Okay, Gentle Reader, and I can just hear all of you snapping, gnashing your teeth and hissing with indignant whispers, "Alright already! I get it. So we're all walking wounded, we're all traumatized, we're all more screwed than a hooker on a busy work night!" So what do you want we should do-cry?"
Well, that would be a start. Maybe while you're reaching for your hankies you might also consider the kind of false positions we put ourselves and one another in by the way we label ourselves and one another.
As I have been studying the cruel and bloody conquest of the Americas, whether by British or Spanish, there is one stark fact that keeps flying in my face: life has always been difficult, hard and full of surprises, almost all of them nasty. Our human species has survived and thrived against all odds. It should be counted a miracle that we still even exist.
How could anyone get through unscathed this unforgiving business of being human? Our earliest ancestors had to survive getting eaten by larger and much stronger animals in Africa. As they began wave upon wave of migration to other lands there were constant risks of drowning, starvation, thirst, warfare with other tribes and subspecies and species of humans. There were the ice ages that threatened the destruction of all life on this earth.
As family groups formed clans, and clans bands, and bands tribes, there was going to be the inevitable competition for land, food and resources. So war was invented. There also remained the constant and perpetual struggles, rivalries and conflicts between individuals, often for dominance or simply to be left in peace.
In the meantime our evolving and expanding brains were making us all the more clever and inventive and creative as we discovered and harnessed fire, made tools, and weapons, and better, more effective weapons for hunting and also for killing each other. Eventually came agriculture and the desire to protect property and resources from invasion and theft. Textiles were developed and metals were forged to make better tools and more effective weapons for killing each other. The wheel was invented, writing was invented thus hastening the development and expansion of culture and commerce. One thing kept leading to another: villages, towns, cities and nations. And new inventions. And war. Inventions for starting wars, waging wars and ending wars. Gunpowder, steam power, fossil fuels, electricity. Better and bigger armies, guns, bombs, chemical warfare and ultimately...
nuclear weapons...
And now we have the capacity, many times over, of wiping out of existence all of humanity and every other form of life that coexists on this planet. Many times over...
I haven't bothered to mention here climate change due to global warming.
Throughout our developing history we have become particularly hobbled by fear: fear of the ravages of nature, fear of foreign armies, fear of one another, fear of ourselves, fear of our own shadow. We all have the capacity of doing better, of being better. Most of us would rather spend our lives running from pain or of gaining dominance over others.
If we are going to consider the reality of trauma we have to take this beyond individuals with diagnoses of PTSD and look for and find the problem where it has always existed: the dysfunctionality of our broken, wounded and fallen human nature. We are collectively wounded and we have to begin owning this if we are to see any real healing occur in the human psyche.
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