Prisoners of War

(4 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Before I even spoke to G. I knew he had been a prisoner of war.  I knew nothing else but that.  

It had been long ago that he had spent much of his youth in a German concentration camp but that had left an indelible mark G. would carry to his grave.  Though I worked alongside G. for many years, I never knew more except that he was German.

It couldn’t have been more different than with a boss I worked for for a short time who had been a prisoner as a child of the Japanese along with his missionary parents during WWII. You had to know him well to hear any brief mention of the experience.  

Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight were in worse condition than Amanda Berry when they emerged from at least nine years in captivity at the home of Ariel Castro…

The sources said DeJesus and Knight were gaunt and had closely cropped hair when they were freed.

http://www.ndtv.com/article/wo…

As just a wild guess, Berry’s youth may have saved her from the worst.  Her daughter seems to have been treated well by the psychopath.

Putting all captives in the same box is much the same as claiming to know anything about people on the basis of their imaginary race.  I have wondered if maybe DeJesus might have suffered more with longer lasting consequences than even Knight since Knight’s life was apparently already a living hell before her captivity.

A woman hired as one of a group of counselors for some abused women and girls in a notorious case would sit and listen with wide-eyed horror and interject only occasionally with such helpful phrases as “ohmigod.”

At least that counselor listened.

I think few do.  The iconic original counselor, Sigmund Freud, considered his clients greatly inferior, bubble-headed beings since they were women.

A paleontologist told his class that all paleontologists were lumpers or splitters.  Every paleontologist would love for the lumpers to be right because it’s so difficult to deal with constantly growing numbers and complexity of fossil species.  The trouble was, said the paleontologist, the splitters were far more intelligent.

It seems to me to be a work requirement for counselors to be rigid, deaf lumpers.

Best,  Terry