CIA: Republicans Were Completely Wrong About Orlando Mass Shooter

Trauma: A Confrontation with Human Evil

Art by Rob Goldstein
Black and Blue


Why am always so triggered by my environment and the politics
of my country?

Why do I care so deeply?

I never discuss my learning disabilities nor do I discuss where
I went to school or how.

I am dyslexic with numbers.

I don’t know my right hand from my left.

Some of it is the result of neurological damage.

I was beaten by my classmates as their parents
cheered them on when I tried to go to school.

My first memory of dissociating was when I was under a pile of boys.

I crawled into my mind and went numb.

There is nothing more painful or confusing to a child
than being hated for being born.

Art by Rob Goldstein
A child under arrest in the Warsaw Ghetto

The beatings began when I was six.

My neighbors and my teachers were anti-Semitic.

I was that little Jew boy.

That kike.

A protector emerged when I was in seventh grade.

My social studies teacher called me a little kike and the protector came out.

He stood and gathered my books.

He marched to the front of the class and threw my books
at the teacher.

With each book he threw he called her a name




I left school that day and didn’t go back.

Later I went to an experimental community college.

It was a federally funded Great Society program.

I got a GED.

I often wonder why I’m still alive.

Why am I still here?

I’m the Rob that thinks.

I’ve seen trauma described as an overwhelming confrontation
with human evil.

Is evil a construction of the mind?

My Mother was abusive but most of the damage was done
by the anti-Semitic hate crimes that I suffered when I went
to school.

The terror was systematic and daily.

Terror is designed to impose limits
on the mind.

It erodes your sense of safety and when the terror
is accepted as normal by the community it also erodes
your sense of reality.

People who incite terror commit murder without being
at the scene of the crime.

The school I went to in Charleston was named after a racist
who incited lynch mobs.

A good terrorist makes terror a part of everyday life.

You do this by convincing everyone else that the target isn’t human.

You make him a thing.

That kike.

That welfare queen.

That fag.

The beatings eventually worked.

I stopped going to school.

There is nothing more painful or confusing to a person than being hated
for being born.

Last June nine African-Americans are gunned down in their Church and this June 53 people are gunned down in a gay dance club.

I am sick with disgust over the killings in Orlando.

These don’t look like random hits to me.

These shooters think that what they are doing is brave and normal.

These shooters think that they are dying or going to prison for a cause.

These shooters are acting on orders.

These killings have a context and we won’t make them stop until we objectively see that context and stop enabling evil.

Or am I deceived my illness?




The Anachronism

The Anachronism