Trauma informed

The image carries a meaning in a way very few others do.A squat tower with an ill proportioned and ugly railway gate, it serves as an instantly recognizable shorthand and an indelible stain on the history of our civilization. In the history of past five hundred years, an age of endless empire, of ever more destructive wars and increasingly empowered hatreds, this one image in all its meanings occupies a unique place. This gate opens onto a killing machine capable of  efficiently carrying out a million murders, a large proportion of more than six million murders in the four years between the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the fall of Berlin. Together, the murder and enslavement beyond this gate created the index trauma of our time. We measure other crimes, other catastrophes, and other horrors against this one.

 

Over the last century, we have increasingly come to understand understand the effect of trauma and the consequences of mass violence. We have certainly had no shortage of examples to study. We know trauma experienced by parents affects their children and even grandchildren, and indeed we have an expression to describe this effect: inter-generational trauma. We have seen how memories of abuse, passed down, colour the way many of us see the world. We have seen how residential schools and the "sixties scoop" have lingering effects on Canada's relations with Indigenous nations, how memories of exploitation, from slavery to Jim Crow, poison trust in institutions from criminal justice to medicine for many African Americans. Indeed the word "trauma" has emerged as something of a touchstone for many on the Left, an instant answer and rebuke to anyone who asks why oppressed peoples do not flourish within the structures of the dominant culture.

Somehow, on October 7 of last year, too many people appear to have made no effort whatever to apply their understandings of trauma, both personal and inter-generational. I have read a great deal of commentary from the Left calling for justice in the wake of October 7. Some writings celebrated the breaking of the Gaza fence as an act of liberation. I have seen a great many comments and demonstrations affirming the rights of the Palestinian people, and deploring the extraordinary violence of the Israeli retaliation against Hamas. I have also seen my share of writings attempting to justify Hamas. I have listened for an effort to address the effects of a fresh slaughter on ordinary Jewish people still dealing with the inter-generational trauma of the holocaust, and I have heard, and seen, very little.

To begin with the beginning: trauma means suffering, and ignoring other people's trauma compounds their suffering. We shouldn't do it. If dealing with other people's pain means complicating our political position, accept the complication. If anyone needs another reason to address the violence of October 7 in the context of inter-generational trauma, not to do so makes for an ineffective deescalation technique. Individuals who feel forsaken and rejected have more reason to resort to violence, and less incentive to respond to appeals. If anyone needs a reason to do the work of cultivating empathy for the Jewish community, where we live and in Israel/Palestine, the children of Gaza and, in the long run, all the children of Southwestern Asia will pay the price for continuing war.