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.
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.
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