Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally Posted by Atticus Grinch

IMHO most people are repulsed at the thought of killing, and even NRA jackasses are a lot of big talk. When we specifically train a person to overcome that repulsion, we owe him or her a duty of compassion because I doubt you ever see the world in quite the same way again. Weirdly, even though we live in a world of talk-it-out therapy, the healthiest war vets I know say things like “I saw a lot of terrible things” but refuse to go into details. They swallow it all, and other than waking up in pools of sweat a couple of times a month, they seem to lead normal lives. I wonder if we’ll one day realize that you can’t talk-therapy your way out of PTSD, and that denial and repression are actually legitimate tools of healing.

But we want this fantasy that Mr. Rogers was once a death-dealing badass, and it’s probably true that if you give your youth to the military, we should have an option for staying in your whole life on a “we broke it we bought it” theory.

Both of my grandfathers, D-Day plus 6 (halftrack driver with 400 percent casualty rate in his unit, cut off at Bastogne) and D-Day plus 4 (surgeon who got to see every horrible thing than can happen to a human body in war) died of substance abuse related causes of death.

OTOH, they really enjoyed talking about it with each other.