoln's second inaugural, "with a religious awareness of another dimension of meaning and judgment must be regarded as almost a perfect model of the difficult but not impossible task of remaining loyal and responsible toward the moral treasures of a free society on the one hand while yet having some religious vantage point over the struggle."

Like all God-fearing men, Americans are never safe "against the temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we most fervently desire." This is vanity. To be effective in the world, we need "a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available to us" and "a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy's demonry and our vanities." None of the insights of religious faith contradict "our purpose and duty of preserving our civilization. They are, in fact, prerequisites for saving it."

The last lines of "The Irony of American History," written in 1952, resound more than a half-century later. "If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory."

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is the author, most recently, of "War and the American Presidency."

Brothers & Sisters of War

Please don’t kill yourselves. Don’t do it. The suicide rate for Afghan/Iraq war veterans is multiple times the numbers that die in the war, now about twenty-four a day. Time heals. Give yourself time. Avoid impulsiveness. Impulsiveness gives no time. Get the guns out of the house. If you have a noose ready, get rid of it. A stash of pills, get rid of them. A stripped electric line? Get rid of the readiness. When you hear that train a comin', it ain’t your train. Stay off the tracks. No bridge has your name on it. No bridge. When you are suicidal, you are distraught. Distraught does not make for clear thinking. Impulsiveness compounds the problem, leads to mistakes. Mistakes may be worse than death.

You need time, more time, much more time, maybe a lifetime. Post-traumatic stress speeds things up. You need to slow down. One of the best ways to give yourself more time is to give your time away. Start with your family. Little children can really slow you down. Their presence to the moment, their curiosity, their imagination, their playfulness can all rub off on you if you slow down with them. Learn to identify ten trees in your neighborhood with your children and their friends. Learn the names of ten birds, ten insects. Then learn ten more of each. Pick some wild grapes and make jelly. Gather some hickory nuts and make cookies. Learn the natural world with them.

Men, learn to cook. Learn to feed yourself and your family. Your children would love to work with you in the kitchen. It will strengthen your marriage. Nurture her. Learn good nutrition. Bake bread. It’s great fun punching down the dough. Sit with your family at the table. Just for the fun of it, chew each mouthful 25 times. Slow down. Feed friends and neighbors. It’s healing. Go to the Farmers Market. Visit their farms. Grow something. Grow herbs and some flowers. Your children would love to grow something with you. Grow it and eat it. I learned how to make a simple red pasta sauce in Vietnam. Do it from scratch. It’s simple and it builds confidence. Then do variations. Don’t eat standing up, out of the pot. Slow down.

Volunteer your time. Help a neighbor, cut grass, rake leaves, shovel snow. Help the elderly. Visit a shut-in. Helping others helps you. It can help get you out of yourself, and getting out of yourself helps. Self can be toxic. Being concerned about others helps. Self needs time to heal. The healing is up to you but taking care of others heals you. The trauma in post-traumatic stress begins with violence, war, and rape. Military sexual trauma — rape — currently affects one-third to one-half of all women. The trauma begins with horrible violence. Life wants to live. It is as simple as that. Life wants to live. Violence can pervert that very simple truth. It can twist it, create doubt, create ambivalence. There can be only two responses to violence. One is to return the violence. The other is to return love. Love is a long, slow, hard, painful path. No one coming out of war or rape is prepared to be loving but P.T.S. is a sign that you can love. P.T.S. is a sign of the love in you.

Post-traumatic stress is not a “disorder." It is a natural response to what you have been through. It is a response to a terribly unnatural and unhealthy trauma. It is a sign that deep inside you understand that life wants to live. That is the starting point for your new life, the post-trauma life. It is a gift and a blessing if you let it be.

By Everett Cox, Vietnam veteran.

Veterans Suicide Prevention Hotline 1-800-273-8255

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