Collective Trauma: The Fallout 10

It isn't that we are bad or horrible or completely, hopelessly and irredeemably depraved. We are simply damaged, and sometimes this festering collective wound to our shared humanity can turn cancerous and then we become evil. We have many lessons of history to illustrate my point: the Nazi Holocaust, for one; the genocides of Cambodia and Rwanda also come to mind; so do some of the small-scale, less dramatic examples that we run across every day, like some white idiot yelling racist slurs at a person of colour in small town Canada, or the current choice of president in the Oval Office. The beast goes on. We never seem to fail at finding new ways of hating each other. We never seem to get sick enough of it to really change. Likewise in our attitudes towards the poor and vulnerable. We were making some real strides in making life more tolerable for people on low incomes, then came the eighties, Reaganomics, Margaret Thatcher, and Brian Mulroney, all puppets and pawns of the global neoliberal agenda to make the planet safe for greed and an impoverished hell for the rest of us who didn't quite make it. Even now that, here in Canada at least, we have finally a more progressive government, as we also do in my province and in my city, for some reason the poor and homeless are always taking a back seat for sports stadiums and bike lanes. Now I don't care a rat's ass about sports stadiums. I do like bike lanes. But everyone needs a roof over their head before all else and our dumb blonde mayor and his dumb blonde city council never once thought of treating homelessness like the humanitarian catastrophe that it is, thus allocating funds that otherwise would have gone to his various vanity projects, and by now everyone in this city would be decently housed and the greedy swine and money launderers who have helped push up our land prices way past the stratosphere would have their sorry ass kicked all the way back to China or wherever they happen to hale from and our homegrown swine and douchebags would be finally rotting in a jail cell specially made for them. Our collective woundedness has somehow stymied our compassion and has conveniently freed us from our common sense. We are still programmed, it seems, to survive at all costs and to trample into the mud anyone who gets in our way. This is how a legacy of starvation, privation, violence, and fear is going to affect people and that is our human heritage. No matter how well we end up doing in life, our genes and our brains, our very DNA seem to be so altered by this collective trauma that is our human condition that there appears to be no healing balm or remedy available to staunch that wound, cleanse it and make us whole. Only love is going to cure us and we do have that capacity, and if we choose not to limit it to our own blood kin, our own friends, skin colour, religion, nationality....But how can a race of miserables such as ourselves possibly reach that high. But reach high we must or we will end up flushing ourselves down that black hole. I still think that we are capable of better, but we just get lazy and ornery. I think that there is such a thing as divine, universal love, otherwise we wouldn't be here to dicker about his existence. I also believe that we are capable of the kind of humility that will motivate us to submit to the inevitability of love so that he (or she, or they, to satisfy the politically correct proof readers) can actually enter our lives, transform our lives, and change us into people that love. I am not talking about religion, though it certainly can play a role. If we are going to survive the challenges of this era we are going to have to change and radically. Otherwise we will get flushed down the toilet before the devil even has time to wipe his butt. Thanks for reading, Gentle Reader. No comments.