tackabery chronicle

"Signs, Symptoms and Injuries . . .

. . . consistent with being raped and sexually assaulted." That's the evidence from the search warrant application (posted on the Smoking Gun site) that was unsealed yesterday in what is known in these parts as the Duke lacrosse rape case. There are so many issues surrounding this case - white privilege, student athlete privilege, hazing, rape, male on female violence, hate crimes, rich vs. poor, Duke vs. NC Central; oh, and then there's lacrosse, a game given to us by the natives we burned out of this country and now the property of rich white landowners. If it weren't about the saddest thing in the world, the irony might make you laugh.

I couldn't sleep so well last night - my nightly cocktail of sleep-without-dreams-drugs didn't kick in per usual, so I watched the movie Boys Don't Cry, which I had never seen. The rape scene at the end is particularly horrific. The movie is extraordinarily well done and superbly acted - I realized Hilary deserved that little naked gold man - so much so that I was thinking of the main character as a him, even as I'm staring at her obvious lack of manhood when it gets brutally revealed. In these situations, outsiders tend to lay more blame on the so-called victims of the deception, for wanting to be loved so much that they willingly walk into being deceived, but they forget how much work went into the hiding of the truth, the lying, the deceiving in the first place. I know, because I've hid so much in my life, even from myself, that I can walk around amnesiac, with no real memory of the truth of some situations in my past because I have so effectively blocked them from my memory.

The brain in these situations can seem like blessed relief. It gives us the gift of passing out when the stress is too much, of blanking out, of being unable to function when the stress becomes unbearable and unmanageable. Yet even the brain can deceive us, because the truth is never hidden. It sticks around. It gets remembered in the body. The body bears the "signs, symptoms and injuries" consistent with the traumatic event. At the end of Boys Don't Cry, when Brandon is shot dead, I found myself relieved, because I knew her body was not going to forget that trauma, even if her mind succeeded in convincing her that it had never happened, even if her mind succeeded in convincing her that she could have a happily ever after, even if her mind succeeded so well that she forgot it ever happened. Because one day, there might be another penetration in the minefield, and the mines would go off.

Setting free the signs, symptoms and injuries. Proof of ptsd. There might be false memories, but there are no false mines.
Technorati tags: ptsd, hilary swank, movie:boys don't cry, duke lacrosse

posted by mktackabery @ 19:13