Healing Trauma: perspectives And Attitudes, 38

Every Saturday I seem to walk past the Canadian Memorial United Church on Burrard and West Fifteenth Avenue, here in my lovely, horrendously overpriced and overrated city of Vancouver. They have a message board on the lawn, which every couple of weeks has something new on it. Some of the messages are pretty good, some not so great, others, meh. The one I saw yesterday particularly caught my attention. Here it is, as I recall it: "Pride makes us artificial. Humility makes us real." I have seen and experienced and lived the truth of those words over and over in my life, pride and artificiality and humility and being real. Generally it's been one coming after the other, or, pride goeth before the fall, as the old sages used to warn us. It seems that one of the surest shortcuts to humility is pride. Exalt yourself, and you will be humbled. It is the natural order of things. I will say this much in commentary: humility makes us real because we have nothing to be proud about. We are small, weak and insignificant. That's right, all you pop-psychologist self-esteemers. You have created a generation of entitled spoiled little monsters and the fact of the matter is so simple and so very hard for a lot of you to swallow: it is getting our ass kicked that makes us human, makes us real, reminds us that we are not the perfect little gods we were brought up to believe. I am also thinking of this relative to yesterday's entry where I mentioned my futile exchange with Sergio, the prissy arrogant Spaniard commenting on YouTube about the inferiority of his Latin American brethren. Over and over, I have encountered this kind of arrogance among most of the Spanish people of my acquaintance (they're not all that bad, by the way.) I will post here my comment on Yahoo from three years ago: "I can't speak for all Spanish people, having never been to Spain, but I've done a lot of language work here in Vancouver with people from all over the Spanish speaking world. This is what I've found: Colombians, Mexicans and Central Americans tend to be the kindest, and most reliable. Mexicans are particularly tactful. I have done well with only one native Spaniard out of, say, almost ten: the others I've found to be prejudiced against Latin American Spanish speakers, generally unreliable and thin-skinned. I'm sure they're not all like that, but just sayin'." Since turfing out the Moors in the fifteenth century, Spain has never been occupied, invaded or conquered. They have been the occupiers, the invaders, the conquerors. They murdered, infected with disease, starved and committed the most loathsome acts of genocide against millions of indigenous inhabitants of the Americas. Yes, I know, so did the English further north, but on this page we are discussing the Spanish, Gentle Reader. I do not believe that there is any record of any apology coming from the Spanish government to the Americas and especially for the aboriginal peoples of Mexico, Central and South America for the barbarities and atrocities that were committed. This likely is never going to happen, just as it is highly unlikely that the Roman Catholic Church is ever going to apologize for the Inquisition (a Spanish invention) I believe that the ontological arrogance of their rulers and governments, past and present, has done much to damage and traumatize the collective psyche of the Spanish people. I have written elsewhere that cruelty and abuse is also traumatizing to the inflictors as well as their victims. Terrified of facing their crimes, their sins, their capacity for doing and being wrong, they become arrogant, haughty and artificial. They become, as it were, less than human, shadows of the human soul. We have seen already some of the results of the imperfect and very difficult processes of truth and reconciliation going on in South Africa, and here in Canada between our government, the churches and our aboriginal peoples. This is not easy, and people have to face their darkness and their own shadow if they are going to move on. The German people had to do this following the atrocities against Jews and others during the Second World War. The Japanese still refuse to do this regarding their role in that war (they are quick to play the victim, though, and rightly so, about the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Germany now is the most vibrant and robust nation in the European Union, and I think this is a fruit of repentance. The Japanese are aging to death, do not accept immigrants, and remain an insular and racist culture. The Spanish? They struggle on as a country with high unemployment, a staggering economy, huge influxes of immigration from African countries, and a collective racist and xenophobic mentality. The Franco dictatorship set that country backwards by several decades. The historical geographic isolation of the Iberian Peninsula with the Pyrenees cutting them off from the rest of Europe was another contributing factor, along with their traditional entrenched arrogance as conquistadores and as defenders of the Catholic faith. Even though the church isn't as strong in Spanish life as before (indeed, I would guess that a huge proportion of the younger generations are secular, agnostic or atheist), the legacy of intransigence and arrogance remains deeply rooted in the Spanish psyche. There has never been a collective repentance for the genocidal abuse committed in the Americas. The Catholic Church is as cozy with them as two peas in a pod. It is very ironic that the same institution that claims to represent Christ, whose faith is founded upon repentance, will likely never look in that mirror themselves. Even now, the popes and the cardinals drag their holy asses about dropping protections for pedophile priests, cardinals and bishops. I will conclude this little essay with a comment about repentance, the joy-filled life. This is a line borrowed from Basilea Schlink, who was the leader of an interdenominational Christian community in Germany. Repentance, in this context, has nothing to do with shame, or self-punishment. It has everything to do with bravely facing the truth and the consequences of our wrong choices and actions, and changing the direction of our lives into paths that are life-affirming and positive for ourselves and others. It is a joy-filled life because upon repentance, forgiveness is accepted and given and this sets us free to move forward.