What Is Trauma? 6

I remained close to the Christians in my new church, becoming particularly closely involved with a household community composed of other refugees from the Children of God, the cult that had swallowed up the Jesus People.  It wasn't much different, still dedicated to Christian discipleship, evangelism, and living out the principals of the Gospels.  They were also a lot longer on common sense and there was more openness to other ideas and integrating with the rest of society, despite the stodgy fundamentalism of the leaders.  My own participation was peripheral and as a sixteen year old, not much was expected of me.

This community eventually died a natural death and I had my own issues of family and other stuff to take up more of my attention besides spreadin' the gospel around.  I moved to Vancouver Island at seventeen to live with my mother and her horrible boyfriend, since I was not wanted by my also horrible father (Mom sure knew how to pick her men!)  Following high school I had little option but to move on my own, first to stay in a very dysfunctional Christian household and within a couple of months to live in my own apartment.  Unable to relate to the vacuum that the loss of Christian community had created in my life I kind of drifted along in my own solitary life, soon getting mixed up with some very scary situations.  I was using drugs, nothing addictive, and I also was selling a bit.  Yes, Gentle Reader, I was once as young drug dealer.

At twenty I moved back to Vancouver, following six months in Toronto.  I had returned to my Christian faith and in Vancouver tried to reintegrate into the church.  It didn't work.  They became very conservative and had shifted very sharply towards the right and I was not made to feel welcome, though I did survive  six months in one of their community houses.  It was a household of six single males, five very narrow minds and I was only too glad to leave (they were unanimous in kicking me out.  My crime?  They simply didn't like me.  I cooked, cleaned, bought groceries and tried to be a friend to homophobic idiots who didn't like me, especially the leader who admitted to being a closeted homosexual and seemed to have a crush on me, unreciprocated.  I was honest, responsible and considerate of others and my personal morals, despite my recent dissolute adventures over the last year, were impeccable.  I pulled my weight.  But I was too "different."

I spent the next four months or so in a tiny house of three to four other outcasts from the church.  We shared certain features in common: we were all above average bright, we were all gifted and we each had a strong streak towards independence.  As fond as I was of these people, and grateful for the wider sense of community they helped open up for me, I had to move on and at the age of twenty-one, I again had my own apartment. 

This loss of community created a gaping hole in my life.  Despite my strong and stubbornly independent nature, I am the first to admit that I function at my best when I feel well-integrated into a community of close people whom I feel I can trust.  I would be inclined to think of this as a universal need.  I also believe that this frustration of community helped traumatize me, and I have been struggling for the past forty years to somehow reconcile this wound.  To discover a healthy sense of community that will neither cast me off nor swallow me alive.  Again, a universal need.

I think of the traditional societies of medieval Spain and of the Aztecs, most rather alike in their cohesiveness and the strict, unforgiving code and hierarchies they were governed by.  Now, in our diverse, pluralistic, multicultural ambience of individual freedom and very little connection we all live as walking wounded, attached to our precious electronic devices instead of running the risk of connecting with the strangers around us.  The way of life in earlier times was in many ways horrible and traumatizing, especially compared to our lovely, progressive louche way of life that we all take for granted.  We are also much lonelier than our ancestors, and I really wonder, who has been really more traumatized?

What Is Trauma? 5

Anyone who has ever lived in a religious cult, or for that matter in any form of intentional religious community, will have some idea of what it would be like living under a theocracy.  I have been involved in at least five such living arrangements: as a teenage Jesus Freak, during my early twenties and again in my early to mid-thirties.  My advice to anyone complementing this kind of move?  Kids, don't try this at home.

Here, I would like to explore through the lens of my own youthful experience some of the dynamics that occur in religious or faith-dominant living arrangements.  I believe that there are parallels to what must have been the common Spanish experience in the Medieval era as well as for the Aztecs.  Fortunately no one in the religious communities I was part of was ever put to death or threatened with death for heresy or insubordination, though it could be insinuated that at times we came pretty darn close.  Neither was there human sacrifice except in figurative terms as many young people laid down their lives together for their God and for their Christian community.

I was fourteen when I became a Christian.  I was wandering downtown shopping post-Christmas on my own.  I was usually on my own.  I never had any close friends in school or in my neighbourhood, and certainly no gang of kids to hang out with.  If I wanted to go anywhere or get anything done I was always on my own.  Some of you reading this might feel a little bit horrified that a fourteen year old boy would be permitted to wander around unescorted and vulnerable in any downtown area, miles from the safety of the suburban single family home.  But that was a different era.  Kids were free-range, the concept of helicopter-parenting was unknown.  We tended to mature early in those days, those of us who survived childhood.  Natural selection, anyone?

But I was very young, alone and vulnerable.  I was accosted by a friendly Jesus freak with shoulder length hair and a beard.  I ended up having dinner with him and his housemates, and that same evening I accepted Christ as my saviour.  To my family's horror.  The Jesus Freaks, or Jesus People Army, was a phenomenon unique to the late sixties and early seventies: hippies and other social outcasts were in droves finding God all over North America and in Europe and many were living communally in old houses and out trying to turn the world upside down for Jesus.

Despite my family's disapprobation I began hanging out with the Jesus People in their coffee house and often visiting in their homes.  It was an incredible, intoxicating era in my teenage life.  The emotions were high, the joy intense and the dedication to Christian discipleship austere.  Even at fifteen as I was crossing the threshold into young manhood I was becoming gradually aware of a very controlling dynamic among my Christian brothers and sisters.  I was one of the youngest people there, more an associate member since, as a teenager, I still had to live with my mother and attend school.  This also gave me a sense of objectivity and detachment.  I felt very troubled about the direction they were going in.  At first I embraced it, but then demands were being placed on me to leave my home, move in with them and give one hundred percent to Jesus.  I was also fortunate to have mature adult Christian friends who were also troubled about the developments.  They supported me and helped me with their adult common sense to make the responsible decision and leave this cult, just before they were going to practically force me to live with them.

Seeing people I loved and admired being swept into this wave of religious zealotry and hate, I only knew that I had to leave.  This was traumatic.  It had been the first really beautiful experience of community in my young life and then it was all taken away by the hateful cult that swallowed everyone alive.  I was also fortunate in that I had succeeded in staying detached enough from everyone to escape the psychological harm that had engulfed many of my friends who also escaped, but too late.

My experience of the Jesus People was key in persuading me of the importance of freedom of thought, and I began to apply myself to the art of thinking independently, which served me well for similar future experiences that would be awaiting me over the coming years.  I also had the blessing of a personal relationship with God (yes, there is such a thing!) and I knew that he was guiding me through this storm and would soon be taking me out of it.  This also helped protect me from succumbing to the dangerous effects of the kind of groupthink that was enveloping those around me.

Fortunately I was not living under an actual theocracy.  I was still surrounded by a society that encouraged freedom of thought and speech and expression, for which reason religious cults, no matter how dangerous, are allowed at times to flourish.  Still, psychologically and emotionally I was impacted, severely in some ways, if for no other reason than having suddenly and tragically lost the first real community I had ever known, where also my infant spirituality was born and already nurtured into a towering flame.  I was fortunate in that immediately upon leaving the Jesus People I became integrated into a legitimate church, central to the charismatic movement that was sweeping the city, where many of my friends escaping from the Jesus People were able to straggle, bedraggled refugees of the spirit., and there, till I was seventeen, I flourished.

What Is Trauma? 4

Each society, every culture, all nations each strike their own particular toxic balance.  The more dysfunctional the state, the more extreme the measures taken to maintain that balance.  I am thinking of Stalinist Cuba (which was the model of communism adopted by Castro.  Che, I suspect, was more Maoist) and Fidel Castro's six hour revolutionary tirades that he would deliver to the Cuban people.  I am sure that prolonged exposure to any kind of harangue could be exhausting, mind-numbing, and eventually brainwashing.  Ever hear of Stockholm Syndrome?

Here it is straight from Uncle Wiki:

Stockholm syndrome (sometimes erroneously referred to as Helsinki syndrome)^[1][2] is a condition that causes hostages to develop a psychological alliance with their captors as a survival strategy during captivity.^[3] These feelings, resulting from a bond formed between captor and captives during intimate time spent together, are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims. Generally speaking, Stockholm syndrome consists of "strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other.

and...

Formally named in 1973 when four hostages were taken during a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, Stockholm syndrome is also commonly known as "capture bonding".^[5] The syndrome's title was developed when the victims of the Stockholm bank robbery defended their captors after being released and would not agree to testify in court against them.^[6] Stockholm syndrome's significance arises because it is based on a paradox, as captives' sentiments for their captors are the opposite of the fear and disdain an onlooker may expect to see as a result of trauma.

Whether you are training a dog or saddle-breaking a horse, you have always two objectives in mind: breaking the animal's will,

and...

persuading them to love you.

How many of you have read the ultimate dystopian novel, by George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four?
This is the story of the ultimate totalitarian state, where the state, also known as Big Brother, has complete control over every detail of the lives of the members of the "Party" which constantly feeds the people lies and propaganda loaded with fear in order to keep them in line.   The protagonist, Winston Smith, becomes lovers with a woman in the Party (called a sex crime) and she ends up betraying him to the authorities.  After he has been held and tortured he is told that he will be in time executed, after being set free for a while.  This is when Orwell draws his most chilling prophecy of the future of humankind, as being that of a boot forever stamping on a human face.  At the very end, he is broken, and concludes that he has come to love Big Brother.  Fait accompli.

Even the ugliest, most oppressive regimes are usually able to seduce their own populace into loving them and commanding their undying loyalty, and sometimes especially the worst of the worst.  North Korea would be a splendid example of this.  The fear of consequences is often a very effective corrective for winning the hearts and loyalty of the subjects.  We are a social animal, we humans, by far one of the most social animals on the planet, along with ants, bees and lemmings.  There is something so powerful about our need to belong, to be fully bonded members of the tribe, that we really cannot exist without this sense of full participation.  One has only to consider the effectiveness of the passive form of schoolyard bullying, known also as shunning.  Girls are especially good at this, but schoolboys can be every bit as evil this way.  This is why exile, in ancient times, was often so popular as an alternative to the death penalty.  Banning a miscreant from the very community that they always called home was the equivalent of declaring "you are dead to me."  And early death has often followed exile, hence the brutal consequences that are often experienced by our own modern refugees.  Another example might have been the slave who loved unconditionally their brutal and antagonistic master.

I believe this all ties in with trauma.  Living under the trauma of fear and threat we are coerced into conforming.  And we are all treated with stark reminders of what could happen to us for not conforming to the social order: whether in having to witness the burning of witches and heretics, or bloody human sacrifice, or in our own progressive and enlightened era, being subjected daily to the spectacle of the visibly and profoundly homeless as a chronic lesson of what happens to those who will not worship the golden cow called money and wealth, and will not work at the low-paying and meaningless jobs that in the end will still do little or nothing to keep a roof over your head.  In order to live with this state of cognitive dissonance we often fall in love with our overlords.  Mission accomplished, our will has been broken, their wish is our command, or, stick a fork in me.  I'm done.

So we usually end up conforming and following the dictates of our overlords and for one simple reason.  The alternative is just too scary and too deadly.  The isolation will end up killing us long before the executioner's bullet, and for this reason in all our collectives we live in a toxic state of balance that always regains and reasserts its form and consistency no matter what is done to really try to change anything.  Either way, we are traumatized.  Either way, we are screwed.

What is Trauma? 3

Querido Lector, hoy voy a intentar algo un poquito diferente al normal y escribir en espanol, luego traducirlo para el disfrute de mis lectores que no leen el idioma de Cervantes.  Que tenga suerte!

Gentle Reader, today I am going to try something a little bit different and write in Spanish, then translate for the enjoyment of my readers who don't read the language of Cervantes.  Wish me luck!

Pienso en este tema de la victimizacion que resulta de las causas de trauma.  Cuando en mi ultimo ensayo escribi algo acerca del ambiente de miedo que ocurre cuando hay siempre la amenaza que se inflige el dano corporal o la muerte por las partidas que controlan nuestras vidas o quienes gobiernan nuestro pais pense en nuestro permiso colectivo que posibilita la ocurrencia de tal dominacion cruel.  Como alumne de la escuela secundaria, convivia con los otros estudiantes aguantando con tal clima de amenaza.  No teniamos mucha opcion menos que aceptar tales amenazas en vez de padecer del castigo.  Por eso, muchos estudiantes se portaban muy bien, para no se infligen el castigo corporal.

I am thinking about this theme of vicitimization resulting from the causes of trauma.  When I wrote in my previous blogpost about the climate of fear that is the result of living under constant threat of bodily harm, or death by the parties controlling our lives or that govern our nation, I thought of the collective consent that enables this cruel form of control.  As a secondary student I co-existed with other students enduring this ambience of constant threat.  We had little other option except to accept those threats instead of having to suffer the resulting punishment.  For this reason, a lot of students behaved very well in school in order to avoid corporal punishment.

Amenazas por la mayoria no salen muy bien.  En lugar de mantener el bien orden y el conducto ejemplario se ponen la gente por un estado cronico de miedo.  Tal vez podria ser suficiente para disuadir del mal portado, pero por la misma manera se danan al bienestar psiquico.  Nos hacemos asi como exclavos que no hacen lo bueno por los motivos honrables sino para escapar del castigo,  Ademas de insultar a nuestra humanidad basica, vivimos en un estado muy sutil de la trauma alargada.

Generally the use of threats doesn`t turn out very well.  Instead of maintaining order and exemplary good behavior, people are left in a chronic state of fear.  Perhaps this could be enough to dissuade bad behaviour, but by the same token, damage is going to be inflicted on one`s psychic wellbeing.  We turn into slaves who aren't doing good out of noble motives but in order to escape punishment.  As well as our basic humanity being insulted, we end up living in a very subtle state of prolonged trauma.

Asimismo, no es muy efectivo tal cosa de amenaza porque queden siempre tales personas rebeldes que no tengan ganas de claudicar y por respeto a su dignidad humana se actuan como rebeldes de estado constante de mutin y siempre se presentan como personas problematicas que no nunca se resuelven por las autoridades.  Por mas se castigan, mas rebelan, asi como decirles que no importa nada que se lastimen las manos sino aun se quedan en el desafio constante.

Also, it isn't that effective using threats because there will always be those rebels who have no desire to give up and submit and out of respect for their human dignity they continue in a state of rebellion, always showing themselves to be a problem that the authorities are never going to solve.  No matter how much they are punished, they go on rebelling, as thought to say that it doesn't matter how much their hands get injured and they are going to continue resisting the authorities.

Entonces, tenemos el estado perpetuo de tension y estres entre opresores y los oprimidos.   Sigue el conflicto.  Las autoridades no claudican, tampoco los rebeldes.  Someten, de todos modos, la mayoria que solo quieren llevar a cabo su forma de vida sin interrumpir y bien afuera de los ojos del gobierno.  El miedo produce el estres perpetuo y se manifestara en los problemas familiares de abuso y conflicto, ademas de la consumpcion de alcohol y las otras drogas para dar abasto.  Se afecta el trabajo porque, dado que no hay justicia por el estilo de gobierno, tampoco va a ocurrir en ningunas otras partes.  El miedo de castigo, sobre todo por la pena de muerte,  en vez de bajar las estadisticas, el estres de la trauma colectiva simplemente nutre las condiciones de la pena general y el malestado publico.  Nadie dice nada porque de verdad, no nada se sabe de lo que pasa.  La salud psyquica general se dana, tambien se aumentan las condiciones de desigualdad social y economica.   Aunque los castigos por los crimenes son muy graves, hasta la muerte, no se para a los tipos desesperados.

So then, we have this perpetual state of tension and stress between oppressor and oppressed.  The conflict continues.  The authorities will not give up, neither will the rebels.  The majority of people do submit, if only because they want to get on with their lives without interruptions and well away from the eyes of the government.  The fear produces perpetual stress and this is manifested in problems of family abuse and conflict as well as alcohol and drug use in order to cope.  Work is also affected because, given that there is no real justice in this style of government, neither is there going to be justice in other areas.  The fear of punishment, especially the death penalty, instead of lowering the statistics, the stress of collective trauma simply nurtures the conditions of general unease and public malaise.  Nobody sys anything because really no one knows anything about what is really going on.  The general mental health is damaged, as well as social and economic inequality being on the rise.  Although the punishments for crime are so severe, even causing death, this is not enough to stop desperate individuals.

Para decir algo de Espana y a las Mexicas durante el siglo dieceseis:  aquellas personas existieron baja de tales circumstancias horribles.  No se de las incidencias de los crimenes para las Mexicas, sino se castigan con mucha severidad.  Es posible que los sacrificios humanos proporcionaba a la gente una salida psyquica para reventar el estres y el miedo, y por eso las victimas sacrificiales les entragaban algo de atonar por la substitucion.  Por los Espanoles los espectaculos de los autos de fe y la hoguera para los hereticos los daban algo parecido?  No se, solo que tantos eran las circumstancias en varias formas atraves de la experiencia humana por miles de anos, y solo ahora, a los ultimos cien anos se cambian las cosas y por fin se abole la pena de muerte y la tortura en mas paises que nunca.

I'd like to say something here about Spain and the Mexica during the sixteenth century: those people lived under such horrible circumstances.  I know nothing about the crime rates for the Mexica, but they were always severely punished.  Possibly the human sacrifices offered the people a psychic outlet for venting the stress and fear, and therefore the sacrificial victims gave them a sense of substitutionary atonement.  For the Spaniards the spectacles of heretics being burned at the stake might have done something similar?  I don't know, simply that such have been the general circumstances in various different forms concerning the human experience over thousands of years, and only now, in these last one hundred years are things changing and finally the death penalty and torture have been abolished in more countries than ever.

Todavia hay crimenes y guerras y rebeliones, pero en los paises que han escogido las formas mas justos y mas clementes, en Canada, Australia, Nueva Zelanda, en los paises europeos, la gente por lo general, a pesar de los problemas restantes, disfruten de una calidad de vida que se ponen como algo de envidia por el resto del mundo.  Mientras tanto, si tengo consejos para quienes padecer hoy en dia abajo de las dictaduras y las amenazas cruentes, podria ser que deben resistir y rebelar, no importa el costo.  Muy facil para decirselo, dado que mi forma de vida me pasa como bien facil y tranquilo.  Ademas, la gente que se cria en tales culturas tambien estan lavado del cerebro hasta aceptar y siquiera celebrar las mentiras y las barbaridades de sus gobiernos, asi como hicieran las Mexicas y los Espanoles.

There are still crime, wars and revolutions, but in such countries as have chosen the most just and merciful ways of governing, in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, in the European countries, generally the people, despite the remaining and continuing problems, are enjoying a quality of life that has made them the envy of the rest of the world.  Meanwhile, if I have advice for those who are suffering these days under dictatorships and cruel threats, it would be that they must continue to resist, whatever the cost.  A very easy thing to tell them, given that my own life is so easy and peaceful.  Moreover, those who are brought up in such cultures are also brainwashed to accept and even celebrate the lies and barbarities of their own governments, just as did the Mexica and the Spaniards.

What Is Trauma? 2

Life is traumatic.  To quote Sartre, "Hell is other people."  Remember that I have already mentioned that our brief epoch of lovely liberalism is but a wee aberration on the vast sweeping map of our human history.  Until less than one hundred years ago, people living in the majority of countries lived in peril of their lives being taken by the state.  Only in the last fifty years or so are there more countries (103) that have completely abolished the death penalty, than those (58) that still practice it.  This is to say, that until recently, within my own lifetime, the vast majority of the world's citizens lived in danger of being killed by their own governments.  This is what I would call passive collective trauma.  The actual cause of trauma is not self-evident, but a hostile, chronically unsafe environment that contributes to a state of perpetual unease.   Torture and other harsh punishment were also a constant threat.  I believe that this in itself would have been sufficient for creating a vast, global experience of collective trauma from people having to coexist under harsh governments and in unforgiving societies.

Let me reduce this to the personal.  In schools in my province, British Columbia, corporal punishment was only abolished in 1973, when I was in grade eleven.  The strap was the most popular form of punishment.  The offending student would be whipped on the palms of his outstretched hands by the principal or vice-principal with what resembled a truncated leather belt.  This was a punishment that  I believe to be consistent with the UN definitions of torture.  I remember vividly the sense of chronic dread that many of us coped with at school, of the importance of avoiding this harsh punishment.  We were controlled and ruled by fear, very consistent with the spirit of the times.  This was at the height of the Cold War, in the shadow of the Second World War and everyone lived with an impending sense of danger from nuclear annihilation.  Being threatened by educators with physical harm for misbehaving was merely part of the fear machine that was normal life.

We all had to watch our backs and we all lived in a state of subjugation.  Have you ever noticed a dog that has been beaten, perhaps a spaniel, wagging its tail with affection, but head lowered and trembling as though anticipating the first sudden and unexpected blow or kick.  This I think would describe us when we are kids in school, living in this shadow of fear of physical harm and humiliation from our educators.  This also suggests the muted and ongoing sense of terror that people have almost always lived under, accepting as normal that for stealing a loaf of bread they could be flogged one hundred times, and for sleeping with the wrong person they would be hanged or burned to death.

This legacy of oppression and trauma still lingers in our society, only right now it is the power of our employers to deprive us of our livelihood, or landlords to throw us out onto the street that keeps many of us afraid.

I remember my own fourth and final experience of being threatened with being strapped at school.  It had already happened three times:

In grade one I got it for brawling at recess.  In grade three I was strapped for not finishing writing a test on time.  My mother was very angry about this punishment and harshly rebuked the vice-principal afterward, though naturally he never apologized to me.  It happened again in grade eight, for the part I played in encouraging a fight between two other students.

Whether I deserved the punishment or not, there was something about being intimidated to the point of tears, physically harmed and openly humiliated by two heartless unfeeling old men in suits that had no relation to the offence committed.  I was simply a spectacle for the sadistic enjoyment of those bullies in suits.

In grade nine, shortly after turning fifteen, I appeared again in the principal's office.  This time, I had missed a detention which I had assumed had been cancelled, as my name was not announced with the others.  My offence was rather small.  A particularly disagreeable math teacher exiled me from class when she caught me yawning openly and loudly.  To cut myself slack, I wasn't sleeping well, and my parents were in the middle of negotiating their protracted and bitter divorce.  I was so pissed at the old bag (my math teacher, I mean) that I slammed the door loudly on my way out.  She clicked out on her little high heels and ordered me to the principal's office, and the rest is history.

The next day my name was announced on the school PA and I went to the office.  In the principal's office, with the vice-principal standing by, the principal, who was an oppressive bully of the old school, took out the strap and told me to extend my hand palm upward.  I was not going to give him the satisfaction of humiliating me.  He was not going to see me cry.  I said, "I don't believe in the strap, and neither does my mother (she didn't!) and I walked out.  I was told I wouldn't be welcome back in the school until I took my punishment and I replied, then I'm not coming back.  I spent the day with my Jesus Freak friends.  When I came home in time for dinner my mother interrogated me, then acknowledged that even though she didn't like my taking off into Vancouver like that (we were living in Richmond), neither had the principal any right to strap me. 

Two days later, Mom tarted herself up in her best clothes, make-up and perfume.  Already an attractive woman, she made herself Hollywood beautiful.  She drove me to school and chatted for half an hour or so with the principal in his office, while I waited outside.  When she emerged it was announced I could return to the school.  I was not going to be strapped.  I also overheard the principal, in his thick New Zealand accent, tell Mom, "Mrs. Greenlaw, you are a remarkable woman!"

The next day, I returned to class.  There was a substitute teacher in our English class and anarchy ruled.  I swore at a student who'd insulted me about something, and the sub (now known as supply teachers) dispatched me immediately to the principal's office.  When I arrived, all he said in his thick New Zealand accent was "Greenlaw, I don't know why you're here and I don't want to find out.  Go home.  Now!"

When I arrive home twenty minutes later my mother snarled, "I was just on the phone with your principal giving him shit and now I'm going to give you shit."

I was back in school that day after lunch.

Almost forty years later, by the way, one of the case managers I was working with, it turned out, was the son of my former vice-principal.  When I found out, I told him about how I walked out on his dad and the principal that day when they were going to give me the strap.  He seemed quite gobsmacked.  Apparently, he had heard about me!

What Is Trauma? 1

What is trauma?  Well, I just gave two working definitions from yesterday's post:

a deeply distressing or disturbing experience

injury, damage, wound

I am going to make one very sweeping generalization before I continue.  You don't have to agree, but you will if you know what's good for you.  Here it is.  We are all damaged.  We are all survivors of deeply distressing or disturbing experiences and we all carry injury, damage and wounds.  Middle class, especially white middle class people who live in First World countries often seem to assume that everyone else in the world is damaged except for them.  And then when something does go kablooey, there is hell to pay, because bad things simply are not supposed to happen to nice people.  So, when suddenly there is a divorce, a terminal cancer diagnosis, sudden death, a kid with a drug addiction, or a bad day at the nail spa, then no one can cope.  These are people well-versed at fielding first world problems but when the big shit hits the fan they are suddenly like helpless preschoolers.  It's as though these are things that happen to anyone else.  This is how sheltered middle class people often are.

Which also makes them very easily traumatized.  Because they're soft.  They haven't been tested.

As I demonstrated in my little fictional experiment with Juan and Ilhuitl, from Sixteenth Century Spain and Mexico, respectively, the kinds of horrors they grew up with and accepted as normal would be unimaginable to any white middle class first worlder (my coinage and the online dictionary is just going to have to adapt) Whoops, I just checked and Urban Dictionary beat me to the draw.  They have an entry for First Worlders.  Who knew?

Here in dear middle class Vancouver, one of the jewels of the first world, we don't have open sewers on the streets, nor public floggings and executions.  Nor are we treated with the spectacle of public human sacrifice.  We still lead, for the most part, a comfortable and sheltered existence, which is now already under threat.  Our street homeless population has steadily risen over the last sixteen years and now housing is a problem for almost everyone who doesn't have a high income.  The high price of real estate is necessitating greater urban density, which means fewer detached homes with front and back yards and more condos, townhouses and apartment buildings.   And, given the greed of real estate brokers and those sitting on big fat house equity fortunes, not even that is going to be a guarantee for making things affordable.  The lovely, idyllic quality of life that many of us remember from childhood is no longer ours by entitlement.  We are being priced out of our own dear lovely little city, and this phenomenon is now occurring all over the developed world.

What I am saying is that thanks to our own short-sighted greed and entitlement, we are now losing our bulwark and sense of protection from those very nasty realities of life that almost everyone else has to live with.  We no longer have housing security.  Food security will likely be the next to go down the toilet.

We are afraid.  We are so very afraid.

Just like street and homeless people with addictions and mental health problems many of the middle class have their own routes of self-medication.  Has anyone noticed the huge rise in alcohol promotion and advertising?  Especially on our own public broadcaster, the CBC Radio One.  Almost daily one of their smug broadcasters is plugging craft beer, vintage wine, or anything stronger.  The middle class with their indulgences in expensive booze are every bit as pathetic as the crack addict sleeping in the alley or the homeless bum scavenging cigarette butts from the pavement.  Middle class people do tend to smell rather nicer, but that's where I'm drawing the line.

Many people are getting very scared of what's happening.  One might even suggest that this is traumatizing us.  Just as the poorest of our poor have been chronically and systemically traumatized by institutionalized homelessness and legislated poverty, collective trauma is beginning to creep upon us with its cold grey fingers and we are going to find that none of us are immune.

I only wish we were better equipped to handle this inevitable visitation of extreme injustice that hangs like a  sword over our heads.  I did say we've become soft.  I am not suggesting here that either Juan or Ilhuitl came off any better, being themselves traumatized individually and collectively from the crappy lot they'd been dealt in life. 

I think that trauma, individual and collective, is going to be inevitable.  Some will cope better than others.  Usually those who are already generous and giving people by nature or volition will simply fare better by virtue of caring for the rest of us.  But no one is immune.  I believe strongly that we need hardship to form and build our characters and that the new hardships that are coming are going to remake us every bit as much as they are going to kick our ass.

Historical Perspectives And Collective Trauma 21

Gentle Reader, I am dizzy and bleary-eyed from reading these last twenty of my blogposts today.  Don't ever think that I have no empathy for what you have to put yourselves through when reading my dear little scrawl.  I had to read everything in this current series in order to think up a half-assed summary to offer you.  Here goes:

First, a lovely and succinct definition for Collective Trauma that I just pulled from Uncle Google:

Collective trauma is trauma that happens to large groups of individuals and can be transmitted transgenerationally and across communities. War, genocide, slavery, terrorism, and natural disasters can cause collective trauma, which can be further defined as historical, ancestral, or cultural.

What does trauma look like?  Here are two more definitions, thanks to Uncle Google:

a deeply distressing or disturbing experience

injury, damage, wound

The formative conditions that Juan and Ilhuitl respectively had to live under could well be called traumatizing.  However, trauma is as trauma does.  Being horrible, frightening and life-threatening conditions does not necessarily mean the same thing as trauma, which is the ongoing impact, or fallout on the individual's or collective's life experience following the trauma-inducing conditions.

At first blush, one might assume that Juan and his compatriot Spaniards escaped rather nicely from the ravages of trauma that might have disabled them in so many ways, given the horrible and violent history of Spain and the daily wretched conditions they were nurtured and raised on.

He was ambitious, courageous and energetic.  He was no slouch, an absolute go-getter, as my parents' generation used to call them. 

On the other hand, he had absolutely no anger-management skills, was chronically inflexible and simply refused to consider change.  Signs of trauma.

Ilhuitl?  Raised on bloodshed and war, even as a high-caste priest in training, he had to accept the many limitations and restrictions of his social status.  He seemed disarmingly gentle and open.  Also, very passive and susceptible to psychological paralysis.  Signs of trauma.

The toxic brew of these two particular manifestations of trauma can only be imagined in their fallout through their particular expressions in succeeding generations.  Mexico has lost through violent death and murder more than one hundred thousand people in the last ten years of the drug war that is not about to go away and seems only to be growing.  My experience of Mexicans is generally very positive, despite their famous passive-aggression: gentle, kind, courteous, warm and hospitable people.  Like a ten peso coin with the face of Juan the Spaniard on one side and Ilhuitl on the other.

This can be said about other Latin American countries and cultures.  All of them different, but in more cases or not, bristling with the effects of collective trauma.  In Central America we have Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras all in the grip of narco-gangs and warfare following the ravages of decades of civil war.  Nicaragua remains very poor.  Panama is on the up and up, but exists basically as an economic colony of the US.  Likewise Costa Rica with a couple of very important exceptions: being the only country in Latin America, and I believe in the world, that has abolished its military (since 1948) and has become the most peaceful and one of the most prosperous and socially progressive countries in Latin America. 

Cuba remains paralysed as a post-Stalinist state that still seems to be going nowhere.  The Domincan Republic is poor with tremendous economic inequality and a bustling tourism industry.  Puerto Rico is an American satellite and has to do everything Uncle Sam says. 

In South America, Uruguay seems to be the most progressive, prosperous and socially equal country.  Chile is doing rather well, despite the ravages of the Pinochet years.  The other countries are not doing so well, particularly Venezuela.

I will be doing much further and more detailed studies over the coming years of these and other countries in Latin America.

I will also, in a future blogpost, explain the Millionth Council.  Maybe, Gentle Reader.  If you're good.

Historical Perspectives And Collective Trauma 20

Juan hasn't bathed in over a week and Ilhuitl has refused to sleep in the same room as him.  I am unable to budget for an extra hotel room so they have to work it out.  The Millionth Council has opened for me a special bank account with only enough funds for shared accommodations, and I have found that generosity is not one of their stellar qualities.  Juan insists that soap and water are an invention of Saracen nonsense and he is a Spaniard and Spaniards shouldn't be expected to bathe.  He also insists that bathing is bad for his health and will make him susceptible to a fatal illness.  He has been the last five days an exceptional pain in the ass.

I have had to cut him off from his spending allowance.  He blew everything in the bar downstairs, got outrageously drunk then became aggressive and ugly, telling three attractive Colombian women resplendent in their new cocktail dresses that since they are dressed like whores then whores they surely must be and offered one of them money in exchange for services in his hotel room.  He is sure they must be Spanish women, since Colombia does not yet exist for him.  My guess is that the three young ladies have done exceptionally well under the scalpel of the cosmetic surgeon and are now only too eager to show off the stunning results of their recent boob and butt jobs.  Ilhuitl was with him, refusing to drink, as this was forbidden in his formation as a Mexica priest, and doing everything in his power to restrain him.  They both had to be forcefully removed and again the manager was phoning me, threatening to expel them, or at least Juan.  Then he got into a fight, with a trained martial arts fighter who had the presence of mind to do him no harm but to put him in a spectacularly effective choke hold until he capitulated.

I have just been up to their room.  Ilhuitl and I almost had to bodily force him to undress and shower.  He finally complied, after we both threatened to stand there in the bathroom with him and watch while he showered.  That was enough to hit him in his delicate macho pride.  He smells much better now, but I have to think of what I'm to do with him.  He and Ilhuitl both are completely overwhelmed and chronically overstimulated.  The agent from the Millionth Council has just given me his email contact.  Here is what I've proposed:

If Juan and Ilhuitl were to be sent back to Tenochtitlan, Juan would finish chopping off Ilhuitl's head, just before an Aztec arrow pierced his throat.  I have begged the Millionth Council for alternatives.  Here is what we've agreed on:  Juan, as adapting to the twenty-first century in Canada is completely unfeasible for him, will be sent back alone.  He will be wounded, but not mortally, by a Mexica blade and will fall ill with a blood infection from which he will recover.  While ill he will descend into a state of madness and total amnesia.  They will send him back to Spain where he will recover some of his memory.  He will find himself drawn close to God and will openly recant before his confessor all his involvement with the plunder and conquest of the New World, and then he will take holy orders with the Franciscan friars.  After ten years, a bit older and wiser, he will return to Mexico to serve the Mexica in a very similar manner to that of Bartolome de las Casas.  He will be a true and gentle and generous servant of the poor and dispossessed remnant of the once powerful Aztec, defending them against his fellow Spaniards who will eventually kill him.  He will be a holy man, a Christ-like figure, and he will die a martyr.

Ilhuitl will stay here.  I will adopt him as my son, but he will soon take ill with amnesia and mental health disturbances.  He will be glad to stay here, in this land of the gods, the people of the great god Quetzalcoatl.  He will become fascinated with both the Anglican and Catholic cathedrals and will find himself sitting for hours in these great churches, completely transfixed by the coloured images in the stain glass windows.  I will eventually have to cede responsibility for him to the psychiatric profession, who are also my employers, but he will eventually recover and adapt within five years and live and work as a productive new Canadian.  He will always be fascinated by the new, the unknown, the mysterious and many will find his presence a blessing.

Historical Perspectives And Collective Trauma 19

This must be our fifth time in Stanley Park in as many days.  Ilhuitl and Juan are agreed that for them this is the best part of Vancouver and of 2017.  We have been walking in the forest for almost an hour.  Some of the huge old growth trees remain, some over five hundred years old with such massive trunks as could scarcely be imagined.  Ilhuitl, from time to time, crouches down, gathers up soil in his hands from among the roots and puts it to his nose.  Juan, on the other hand, cannot refrain from commenting on how many ships could be made from the timber.

Both my charges are weary and overwhelmed with the new world they have been abducted into.  Especially Juan, who makes every effort to try not to notice his surroundings.  He appears
to be in a perpetual bad temper and seldom can refrain from belittling Ilhuitl as an ignorant savage that worships devils.  Twice I have had to pull him off of someone he was about to deliver a good beating for getting in his way on the sidewalk.  It seems futile trying to explain to him that when pedestrians are glued to their phones they become as useless as two tits on a bull and cannot be faulted for getting in the way.  It would be like hitting a child.

We come out onto the seawall where several times I have to remind and almost bodily restrain both of them from wandering onto the bike path, where already they have had a few close shaves with oblivious cyclists.  I had to bodily restrain Juan from going after one of them.  There are not many people out today, being the morning of a weekday, and they both seem a little less overwhelmed than usual. 

There are already a few sunbathers on Third Beach, a few young women in bikinis among them.  Juan is scandalized that men and women are permitted to go nearly naked together in public places and seriously wants to know what the men have to do when they get an erection.  The women he stares hard at, as though trying to take in and memorize every tantalizing detail.  Ilhuitl seems more chill about it and I catch him casting admiring glances at skimpily clad women and men without any show of preference.

At Siwash Rock we stop to admire the great towering rock just off the seawall, jutting out from the ocean.  I tell them both the legend of Siwash, a great Squamish chief who became famous for his generosity and that as a reward, instead of dying was transformed into this huge rock.  Juan appears all set to admire and appreciate.  I explain to him and Ilhuitl both that Siwash was one of our indigenous peoples, from the same bloodline as the Mexica, and that he might even be a distant cousin to Ilhuitl.  A shadow of scorn passes across the face of Juan, but then he gently places his arm around Ilhuitl's shoulder and briefly cuddles him, like a beloved little brother.  Ilhuitl says nothing, smiles briefly, then quickly pulls away.

Historical Perspectives And Collective Trauma 18

I haven't yet mentioned to either of you just how much the global economic system will have changed in the next five hundred years.  You heard me right.  Global.  It all begins in Europe with your not particularly well-loved merchant class.  They will expand in power and influence as the power of kings wanes.  There will simply be more commerce.  The gold and other riches that Spain will be plundering from the Americas will be reinvested to make her quite a wealthy and powerful nation, for a little while, until she can no longer sustain her own divisiveness and corruption.  But business will soon take off all across Europe with manufacturing and trading of goods, including sugar, metals, wood and many other goods from the Americas.  Following the revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, when various forms of energy, beginning but not ending with steam and coal, will result in great factories with machines and staffed by poor workers living in near slave-like conditions, producing more quickly as a team within days items that once took months to manufacture.  All the gold of the Americas is going to open the most lucrative markets your world has ever seen.

There will be even more revolutions, in the name of socialism and communism to combat and reverse the glaring social inequalities brought on by capitalism, or business gone berserk.  Russia, China, and even two countries in Latin America will be transformed by such revolutionary movements, themselves every bit as brutal and murderous as the monarchies and capitalist overlords they will be overthrowing.  The struggle between production of wealth and a just redistribution of wealth will be prolonged and bitter and even now in 2017 there are many people fighting for social and economic justice and equality.

In the twentieth and now in the twenty-first centuries growing numbers of people will be living in cities instead of growing food on the land.  The world human population will double, triple and quadruple, especially halfway through the twentieth it will grow exponentially from three billion in 1960 to over seven billion now just fifty-seven years later.  China will be the world's most populous nation at over 1.388 billion people, followed by India at 1.342 billion.  Commerce will be global, with goods freely flowing between countries and creating wealth for some and economic hardship for many others.

On the whole, people will be wealthier today, by far, than your own Mexica or Spaniards of 1519, though there will still be grave concerns of poverty and starvation, especially in many of the African countries, a continent still traumatized even more than Latin America, by colonization, foreign exploitation and the slave trade.  Food production will be global, with movements towards a local and sustainable food supply in North American and European countries.  The global means of food production will be on such a grand scale that it still staggers even my own imagination.

Communications will also be global.  Those little boxes and tiles called computers and phones?  That seem to work like magic?  Those are the means of keeping people all over the world connected.  It is called the internet, you cannot see it because it is an invisible phenomenon with near spiritual and magical properties, through which you can learn and read all the information and all the knowledge of the entire world, present and past, but, fortunately, not for the future.

Almost everyone in the world will have even the most basic skills of reading and writing, and more people will be educated in universities than at any other time in world history, for higher education, while still expensive, will no longer be the exclusive property of the upper classes and aristocracy.  In many countries, such as here in Canada, the family and religion are going to lose much of their strength and influence.  All the incredible wealth, knowledge and learning that we are now enjoying, that your people would never even conceive or imagine, will do much to advance us as people but also much to divide and isolate us.  In wealthier countries people will be increasingly alone, living alone, not marrying or ending their marriages, and many will be expecting a lonely and friendless old age, because we are not going to be able to cope well psychologically or emotionally with these huge and lightning quick changes and advances.

Our very planet, Earth, which we call home, is also now imperilled.  All the engines and machines of industry and commerce have wreaked havoc on our air, water and landmasses.  This planet is gradually getting warmer, and it is feared that some parts, within my lifetime, could become uninhabitable because of heat, drought, fires, floods and rising sea levels.  There is a concerted effort all over the world to fight and slow these changes as we are learning to harvest the energy of your gods, Ilhuitl, the sun and the wind, the ocean, and the depths of the earth, for meeting all our energy needs.  Whether we will get this done in time is up for debate and many are living in fear that this century could be our last.

We have many in the scientific community working hard to develop the means and the technology for humans to travel to other planets, even visiting star systems and galaxies very distant from our earth and solar system.  We have already flown to the Moon, and we have sent machines of exploration and research farther than the outer planets.  There is also a growing dread that with this planet at risk of becoming uninhabitable that we are going to have to think up ways of making our near neighbour, Mars, inhabitable again for human life (if it ever was to begin with), an absolutely hare-brained notion, but we shall see, eh?

I realize, Ilhuitl and Juan, that I have already told you far too much and I can see by both your eyes and faces that you are growing weary of my discourse.  Perhaps we should go walking in the forest nearby and simply enjoy the trees?  Yes, I can see that you both like the idea.  Let's go.

Historical Perspectives And Collective Truma 17

Juan and Ilhuitl, I can only say that more things will have changed in the next five hundred years, between the year 1519 and this current year of 2017 than all the changes that occurred in the previous ten thousand.  Our understanding of the dignity of persons and of human rights will undergo a bloody and violent birth in less than three hundred years through two revolutions: in America, then in France.  America, which is to say, the states that will take form in the great land mass north of Mexico, or the land of the Mexica, will fight for their independence from England.  That's right, Juan, I'm afraid that Spain's great rival and competitor and sometimes enemy, is going to grab most of the territory to the north, except for a generous portion even further north, here in Canada, that France will take hold of, but then will lose to the English.  I can tell already that this for you is not exactly happy news.

Both America in the north, and France, are going to break their ties with their monarchies.  America will simply become the world's first independent democracy.  Then in a couple more decades, France will follow in their footsteps, but with a lot of bloodshed and slaughter, to the point of beheading even their own king and queen.  These newly-minted democratic republics will serve as a kind of experimentation: the rule of the common man.  People of all classes and positions are going to awaken to their worth as human beings.  They will awaken to the knowledge that their worth, their value is not in relation to the king, nor to the feudal lord, but to the very innate humanity that we all share in common.  This will be a kind of rapid evolution, beginning with the middle classes revolting in America and France against arrogant and brutal aristocracies.  Then slavery will be abolished and all people will be considered free.  But the march to freedom for the ex-slaves, especially those of African heritage, is going to be long, difficult and bitter.  Even now, in 2017, people of colour, as we tend to call them now, especially in America, but elsewhere in the world, are going to be doing battle against prejudice and the derogatory treatment and attitudes of those who mistakenly think that the whiteness of their skin gives them an inborn superiority over others.

Over the coming years, many others will fight and struggle for equality: people from what you call Cathay or the Orient, are going to encounter very poor and cruel treatment here in this country Canada, and elsewhere.  Eventually they will gain their full rights as equal human beings and they will win the right to vote and fully participate in society, as will our own indigenous peoples.  In Canada are those similar, Ilhuitl, to your own Mexica, and the Toltec, the Maya, the Zapotecs, and many others.  Like your own people, their numbers will be decimated by war, disease and mistreatment and abuse by the European colonizers.  Juan, the English, like the Spanish, have much to answer for.

Women will win the right to vote and will have to struggle to overcome entrenched historical prejudice from men in order to come into their own as true equal partners in our shared humanity.  Homosexuals and transgendered people, which is to say men who believe they are really women and women who believe they are really men, will also be given recognition as people of worth and will fight hard against the prejudice, persecution and oppression that has been their experience of life, especially by so-called Christian Europe. 

Juan, I can tell that this offends you, but you have to learn to live with this, unless you want to return to the Sixteenth Century.  Ilhuitl, you appear to welcome this news.

Juan says, with huge indignation and in high dudgeon:  You mean to place me at the same level as black slaves and perverted men with desires against nature?

I reply, Juan, I mean to tell you that we are all equal, and that we are all equally loved by our same God and creator.

Historical Perspectives And Collective Trauma 16

Ilhuitl and Juan, I want to tell you a bit about the changes that are going to occur in our understanding of the human soul over the following five centuries.  I am intentionally using the word soul because neither of you will have for a couple of hundred years any comprehension of the human psyche.  That's right, the psyche, or what you understand and know as the soul which also includes the mind, the intentions, the emotions, the will, the intellect, the passions, and everything that is not directly related to the body.

In the next four hundred to five hundred years you will see the rise of psychology, or the study of the mind.  I will focus on two of the great psychoanalysts of this coming time: Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.  I am not an expert testator by the way and the little I will have to tell you will not do great justice to either of these remarkable men.  They will arise from what you currently know, Juan, to be the Holy Roman Empire in Central Europe, now the nations of Austria, where Freud lived, and Switzerland, the birthplace of Jung. 

Both men believed strongly in the unconscious.  This is the huge, hidden and largely unknown area of the human mind from which arise our dreams and irrational impulses and instincts.  Freud seemed to see the unconscious as a huge hidden garbage room where the trash was often filtered out through dreams.  He believed strongly in the primary impulses of sex and death as the major motivators of human beings, and that our lives were a constant struggle between our inner forces of life and death.

Jung took this a few steps further by recognizing the strong spiritual dimension to the human unconscious, from which we derive our sense of spirituality and religion.  To him this was a particularly powerful motivator for good or for ill.  He believed in the usefulness of our dreams as roadmaps to our inner lives.  He even believed in the unconscious connectedness of all people from all ages, which he called the Collective Unconscious.  From the Collective Unconscious were derived the Archetypes, or the original symbols of the many facets of our humanity.  It is believed that it is from their Archetypes that your people, Ilhuitl, have really derived your gods.  Now, please, don't take offence, this is simply a theory.  However, if you were to carefully examine the character and biography of each of the gods of the Mexica you would find their origins in these collective psychic blueprints known as the Archetypes.

For you, Juan, and the Spanish Catholics, Freud would have the greater resonance, given the obsession of your people with sex and death, struggle, bloodshed and this constant necessity of having to somehow reincarnate your civilization, such as it is, in other lands and through other peoples.  This is because the Spanish have a neurotic terror of death, whereas the Mexica with their heightened sense of an interconnected spirituality embrace it, and bravely at the altar of sacrifice.

Both models, I would have you know, are equally flawed and equally disastrous.  However, in Ilhuitl, and I believe, in many of the Mexica, there is an openness to the spirit that would make him adaptable to living now in the Twenty-First Century, whereas for you, Juan, it would be a living death.

Historical Perspectives And Collective Trauma 15

I wish I could say, Juan and Ilhuitl, that human beings have become more peaceful in the last five hundred years, but this sadly is not the case.  You notice the great advantage that having gunpowder, cannons and muskets has given you and your fellow Spanish, Juan, making it all the easier for you to win the conquest of the Mexica, which you are going to win, will be a colony of  Spain for three hundred years until there is a revolution and Nueva Espana becomes the nation Mexico.  Weapons technology is not going to stop here, but will go further, way further.  Guns and bullets that operate with accurate, lethal and lightning speed will eventually be invented, along with things called missiles and bombs that can be dropped from airplanes on cities, or fired across the great oceans of the world to destroy countries farther away than the Mexica are from Spain.  With our developing weapons technologies bigger and deadlier wars are going to be fought and waged.  In the last century alone we have seen the two hugest and deadliest conflicts ever, known as the First World War and the Second World War, which occurred one hundred years ago and seventy-five years ago, respectively.  The First World War was fought in Europe, chiefly between Germany, France, Britain and the United States, that huge country just north of Mexico and south of here that will become the dominant global power.  Five million people were killed.  In the Second World War that followed, involving many more nations and a much greater part of the world, they say that more than seventy million were killed.  This was also the first time that nuclear weapons were invented and used, twice in Japan, the easternmost country of Asia, killing two hundred thousand people in a matter of days.  I will tell you this much about the nuclear, or atomic bombs: they are still the most deadly, by far the most lethal form of weapon ever known to humankind.  Those things called atoms?  Those most minute and fundamental particles of all matter?  The energy from the atoms will be harnessed and channelled for this kind of destructive potential.  Right now, as many as eight, possibly ten nations have these weapons, and you can imagine the global climate of fear and terror that has arisen.

Both of you have grown up on warfare.  Ilhuitl, your people, the Mexica, have fought and waged battle for hundreds of years to get to where you now are, at least where you were five hundred years ago, and even now, your rulers do battle with your neighbours to keep them submissive and in line and to supply your gods with an endless buffet of human sacrifices.  Juan, Spain is always and has always been at war with her neighbours and with herself and now you are carrying this bloody and violent legacy to the Mexica where violence is meeting violence.  Without the terror of nuclear weapons of mass destruction to help keep everyone in line, war is easy and cheap.  Instead of negotiating, instead of seeking terms of peace and coexistence, and of perhaps even becoming friends with your enemies you choose instead to kill, burn at the stake or sacrifice to hungry gods.

You do not even see how this has affected you, but I can see it.  You are both children of violence and this has made you in turn, fearful and violent and fearful again.  And you are going to pass on this toxic legacy to your descendants, the Mexican people.  Juan, your companions are going to rape and enslave the Mexica women, the few who survive the slaughter and the epidemic diseases you are destroying them with, and under a pretence of marriage where you won't be simply abandoning them, they will bear your bastard children and your bastard children are going to carry the stigma of conquest, rape and enslavement and this collective trauma is going to more than anything else define the character of the Mexican people, and of other peoples who will be arising in your other lands of conquest, all while Mama Espana goes on raping and plundering Latin America for its gold and other forms of wealth to fatten her coffers and finance her wars.

Juan, as much as I am coming to like you, almost to love you during this short time, I am sad to say that you are beyond redemption.  Like the other Spanish people, you will go on in your thoughtless arrogance, lack of compassion for others and chronic religious hypocrisy and only because you have never, since kicking out the Muslims, known what it is like to be a subject people.  Rather than learn valuable lessons of humility from your humiliation, you and your fellow Spaniards have opted instead to roam the world like brutal soldiers of fortune, without sympathy for those who are not like you, carrying along with your other diseases a very degraded form of the most beautiful religion that has ever visited our world.  The Mexicans, and the other descendants of your depredations, will live lives of humiliation, but they will also grow into a people known for their kindness and generosity and their sheer celebration of life, while still acting out the legacy of violence and social inequality and injustice that will for a long time to come be their tragic inheritance from Mama Espana.

Historical Perspectives And Collective Trauma 14

I have some things to say to both of you, Juan and Ilhuitl.  First of all, I would like to thank you both for your courage in coming here, not only to a land completely foreign and unknown to you, but five hundred years in the future.  I only wish you both had some say in coming here.  The Millionth Council, for all their benevolent intentions, really don't have a lot of respect for individual free will, but such is the case with the angelic hierarchies.

Still, willing or unwilling, I am glad to have made your acquaintance and hope that we can go on being friends for a long time to come.  You will be experiencing what we call culture shock.  This is to say, when you arrive suddenly from one place and a certain way of living to another very different and foreign, it is going to have on you some, shall we say, unsettling effects?  And, Juan, you are getting a double dose of this.  You first came from your familiar and beloved Spain to the land of the Mexica, a place you had never seen nor heard of, where you encountered a different people, a different race, language, customs, religion, ways of living, ways of governing, climate, diet.  All of this was completely unknown and completely new to you.  Here you were just in the act of lopping of the head of Ilhuitl in the ambush you and your compatriot Spaniards made upon Montezuma's banquet.  You had just grabbed hold of his hair and were about to strike with your sword, and you were both suddenly teleported five hundred years in the future to the archeological ruin of the temple in the heart of Mexico City, the heir to Tenochtitlan.  There were agents from the Millionth Council present to whisk you to a hotel, provide you with clothes, other supplies and passports and documents and then to take you to the airport.  I really cannot go into detail about my own role in this, simply that I received a mysterious email from a do not reply and that you would be waiting for me at international arrivals.

I see that you are already mystified by things I am saying, so let me explain a little.  I can say nothing about the Millionth Council because I know nothing about them: only that they are an angelic hierarchy that oversee the wellbeing of our mother earth and that I am suddenly under their orders.  Concerning passports, those little books that you carry when you travel to other countries, that contain your picture.  This is how foreign travel is relegated now in the world, five centuries later.  Since Spain, England and France and Holland have colonized the Americas, which is to say the entire length of the part of the world that you live in, Ilhuitl, the world has become a much smaller place.  People from almost all nations in all parts of the world now travel every day to other countries, usually on great airships called airplanes.  There is a huge complex technology involved in air flight that I cannot explain to you because I know it so poorly, but it is not a strange magic as you seem to think, but a way of negotiating the air currents and the winds in high-powered flight.  This has made foreign travel easy and very fast.  I know this is a lot to comprehend and you'd might as well just accept it at face value.

If I could also explain something about computers, another strange magic that has frightened the crap out of you (Juan) or completely mystified and fascinated you (Ilhuitl).  These are incredibly complex machines developed over many decades and now they connect the entire world in a network of communications, images, and news.  Remember the map of North America I showed you?  That is from the huge advances in technology that were made in five hundred years.  I know this is just magic and witchery for you, because for you, the age of discovery and science have not yet begun, but in your era, Juan, this age is just beginning now and it is going to be revolutionary.

They are going to discover that it isn't God so much who has created this wonderful earth (though I and some others still believe him to be the first and sustaining cause) but incredibly intricate and complex interactions of chemicals and elements from their most minute particles, having gradually evolved from the simplest and tiniest forms to the incredible web of life that we are now part of.  They will find that the earth is much older than what your priests say the Bible indicates: not six thousand years old, nor six million, but closer to six billion, if you can imagine this!  They will find that human life itself evolved from older animals, descended from the apes, which descended over millions of years from other creatures and so on.  This they will discover from the fossil records of bones transformed over the ages in the earth to stone, and through the discoveries of chemical analysis for measuring the length of time past.  We will have the huge advances in mathematics to thank for all this.

In the centuries that follow, people are going to become more intellectual and less spiritual.  They are going to seek rational and logical causes, rather than spiritual and mystical to explain mysterious phenomena and for probing the mysteries of the human soul.  God isn't going to be declared nonexistent so much, and not exactly irrelevant, but rather not quite so directly involved in the course and process of things.  Of course there will be many arising who will completely disavow him and deny even his existence.  Others will still believe but will give greater heed to the rational.  This is not necessarily going to take away the sense of wonder over nature and the universe, but I think that it's going to mute some of the fear that now paralyzes you and your people.  This goes equally for both your cultures, the Spanish and the Mexica.

Historical Perspectives And Collective Trauma 13

Time for sitting on the grass in the shade of a towering cedar tree appears to be taking the edge off.  Juan and Ilhuitl seem mesmerized by the exotic viands they are eating, especially Ilhuitl, who has never eaten cheese nor any milk or dairy product before.  He begins with gentle caution, but soon is devouring with gusto this strange fare I have bought for us.  Juan insists that nowhere in Spain has he ever encountered such wonderful food.  He leans back on his elbows, staring at the rosebushes.  He says they remind him of the gardens of Sevilla, though here he wants to know where the palace or castle is, for surely we must be enjoying the estate of the local feudal lord.  He stares unbelieving when I tell him that there is no palace nor castle here.  Then whose garden are we in, he wants to know.  It is public, I tell him, it belongs to everyone.  But who takes care of the flowers and the grass.  Then he notices a young man and a young woman, city public workers, pulling weeds from a flowerbed nearby.  Why are white people slaves here, he wants to know.  I remind him that slavery was abolished almost two centuries ago, that these are public employees who are paid for their labour.  Who pays them? he wants to know.  We do, I say, through our taxes.  We all pay taxes and the money is spent on public and community services, such as our parks.  But who is the lord here, he wants to know.  Who is your ruler?  We rule ourselves, I reply, through our elected representatives whom we vote into power.  Neither Juan nor Ilhuitl have ever heard of democracy.  The concept is completely foreign to them, nor can they conceive of a system of government where we are all expected to accept some responsibility in the way we are governed.

Juan wants to know why Holy Church doesn't play a role in governing.  Especially in the education of children.  He is scandalized and offended when I explain that children are generally educated without religion.  Are their no schools facilitated by Mother Church? he wants to know.  I explain that we do have some Catholic schools, but not many.  And the others?  They are generally educated to be good and responsible citizens, though how effectively is always going to be up for debate.

Ilhuitl wants to know who educates the children.  I reply, the state.  And no priests?  None, the children must be free from religion in order to be free to choose or not choose religion as they become adults.  And if no one chooses the gods? he asks.  I reply that if the gods truly have power then there will always be those who will choose them.  Then I ask Ilhuitl if he ever felt free to choose.  He replies that never in his life, until these first few hours he has spent with us here, has he even known that such freedom might exist.  His chin trembles and his voice breaks a bit as he is saying this.  I notice his eyes beginning to well up with tears.  He mentions that he always sees the gods throughout the movement of the heavenly bodies and the plants and trees and birds.  He sees everything as sacred, as infused with the holy, as being sacred.  And other people? I ask.  Yes, he replies after a bit of a pause.  Other people.  And you still think they should be killed and offered up as food for the gods? I challenge.  Well, yes, he says, because they are sacred.  But not sacred enough to stay alive?  But they live on with the gods in the heavens, he says.  And no longer can you see or touch or acknowledge the sacred presence that they are, only carry the shadow of guilt for having murdered them?  He simply stares at me, as though beginning to see something for the first time, as though just starting to discover a new truth.  He suddenly takes my hand in both his, lifts it to his forehead till my fingertips touch the skin just above his eyebrows.  He whispers something in Nahuatl, his native language, releases my hand, and cross-legged, bows his head in silence.

Juan begins to weigh in about the women here, how many of them dress in pants, like men, and go about unaccompanied, their heads fully uncovered.  Nor can he understand why so many young women, as well as men wear tattoos.  And why do so many women dress like whores if they are not working as whores?  I reply that they want to feel attractive to men.  He retorts that they ought only to be attractive to their husbands, and then goes almost ballistic as I inform him that a lot of women, as men, are single, or they live with their romantic partners without benefit of marriage.  Then when I tell him that ultra conservative Muslims have exactly the same beliefs about women as his, he goes very silent, but I feel truly chilled and frightened by the look I see in his eyes.

This is the Great Whore of Babylon! he shouts.  I urge him to calm down.  Regardless of who you are in 2017, everyone is allowed to live and believe as they choose, so long as they are not interfering with the right of others to live and believe as they choose.

This is complete disorder! he shouts, refusing to calm himself.  How can there be any social cohesion without the joint rule of church and king, how could there be any unity?

I reply that here we celebrate unity in diversity and diversity in unity.  Yet on a deeper level I hear what he is saying.  I hear the loneliness, the isolation in his voice.  The despair.  I also have to accept the isolation and loneliness that we live with here as a fact of life, of how fragmented we are despite our scrambling efforts to find some sense of unity and order in the chaos we have visited on ourselves.  I know what Juan yearns for, and this is what we all yearn for: an authentic experience of our humanity in authentic community, and an authentic experience of community in our authentic humanity.  I know that the model we work with is far from perfect, but even worse the enforced conformity of belief, race and manner of life that Juan wants to revert to in Medieval Spain, or see reincarnated here.  The loneliness of our human experience has been a high price to pay for freedom and diversity, and now I must carefully hear out my friends Juan and Ilhuitl to learn again what they had, and to try to imagine recapturing its essence without losing anything that we have gained in 2017.

I ask Ilhuitl to tell me what he thinks.  He has just picked a small saffron coloured rose that he twirls about in his hand, examining the complex harmony of superimposed petals as though he is peering into his own labyrinthine soul.  He looks up, smiles, and replies that he needs time to think.  There is much here to absorb and in the meantime he simply wants to observe, listen, learn, and later, much later to judge, but only as he is able.

Historical Perspectives And Collective Trauma 12

We walk together, three solitudes.  All the drama since the early morning has left us all emotionally exhausted and scarcely able to tolerate one another's company.  We walk on the sidewalk of Robson Street, each as though walking alone.  My friends barely dodge the other pedestrians, who don't appear to see them.  My friends are overwhelmed.  There is too much, too soon, with no preparation.  I am more worried about Juan, who appears to hate everything he sees here.  I believe that his nation's historic intolerance of difference and change has made it impossible for him to adapt.  Ilhuitl appears to be embracing the new world here.  I would even dare suggest that his spiritual foundation allows for a flexibility and openness that the strict and bigoted Spanish Catholicism has forbidden to Juan.

Juan is a handsome young man, muscular, neither tall nor short, with a poet's sensitive face: wide brown eyes, a finely shaped nose, chestnut hair and sensuous lips.  But this belies his rigidity.  He has the posture of a statue, a figure molded in bronze or carved from marble.  Brittle, unyielding.  He must dominate and rule, or perish.  I do not believe that he has ever known the concept of compromise.  Ilhuitl is not what one would call conventionally good-looking.  He is on the short side, slender with the high cheekbones and dark almond eyes of the Aztec and a finely-chiseled nose and a closely guarded smile always hovering on his full lips.  His skin has a cinnamon hue.  Even though he appears composed and reserved there is much activity in his eyes and a certain nimble mirth in his face that he only lightly disguises.  He moves quickly, but with measured disciplined movements.  Unlike Juan and his fellow Spaniards, Ilhuitl has been raised on self-discipline, which gives him the sense of one who is self-possessed and composed, though everything he does appears infused with a dancer's grace.  He makes me think of a current of electricity, crackling and flashing its silver fire as it runs at high speed flashing and igniting everything in its path..  He is infused with a cool, lively intelligence in counterpoint to a child's delight in innocent mischief, and I find in him a kindred soul.

Juan has asked me how gold can be obtained here, for that is why he came to the New World.  He is incredibly greedy.  I simply reply that we don't deal a lot in that metal and that he would best look elsewhere.  He says that we need gold to spread the Catholic faith.  I reply that if it is the Christian faith of the Gospels to which he is referring then love will do the job sooner than all the gold in the universe.  He appears to have not heard me and I know not to rattle his cage when he is being obtuse, for this is his way of finding his safe place and I know that he is traumatized.

In the Safeway we pick up food for a picnic in the park: salads, cheese, rolls and sausage slices.  They are mesmerized by the size of the supermarket and the superabundance of food.  The packaging especially intrigues Ilhuitl, who wants to know what materials it is made of.  He understands metal, strains himself to get the concept of paper, but plastic totally loses him, especially the disposable containers that hold our food.

We arrive in Stanley Park by way of Lost Lagoon.  The Canada geese and the mallards and other duck species waddle and swim freely, knowing they will come to no harm in this place where they are treated almost like pets.  For the first time Juan and Ilhuitl are in agreement.  They both want to obtain bow and arrows and kill a few birds for the table.  I just smile indulgently and guide us to the rose garden for a picnic in the shade.

Historical Perspectives And Collective Trauma 11

As though by magic, a black priest appears as though from nowhere while Juan is getting up off his knees.  He greets us in lightly French-accented English and appears especially focussed on Juan, who ignores him.  Later, as we are leaving the cathedral I mention to Juan that he had his chance to talk with a priest, a male priest, and he blew it by ignoring him.  He replies that he never holds converse with slaves unless he has work for them to do, then stumbles as he is nearly run over by a young punk on a skateboard.  He instinctively reaches for his nonexistent sword, then goes running after him.  The kid has gotten too far ahead and Juan returns to us, surly and muttering under his breath, as though having lost every single drop of blessing he was enjoying while kneeling before the Blessed Virgin less than ten minutes ago.

Ilhuitl wants a skateboard, he badly wants to learn how to ride one.  Juan is holding out for a bicycle and makes very evident to Ilhuitl his scorn for his transportation preference.  But the wheel is still and likely will always be for him a novelty, a thing of fascination..  In the meantime we walk everywhere.  I ask Ilhuitl if he can further explain his interest in the wheel.  He says that it reminds him of the sun disc on which their sacred calendar has been carved and written, and that it had never before occurred to him that the form of the sun could also carry us to where we wanted to go.  He stops at explaining further, but the muted expression of wonder on his face is every bit as unmistakable as it is subtle.  The Aztecs worshipped the sun.  And killed thousands, possibly millions of innocent lives in votive offering to their god. 

They cannot seem to refrain from looking up at the skyscrapers surrounding us.  He wants to know if they are a new kind of temple, and if so, how would they get the sacrificial victims to the top, without an exterior staircase.  I remind him that human sacrifice is no longer practiced, and certainly not here in Canada.  He nods in acknowledgment, then asks me why, without the practice of human sacrifice, the cosmic order has not collapsed, or perhaps do we worship a new set of gods, different from the bloodthirsty deities he was raised on.

I reply that here, now, everyone worships what or whom they choose, or choose not to worship and this is generally respected.  Juan cannot comprehend that the one true church isn't allowed to govern our affairs and our lives.  But Juan wants to know how we can possibly know to do what is right, without believing holy church.  I reply that in Spain during his time the one true faith did nothing to prevent the bloody wars and slaughters of the Crusades nor the burning of innocents during the Inquisition.  Juan insists that they were witches, Jews and heretics.  I reply, trying to curb my rising temper, that his beloved holy church has always been completely out of step with their lord, Jesus Christ, who taught love and nonviolence.  He denies this.  I challenge him to show me where in the Gospels is it indicated that Jesus would approve of the killing of others.  Juan, who has never picked up a Bible in his life (he has only heard it read to him, like all Spaniards of his era, by the priests), mutters that I am no better than a Saracen, but respectfully backs away from confrontation.

Historical Perspectives And Collective Trauma 10

Juan successfully concludes our visit in the Mexican café when he does something that would be considered perfectly rational in Spain five hundred years ago and utterly ludicrous and pathetic in 2017.  He has asked the Mexican server in the café if her parents live nearby.  She replies, no, they live in Mexico.  Where?  he asks.  Mexico, she repeats.  The country where I was born.  No esta en Espana?  or, it isn't in Spain?  he asks, bewildered.  He wants to know why a young lady of her class and breeding shouldn't be at home serving her mother and father.  She smiles, picks up our empty cups, and hurries away.  In a theatrically low voice he confides to Ilhuitl and I that he plans to find her father in order to ask for her hand in marriage.  Ilhuitl stares long and thoughtfully at his friend, then suddenly throws back his head and erupts in the loudest, most unrestrained derisory laughter I have ever heard.  Juan is thunderstruck.  His face sinks down from unfettered rage, to embarrassment, then sinks further down to abject shame.  He gets up and slinks out of the café.  Ilhuitl has not, and apparently cannot, stop laughing.

Juan is seated, hunched, in a bus shelter, trying to conceal that he is weeping.  Then Ilhuitl surprises us both by parking himself right next to him on the bench as he puts his arms around his friend.  Juan accepts the gesture and the apology and for a while shakes with silent sobbing and Ilhuitl gently rocks him back and forth till he calms down.  I have seen this in Ilhuitl before, this unabashed affectionate nature that I think many would find embarrassing, but this also helps makes him shine.  I have not been able to deduce whether this is from the culture he grew up in, or if this is just Ilhuitl openly expressing love to those he cares about.  Even though he has been training for the Aztec priesthood, he still hasn't shed human blood, making him even more the innocent.  He has told me that just days before, when he was abducted to the Mexico City of 2017, he was just about to kill his first human offering to Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and chief of the Aztec pantheon . 

But the Millionth Council has already informed me that had Ilhuitl's hands been stained with the blood of even one human sacrifice, they would not have brought him to our current era, likewise with Juan, who has already bragged aplenty about the various villains and scoundrels and Moros and heretics he has slain, but I was told that had he not been lying about it he would also have remained in the Sixteenth Century.

Juan is calm now and for him his nervous friendship with Ilhuitl has been restored.  He asks about seeing a priest.  I know there are a couple of churches within walking distance.  The two cathedrals, Anglican and Roman Catholic.  Christ Church, the Anglican cathedral, is closer.  We are just in time for the midday Eucharist.  I cannot persuade Juan to approach the small circle of people seated near the high altar, where progressive Anglicans often gather to celebrate Holy Communion.  For Juan of the Middle Ages it is too holy and too sacred a place for laity to enter and he cannot place himself at the level of the participants, whom he assumes to be persons far holier than he.  We sit near the front of the nave, observing the sacred rite.  Ilhuitl seems particularly and intently focussed on the ritual.  Juan is transfixed by the stain glass windows, the riot of holy colour that illumines this place of reverence. 

At the end of the service I bid my friends to come with me to the doorway where the celebrating priest is ready to meet and greet.  I introduce myself and my friends and she responds with calm kindness.  Juan whispers in my ear that he wants to see a priest.  I step aside with him to explain that here she is.  No, he does not want to talk to a nun, he almost spits while whispering, but to a priest.  But she is a priest I tell him.  He insists that she is a nun and feigns deafness when I try to explain that women have been ordained to the Canadian Anglican priesthood for the last forty years.  Ilhuitl, smiling, approaches her with extended hand.

The Roman Catholic cathedral isn't that far, perhaps a ten or fifteen minute walk, and something has to be done for Juan, who appears crestfallen and disconsolate.  Mass is over, there are no priests in sight and perhaps less than a half dozen visitors, some admiring the stain-glass, two or three quietly occupying the pews.  Juan, seeing a statue of the Virgin Mary approaches like a lost child running toward his mother's open arms.  Ilhuitl and I maintain a respectful distance as Juan is kneeling, prostrated at her feet.  Then the young Aztec slowly approaches him from behind and sits in the pew just behind Juan, in silent support and patient waiting.

Historical Perspectives And Collective Trauma 9

It is time for a coffee break.  Both my young friends from five hundred years ago are understandably overwhelmed.  Ilhuitl is especially fascinated by anything that has wheels.  The Aztecs didn't know the wheel and so this is a complete novelty to him.  I like Ilhuitl, and even though my overseers from the Millionth Council have advised me to not pick a favourite between the two young men, I find that the young Aztec priest is by far more likeable.  He approaches everything that he sees here with the innocent curiosity of a highly-gifted child (I believe him to be gifted), very unlike Juan, who has absolutely no tolerance for anything different or that exists beyond the range of his understandably very limited experience of Medieval Spain.  But he does like bicycles.  To my wonder, Juan is not only intrigued by bikes, he wants one.  He expressed dismay that no one rides horses in my city and Juan, like any self-respecting hidalgo, is an accomplished horseman.  He brought his steed over from Spain on the boat and this fellow and his horse were inseparable.  For him, not having his horse with him is a lack and a loss he can scarcely endure and then I put it all together.  Having a bike, for Juan, would be his small compensation for being without a horse, and would at least in part help restore his sense of lost manhood.

I have also observed this about Juan, and what makes him so different from Ilhuitl, who has never ridden any kind of animal in his life, because the Mexica never domesticated anything other than dogs, for meat as well as companionship, and turkeys.  I believe that Ilhuitl can owe his evident humility to the fact that he has always walked everywhere, thus firmly connecting him to the earth.  It could be that the Spanish of the Sixteenth Century, like other Europeans from the minor nobility and up, are so insufferably arrogant because they have long dominated horses.  Those beautiful, proud and strong animals, and quite huge and quite able to kill any man with a single kick, are under their dominion.  They carry them everywhere now as their own beasts of burden, leaving them too proud to touch the earth with their delicate (and stinking, since they never bathe) European feet.  I am sad to note that I have noticed in many of our own cyclists a similar kind of arrogance, especially towards pedestrians.  I will not speak here of the mentality of people who drive cars.

I have picked this café for a couple of reasons: first of all, to get Juan off the street so he can cool off for a while.  He threatened to punch a small Asian man for almost walking into him.  I tried to explain that he was too fastened to his phone to know where he was going, then remembered that I still haven't explained phone technology to either Juan or Ilhuitl nor do I think they'd absorb it.  I have also noticed that he has no tolerance for anyone getting in his way, especially non-Caucasians.
In decidedly different ways, the weight of the violent histories of their peoples hangs like a dark shadow on both my young charges: Juan, the conquistador, like many Spanish hidalgos, is not satisfied that his people have driven the Muslims and the Jews and everyone else they didn't like out of Spain.  Now they have to proceed onto other shores to continue their celebration of dominance and slaughter.  Ilhuitl wears it differently.  From centuries of internecine warfare with other tribes and nations his people have become very ordered, disciplined and introspective.  Even though they do it with brutality, the Mexica are prepared to coexist with other peoples, despite the frequent warfare.  The Spanish will coexist with no one.

I have also picked this café because it is a place that I already enjoy.  The people who work here are friendly, personable and welcoming.  Reason number three: this is a Mexican establishment and for this reason it will be a valuable link in our little experiment.  Now they are both drinking and enjoying their coffee.  They have been able to speak a bit of Spanish with one of the young servers.  Juan wants to know what part of Spain she is from, an awkward moment, given that as a Spaniard he would already know from her accent that she is from Latin America.  But for Juan, this young woman, who might easily be his and Ilhuitl's descendent, could not possibly be from Mexico, a country that for him still has no existence.  He speaks to her with courtesy and deference, as she is young, pretty, and rather modestly dressed.  She is also light-skinned, which for him certainly helps.  She appears a bit uncertain about his accent, as his Spanish is quite antiquated.  I note how quickly he drops his pretence of amiability as she serves him his coffee which he receives without a word or gesture of gratitude.  Ilhuitl offers her a shy smile and proffers a softly spoken, "Gracias, doncella."