Gratitude 141

Rising above trauma is essential for getting on with life.  It isn't easy and there are going to be those who will be more successful than others.  Overcoming trauma is going to be even more complicated for the collective than for the individual, especially because within the collective will be persons who are more successful than others, moreover, the quality of success is going to be determined by the environment they are living in.  Throughout Latin America there are nations very unequal to each other in many details: the quality of democracy (given that it already exists), the absence of corruption, respect for the rule of law, the economy, respect for human rights, the state of the natural environment, the lack of crime, and violence, the state of public health, opportunities for advanced education, and social and economic equality.

Chile, despite its cruel and bloody legacy from the years of the Pinochet dictatorship, now enjoys a very high quality of life, as well as an extremely robust economy, as do Uruguay and Argentina. Those nations suffered tremendously because of the devastations from the military through the seventies and eighties, the governments and their militaries murdered tens of thousands of their own citizens and drove into exile many more, for example, with Chile, more than two hundred thousand of their own citizens.

There is great hope that the people of Colombia can finally move forward with their process of reconciliation.  Venezuela has become a madhouse until the controversies brought on by Nicolas Maduro can be resolved and that something resembling true democracy can return to that country.  I an under the impression that other countries have struggled tremendously under tremendous oppression and exploitation since the Conquistadores five hundred years ago.

The violence that has rocked for many years Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras has its origins in some of the recent problems caused by the narco-traffickers, moreover the civil wars where they have their roots.  But the legacy of inequality and exploitation and violence have been the ingredients of the founding of such countries, to which are owed the consequences of the Spanish conquest.

What I want to understand is this: why the violence?  Why such violence and barbarism to carry out the will of the nations throughout the history of our sad and broken world?  Only in the last seventy years, following the most brutal war of our entire human history are we finally talking seriously about peace, of how to bring about nonviolent measures in our international and interpersonal relations,  I want to know why we have been so slow to learn such essential lessons to our human survival.

Concerning those who overcome trauma, there are those who are very strong and very capable of surviving almost anything and such individuals are going to be greatly needed if we want to move forward as a society.  Even the strongest among us are going to need therapeutic interventions.  It is only too easy for the strongest survivors to inflict on other vulnerable parties the same kind of cruel treatment that others inflicted on them.  Only through education, through coming to know our history very well and our own guilt as well as our own capacity for being cruel are we going to avoid repeating the madness of our history, and then we can move forward to create a new world.