When a human experiences a severe trauma while young, it will manifest itself in unpredictable ways, but it will. PTSD is real and almost always negative, frequently severely debilitating. There is no ignoring it. We're still learning how to treat this disorder, but it seems addressing the root cause is critical, as well as managing the symptoms and destructive damaging behaviors.
A country or a people is the same way. When it has undergone serious trauma, like Slavery and the Civil War which sought to end it, the healing is going to be a long-term endeavor, and not directly dealing with the deep wounds requires taking an unflinching look at the lacerations and inflammation is not enough, just as in a physical injury. Risk of infection exists with the potential to deeply harm the nation. I believe inadequate healing is what we are suffering from, and any denial will leave diseased tissue. It requires a solution that, like a general antibiotic that travels throughout the whole organism, it heals the infection nation-wide.
Maybe someone wants to develop a cancer analogy that works. But the unrest in and around the country are, in my view, a natural flare up from a function of our inability to truly look at who we are as a nation, what we've done to wrong ourselves, and do what it really takes to return to full "mental" health as a nation.
We are suffering because we have continued to impose suffering on sectors of our population, and the protests are a natural expression of pain. We know it's there, and it's not going away until we, all of us, bring our full resources to bear.
No comments:
Post a Comment