Living With Trauma: The Healers, 38

People who live in this country, Canada, come from all over the earth. Even our aboriginal inhabitants are relatively recent arrivals, having come here some twenty thousand years ago from the Asian continent. The Americas did not cradle the origins of our species. Life on these continents, North and South America, until the beginning of the last twenty millennia, developed and evolved untouched by human presence. This makes the Western Hemisphere somehow special, and somehow tragic. Our human species had already been set in motion for almost two million years, and in its then (and now) current form, for well over one hundred thousand years, when the first invaders from other continents set foot on this side of the Bering Strait, or on any Pacific Coast of these continents. Even in pre-civilization our species was a force to be reckoned with. While physically vastly inferior in strength or acuity, we had the larger and superior brains. Even in our pre-civilized "innocence" we were wreaking havoc everywhere we trod, bringing on species' extinction and environmental destruction. Our knowledge of fire and need for fuel sources already gave us a head start on deforestation and contaminating the air. What our ancestors had to their advantage was their lack of numbers and technological advancement. It only took us a few thousand years to develop so in numbers and in technology as to pose a major and mortal threat to all other life forms and the future viability of our Mother Earth to continue sustaining life. There has always been something wrong in the way we humans are wired. We are too intelligent for our own good, yet far too stupid for the good of our planet. Much of the earth was still in the grip of the last ice age when the first humans crossed over to what is now Alaska. That was when large mammals roamed the earth: woolly mammoths and rhinos, giant bears, and much further south, giant sloths and giant armadillos to name but a few. The new human arrivals, evidently, took them all. There are several different theories around this mass ice age species extinction, and even if our kind was not entirely responsible for their destruction, it can easily be argued that they played a not insignificant role. What I am arguing here, Gentle Reader, is that if ever there was a Golden Age of Human Innocence, it is likely so removed in the most distant past around the time of the very origins of our humanity, that it can only be guessed at. That such an epoch of original innocence ever existed is more than likely, given how encoded this primeval myth is in our collective unconscious. We generally look to the creation myths and stories in our religions and cultural belief systems for this. Even if there was no Adam and Eve in a Garden of Eden, we still have in the Biblical Creation Story a kind of an idea being sketched out about what may have happened. Even if you don't believe there is a God, something must have happened very early in our prehistory that would turn us into such extremely smart and oh, such destructive little monsters. Suffice to say, when our first parents ate of the forbidden fruit, they became conscious and intelligent beings. They also developed a sense of shame over their alleged nakedness, or perhaps of their human vulnerability. Needless to say, they were expelled from the garden, smarter but not necessarily wiser. So human intelligence has developed collectively as human civilization. All the achievements of civilization throughout the ages shine with the evidence of superior human intelligence: writing, metallurgy, art, music, literature, science, statecraft, religion, architecture, textiles, electricity, automation, computer technology. We became like gods condemned to death, and this because all our achievements, and all our successes have been wanting for one particular detail. Unconditional Love.