198. NOT DEALING WITH TRAUMA - Why We Need to do Some Work Before Returning to Normal
After 9/11 happened I wrote then about how odd it was that millions of people had watched a massacre on live TV but received no counselling for the trauma they had witnessed. Thousands dead as buildings collapsed in front of our eyes and the next day it was just back to work. Back to normal.
I always thought that the wars that followed might have been prevented had we all just been given some grief counselling.
As I watch the world seem to blow itself up a little more everyday in recent years - from the election of Troll-in-Chief Trump to the daily divisiveness of our social media discourse with each other - I think a lot about the pandemic. Those weeks and months where bodies were stacking up as hospitals were overwhelmed with scared and sick people forced to die alone for fear of spreading the virus further to their nearest and dearest. Zoom calls to say goodbye. Streamed last rites. Confusion and fear. Masks and lock downs. The world we knew up until 2020 tipped completely upside down. Jobs lost or transformed to fit somehow impossibly into our homes. Homes which started to feel like prisons. Prisons which had to let free its prisoners for fear of them becoming sites of mass infection. Norms overturned and ways of life forced into transformation. Adapt or die.
I wonder, again, how strange it is that we all went through so much - the losses, both of lives and of basic human freedoms and social interactions - and how we saw so many terrible things, and yet as soon as possible we were forced back to ‘normal’. Barely ever talking about those lost years where everything we once held to be solid and true was proved to be tenuous and unstable. No counselling to deal with how utterly crazy it was to transform the world overnight and learn to live in a new normal (a normal which included mass graves and hospitals full to breaking because of an unknown and invisible disease no one quite knew how to contain) and then try to pretend like nothing happened.
Of course the thesis suffers a bit from the fact that some of the significant moves in the start of the world blowing itself up was the first election of Trump in 2016 and Brexit in the UK, a full four years before the pandemic. But actually those events, though catalysts for much horror to come, could arguably be described as good faith gestures from those who voted for them, still clinging on to a world where slogans on the side of buses from leading politicians really could be believed and America might actually be made great again. A mistake that, had we been properly adjusted peoples, we might have learnt from.
And what Trump and Brexit have in common, as with the pandemic’s Chinese origins and the 9/11 attacks genesis in the Middle East, is that unending unattended trauma: racism. Colonialism. Empire. Prejudice. Slavery. Fingers pointing at new ‘others’ blamed for everything that is wrong because we haven’t yet learnt the appropriate tools for pointing them at ourselves. Mexicans, Europeans, the Chinese, the Iraqis, the Afghanis, the Democrats, the Republicans, the Leavers, the Remainers, the mask-wearers, the anti-vaxxers… Always a finger ready to point at a group who are not like us because we have never actually dealt with the undeniable history of baked in racism and discrimination at the heart of our social structures and institutions.
We do not get the therapy we need. The time to properly reflect and be vulnerable with the truth of all of our inherited trauma. We just get told to move on and stop thinking about it. Get back to normal.
And now normal is what happens when we live so long in denial about our generational wounds that they fester and metastasise into something ugly and, possibly, untreatable.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. It would make a great Christmas present for that special someone in your life!
My academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here.
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I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.
Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com
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