by Abby Zimet, staff writer, Common Dreams
Oh so heartbreaking to hear of the suicide – or as some call it, the death from
moral injuries– of Jacob George, 32-year-old Arkansas farmer, musician, activist and veteran of three tours of Afghanistan who came home shattered by post-traumatic horror that he insisted was not a disorder, but a natural human response to the inhumanity of war. George
fought hard to heal his pain and grief: Riding his bike 8,000 miles over 3 years to sing his songs and tell his stories,
testifying wherever he could about the hard
truths he’d come to, seeking some semblance of peace with
brothers and sisters who shared his sense of betrayal by his country, returning to Afghanistan to work with young Afghan anti-war activists, and on what he sometimes called his best day, throwing his
medals back to the generals who sent him to the wars that
broke him. It’s only right, note many of the sorrowful remembrances of him, that we honor him by fighting as hard in his name. Rest in peace.
Eléctrica in the Desert 
Rest in Peace. And he’s so right that trauma (and PTSD) is a NORMAL reaction to an ABNORMAL situation (as are many forms of dis-ease). Although PTSD Is explained as such, the very individual world we live in sometimes forgets that context is everything and asks people who struggle to take the weight of the world onto their own shoulders.
It’s heartbreaking. It is also summed up very well by Phillip Zimbardo, in the Lucifer Effect, who explains that when a system is rotten it very manipulatively places the blame for its own faults onto individual shoulders. (You are so aware of this). Zimbardo explains that those who speak out against the system are the only hope…and very important.
And yet, for this dear man the consequences were terrible. It is so very, very tragic.
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Thank-you Nicci. Your words mean a great deal because you back them up with the way you live your life.
As someone with diagnosed PTSD, I anger people when I dare to include myself with this beautiful young man who did all within his power to reconnect to humanity. But I know he would understand, and that he would have stood by my side: when no one else did. I call him my brother, and dare anyone to deny it.
Thank-you again, Nicci
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I am sure he would understand too.
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It’s absolutely dreadful what we did to patriotic young men who idealistically enlisted to defend the US by serving in Afghanistan. We put them through the brutality of basic training and the terror of serving on the front line – only for them to discover that they were being lied to. That we expected them to brutalize innocent people for the benefit of Big Oil.
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Well said, Stuart!
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