I have so many reasons for being grateful that I live in this postmodern (is that word still in use?) era. Regardless of how many of us tremble and quake and whimper in the dark about the coming Apocalypse, the End of the World as We Know It, climate change being accelerated by global warming and the Great Deplorable in the Oval Office I can say one good thing for sure: I got to be a child during an era when it was actually safe and enjoyable being a child.
Childhood and adolescence, as we know them now, are relatively recent concepts. Before the Twentieth Century you had to grow up fast. As soon as you could push a broom or milk a cow you were almost all grown up. As soon as you hit puberty you were considered marriageable. Life was brutal, harsh, short and cheap. You laboured and struggled to put food on the table, raise your too many children, and then you would likely die from disease, malnutrition, an accident or homicide before old age could get you.
It is hard to imagine what it must have been like being a child in Medieval Europe. Parents did what they could to educate their children, but the lower and rural classes generally remained semi-literate of illiterate, educated primarily in the family trade. From the little I've just read online, they were not completely illiterate, children had toys, and they did attend school and classes, rather contrary to popular belief.
I mentioned to one of my clients today that when I find someone annoying, I try to imagine them as a small child and then I feel happy. When I find a small child annoying and try to imagine them as an adult I tend to feel upset.
In order to better understand the roots of collective trauma in Latin American countries and cultures I am trying to visualize what it must have been like being a child in fifteenth and sixteenth century Seville or Toledo. Children must have seen some very horrible things. This was during the Spain of the Inquisition. Public executions and other brutal punishments were frequent and publicly attended by everyone, including entire families and unattended children. Yes, parents loved their kids then every bit as much as they love them now, but they could only raise and train their children within the limits of their era, culture and circumstances. But they were also all children and products of their times and environment.
Society was strictly hierarchical: the king, queen, aristocracy were at the top. Then there were the successful burghers, then the artisans and craftsmen, then the labourers and farmers, then the poor, the outcast, the criminals and the prostitutes. They all had children, they all loved, raised and educated them.
Just as children, teens and tweens get to see the vicarious brutality of computer games, social media and pornography, the children of the fifteenth century witnessed daily brutality in la carne viva, or in living flesh: executions, public floggings and beatings, fights and brawls, and the undisguised horrors of the vast teeming numbers of the disenfranchised. It was not considered cruel or unusual to mistreat animals, or beat up Jews and Muslims, or mock the disabled and poor.
As I mentioned in yesterday's post, the church had bartered its spiritual power for secular political and military authority. The Christ they proclaimed and from whom they claimed their legitimacy remained remote and crucified afresh, inaccessible from the crucifixes suspended behind the high altars. The pope, the clergy and the monastics were all, or almost all, but for the rare authentic saint, corrupt.
I remember when, as a boy of twelve, I saw one August evening while out for a solitary walk in my neighbourhood, a severed human leg marinating in the blood of the man it had been torn from in a motorcycle accident, right in the driveway of the hospital emergency. The leg had been severed from just below the knee. It was the well-formed, strong leg of a young man, still swaddled in denim. The year would have been 1968. Now, almost fifty years later, I still have that image, as clear and strong as when I first saw it. This is something that I will never be able to unsee. I was traumatized.
Now, to imagine the childhood of a citizen of Seville or Toledo, witnessing public cruelty and legislated murder and living, playing and walking among such squalor as we can only imagine; being held hostage to terror by a Catholic theocracy every bit as insidious as ISIS, monstrous as the Taliban and dangerous as Al-Qaeda, all rolled up in one. Imagine the role models and mentors of these boys: knights who killed wantonly, the Crusaders, the Grand Inquisitor. Imagine the absolute hatred they had been steeped in against Jews and Muslims and anyone else who was not a good, white, obedient Catholic.
Visualize these boys as young men, just leaving adolescence, on boats and ships of adventure into unknown seas and lands: boats captained and led by Columbus, Cortez, and Pizarro. Imagine, what would have been sensitive, kind and frightened young men, now despoiled of their humanity by the horrors that have shaped and moulded them, coming against entire civilizations and cultures of complete strangers with differently coloured skin, different histories, customs, values and every bit as human as they.
With their superior weapons, their license to kill and plunder from Queen Isabel and King Fernando, and their mandate from the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, to gain pliant and submissive souls for Holy Mother Church they marched into Mexico, the Caribbean and South America and inflicted the hate and horror of their dehumanization on the Aztec, the Inca, and other nations and tribes, visiting and exponentially multiplying the trauma of their nurturing onto the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
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