Community And Trauma 2

We are all Shiva.  We are all creator and destroyer and transformer. Shiva is one of the major Hindu deities, creator, destroyer and transformer.  This is us.  We are so full of baggage stinking of selfish malevolence and craven fear, while so redolent with the promise of virtue, light and goodness.  Where do we begin?

As community, as a collective humanity, we are formidable, tender, murderous, nurturing, threatening, creators and destroyers all.  Think of rape as a metaphor for how something meant to be so life-giving and generative and loving as the sex act can be turned into an ugly act of violence, destructive to the soul of both victim and rapist. 

We are the creator.  The destroyer is us.  We are also transformer.

Today I watched as an aboriginal mother was scolding and at times verbally abusing her energetic toddler on the bus, reminding him repeatedly of how much he pisses her off and dragging and yanking him violently by the arms to settle him back into the stroller from which he liked to escape.  When she got bored with the scolding she eventually began to play with him and I could see the maternal affection finally reveal itself, however shyly, on her face.  She reminded me of my own mother.  And like my own mother I wouldn't be at all surprised if she also beats the crap out of her kid when there are no witnesses.  Hopefully not.  Pardon me, Gentle Reader, as I digress a little bit here, but before everyone became so all-walking-on-eggshells- about not offending our native peoples it was an already given that aboriginal children were frequently taken from their birth parents and adopted out, usually to white families.  I believe that, yes, there was colonization involved in that way of thinking.  However, it was also clear that in some of those families the children were being abused and neglected.  Which isn't to say that all aboriginal families were dysfunctional.  Rather, that the impact of colonization so collectively traumatized our aboriginal peoples that they in many ways were often too emotionally wounded, disadvantaged and psychologically damaged to be able to provide for their own children a decent quality of life.

I only hope that with the fashionable reluctance to continue this practice, that cultural values are not being used as a mere cover for leaving native children in abusive and neglected squalor.  Maybe better to be adopted by White, or Chinese, African, Latino, or South Asian parents who can provide a decent quality of life, and still keep the children in contact with their birth families and culture?  I don't know.  I hate the term political correctness, but I can't think of any other appropriate way of describing the dynamic.

But, White, Aboriginal, or other, I still saw in this frustrated and impatient native woman something very similar to my own German-Canadian mother.  Would it have been better for me had I been adopted out to an aboriginal family where I might have been treated with greater kindness?  Why not?  Common sense is always the first casualty, it seems, of fashionable thought.

I still also imagine that regardless of the dysfunction involved, there is still no place like home.  The people we call family might be abusive, intolerant, oppressive and harmful, but they are still family and our roots.  Still, children sometimes need to be rescued from those very families, aboriginal or not.

Family and social construct and social order were very intact and powerful forces in the lives of the medieval Spaniards and also for the Mexica.  The Church that proclaimed the Gospel of life, redemption and love, also ate alive the burned victims of her inquisitions, just as the Aztec gods, in order to keep maintaining and renewing the cosmos, the earth, and humankind, demanded to be fed human sacrifices in order to be kept themselves alive.

This theme of contrary forces runs throughout the weave and fabric of our humanity.  We are never really fully safe anywhere, and we are always vulnerable to trauma, yet we are still nurtured by those same safe places that harm and ruin us for life.

It only begins to make sense when we come to find and experience in the midst of the cruel paradox the very means of our transformation.

to be continued, Gentle Reader...