I imagine that if, historically speaking, we are all traumatized, then this also begs the question, how did we get to where we are now? Older people often lament about how soft and useless today's young people are. This is the same complaint that seems to be heard generation after generation. It was likely on the lips of the elders of Ancient Greece much as it is the bitch de jour of our current batch of geezers.
Are we really softer and more delicate than our parents were? In a word, yes. My parents' generation worked a lot harder. They did not have the lovely machines and computer technology that are now making manual labour obsolete. They did back-breaking work, ploughing fields, digging ditches, building, hauling goods, fixing things.
They lived with tremendous uncertainty: the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War. No one knew who would press the button that would end everything. Crying and whining, for both genders, were considered shameful. You manned up, sucked it up and got on with life.
There were casualties. In World War I shell-shocked troops were often shot on sight for cowardice. There was no vocabulary for PTSD. Weakness was despised. It was all Darwinian. Natural Selection.
I don't want to go back to those times. But I think that we've taken the other extreme and that we have completely and absolutely whussed-out. We are a generation that fears and hates death, and any other kind of certainty that renders obsolete whatever false certainty we try to filtre our lives through. We have become soft, delicate, timorous little sissies, and there is a real and present danger that helicopter parents who want to shield their darling progeny from all the hurts and blows of life are on their way to creating one of the most neurotic and psychologically paralyzed generations ever known to humankind.
Life was not valued even a hundred years ago like it is valued now in our lovely liberal democracies. We don't want to lose this gain. But we also need to toughen up. It is great that capital punishment is now abolished in the majority of countries and that war crimes are prosecuted and that deserters and other traumatized soldiers are no longer being shot for cowardice. It is also laud-worthy that our huge advances in medicine have so reduced the rate of infant and birth mother mortality that no one expects it to happen anymore.
I am thinking how when a child dies it is considered the ultimate tragedy that could befall a mother and father, since there is the expectation that children are going to outlive their parents and that life and the generations are going to go on. But there was a time when people were not blessed with this kind of certainty.
Until the mid-eighteenth century, when doctors began to wash their hands, infant mortality, depending on place and social class would range anywhere from twenty to fifty percent, as would the likelihood of premature death before age five. Mothers did not have it much better and were generally encouraged to write their will upon first discovering they were pregnant.
This isn't to say that it was any less painful for a mother to lose a child or a father to lose child and wife, but somehow it was an anticipated possibility and everyone sort of rolled with it. Death seemed, generally, way more certain than it is today, and accommodating mortality was simply worked in to the local culture and rhythm of life.
What I mean to say is that until we began to really benefit from our huge advances in science and medical technology no one was really surprised as we are now by the inevitability of death. I think this flexibility and sense of accommodation of the inevitable somehow made our ancestors both tougher and stronger than we are today.
Without losing one iota of the sense of compassion and humanity that we have been acquiring with all our social reforms and scientific progress I think it would also do us good to learn to toughen up again. I am thinking here of my own journey towards full recovery from trauma. Yes, I have had to learn when to take care of myself, rest and avoid stress. By the same token I only really began to move forward when I started taking chances again and allowed myself to risk life. This really began in two distinct phases: when I began working in a tough and emotionally demanding, but hugely rewarding career as a mental health peer support worker, and when I began to travel, alone, in Latin America.
It hasn't always been a cakewalk. Sometimes I am still triggered, when I am sucker-punched by life. My antidote? I am trying to cultivate the expectation that life is full of surprises and that every day the unexpected could hit me, in good ways, in bad ways, maybe both. I also have a strong redemptive attitude about misfortune and I have come to believe and to know to be true that it doesn't matter how horrible or unfair the unexpected blow might be. There will always be something good to be extracted from the experience.
I think that if we can come into this kind of balance then we are more likely to do well as we stumble forward from life, through life and towards life. Together.
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