What Is Trauma? 21

A perfect world.  How would you like to live in one, Gentle Reader?  What, for you would make a perfect world?  What kind of people would inhabit a perfect world?  What kind of person would you be?  Don't expect to be the way you are now. 

If we want a perfect world (and we're not going to have one, at least not in my lifetime and probably not in yours!) then there will be one particular condition that will have to be met.  We are all going to have to be willing to change.  To give up our selfishness.  To give up on being narcissists.  To give up our apathy.  To quit being idle, passive consumers. To give up our greed.  To give up our vindictiveness.  To give up our hatred.  We are also going to have to compromise on our individualism and learn to balance our sense of personal human rights with social and communitarian responsibilities and obligations.

Still want a perfect world?

Life for most of us, throughout our troubled history, has never been easy.  There have always been the natural kickers: earthquakes, forest fires, floods. inclement weather, wild beasts, famine and disease.  It could well be the trauma that afflicted our ancestors as they had to endure generation after generation of heartache, want and necessity that gave rise to some of our less flattering human qualities, which in turn have generated so many problems and so much grief for our species generation after generation.

If we could somehow become kinder, gentler, less selfish and more willing to serve and care for one another, more courageous, and more peaceful then I think we would be well on our way to establishing here on this sorry and wounded earth of ours the New Jerusalem.

This, alas, is nowhere in sight.

We have only whatever clumsy, slow and stumbling steps forward that we can proffer, always countered by Orwell's grim prophesy of the boot stamping on a human face.  The tension that results is enormous, but not necessarily insurmountable.

I say this: accept the imperfection, the trouble and the woundedness that have become our perpetual human reality.  Only one thing: that we not acquiesce, that we refuse to resign ourselves to this horrible fate as something inevitable.

It is true that we all stand on the shoulders of giants.  Those brave individuals throughout history that have gone before us, often to an early grave, in their zeal and vision for a better and more just world.  Indeed, without those visionaries, those heroes, we would still have institutionalized slavery; there would be no democracy, no progressive liberal values; we would be ruled by tyrants; we would always be at war; the vast majority of us would be profoundly impoverished, uneducated and illiterate; we would be at the mercy of every disease that swept through our communities; women would be treated like domestic slaves, personal whores and baby machines; infant mortality would be widespread and the average human lifespan would be less than forty years.

The quality of life for your average human, throughout the world, has improved exponentially, even though there is still poverty, inequality, hunger and despots.  But those ills are yet fewer and scarcer than ever.

We are still, as it were, a deeply troubled and traumatized humanity.  We seem to be finally, in this past century, discovering and obtaining some of the tools of our healing and for the healing of our ravaged and wounded earth, but in tandem with our enhanced capability of destroying our Mother Earth and ourselves and all other species through exponential nuclear annihilation and environmental destruction through human caused climate change.

Time is now very short.

In my next few blogposts, I want to explore some ideas for healing our trauma.  Stay tuned.

And keep those comments coming in!