TRAUMA, TRIAGE and TREATMENT

Trauma
"The entire country is traumatized by the events of these past years."
Zen Monk Friend

Since 17 people were killed on February 14th at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, students are on the march Nationwide. They will change their world. They have mobilized and they won't forget.

Meanwhile, I am too angry to weep-–angry at this pitiful, anti-everything, lying, posturing, ten steps back to the dark ages, fifteen tweets for personal interests, destructive, uncaring. unintelligent administration. This massacre is yet another expression of contempt made manifest. The shooter–a multiply abandoned child, gone mad and mean and there were more than enough signs ignored. The victims–just kids, fortunate to be attending one of the best schools in the area and on the verge of adulthood, the teachers–unusually caring and qualified, the parents and community–forever scarred. It’s not the guns, nor is it mental health alone that’s at fault here--it’s both of course, but more to the point I think, it's systemic decay--a system destroying itself, overwhelmed by the rot left from decades of unresolved problems, quick fixes and ineffective cover ups returned from the depths and flowing free. That's a longer, too-complex-for-me-just-now story.

Read/Listen to Dee Mallons Story

https://deemallon.wordpress.com/2018/02/15/florida-every-ash-wednesday-from-now-til-death
~*~

Triage
"The initial evaluation of a person who is injured critically from multiple trauma is a challenging task, and every minute can make the difference between life and death."

"And the line between sad and mad
is razor sharp.
And the line between life and death
a sleek blade.
And the line at the in-between
a thin silk thread."
Ms

Having recognized that my anger is the mask of my grief, I let myself feel the tears just behind my eyes and deep in my chest. My headache disappears. I allow myself to sleep as much as I seem to need, to be distracted by entertainments, films, music for relief. I look toward others expressions of anger, grief and joy to comfort and nourish me through blogs I follow. I stay detached when reading Facebook or regular news reports. I do not engage in arguments or succumb to the temptation of contentious discourse.

I visited with friend Wendy. We talked about the terribly sad news of our world, then posed in the mirror for this shot I called "The Sad Sisters who Sing Sad Songs" (it made us laugh). We are Baba Yagas two sisters living in the big bad City!
"Although she is mostly portrayed as a terrifying old crone, Baba Yaga can also play the role of a helper and wise woman. The Earth Mother, like all forces of nature, though often wild and untamed, can also be kind. In her guise as wise hag, she sometimes gives advice and magical gifts to heroes and the pure of heart. The hero or heroine of the story often enters the crone's domain searching for wisdom, knowledge and truth. She is all-knowing, all seeing and all-revealing to those who would dare to ask. She is said to be a guardian spirit of the fountain of the Waters of Life and of Death. Baba Yaga is the Arch-Crone, the Goddess of Wisdom and Death, the Bone Mother. Wild and unnameable, she is a nature spirit bringing wisdom and death of ego, and through death, rebirth."
http://www.oldrussia.net/baba.html
~*~

Treatment

More Meditation
Conscious Nourishment
Random Acts of Kindness
Joyous Creativity
Effective Actions Only
Kindness
Kindness
Kindness 
~*~

Overview Facts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States

DAD

I hardly knew him.

What I knew of him is locked in my childhood.

I was 10 when he died suddenly the day before his fifty first birthday. Here he is at about the same age.

I never saw him in his uniform except in photographs.

He looked like the tiny photograph most of the time.

His loss was a huge trauma for me, my brother and our Mother, but it's just a story now; a dramatic and heart wrenching story I've told in various forms over many decades and one I'm well acquainted with the minute details of. Every year around this time I think of him, our little story and all the stories of fatherless children worldwide.
~*~

Copy pasted from the Writers Almanac some years back because the last line is priceless.....
"Today is Father's Day, a holiday in this country that goes back to a Sunday morning in May of 1909, when a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd was sitting in church in Spokane, Washington, listening to a Mother's Day sermon. She thought of her father, who had raised her and her siblings after her mother died in childbirth, and she thought that fathers should get recognition too. So she asked the minister of the church if he would deliver a sermon honoring fathers on her father's birthday, which was coming up in June, and the minister did. And the tradition of Father's Day caught on, though rather slowly. Mother's Day became an official holiday in 1914; Father's Day, not until 1972. Mother's Day is still the busiest day of the year for florists, restaurants, and long-distance phone companies. Father's Day is the day on which the most collect phone calls are made."


LINKS TO THE PAST
http://mscomfortzone.blogspot.com/2012/06/shooting-stars-and-fireflies.html 

http://mscomfortzone.blogspot.com/2015/05/personal-memorial.html