Are we the walking wounded?
Please don't let the word "trauma" stop you from considering this. It is overused, I know, and people have good reason to be tired of that overuse.
However, psychological trauma is a real phenomenon. And that there are degrees of trauma—being gang-raped in war, for example, is much more extreme than many other traumas—does not mean the lesser traumas don't occur.
How much of what I'm going to describe is only projection, and how much of it is accurate detection of a shared state with others, I don't know. You'll have to judge that for yourself.
I think we in America are traumatized by the past four years acutely. I think this is true regardless of whether a person is on the left, the right, or somewhere else politically.
Nearly everything we thought was stable and normal has been shown to be an illusion. We saw our government lie on a massive scale to take away our constitutional rights because of "the pandemic." We heard our President threaten us for not taking a vaccine. We saw our economy destroyed and our money plunge in value.
We reacted by losing our minds. We dropped all norms. People decided not to go back to work. People decided to run red lights as a matter of course, and to stop using the "small" courtesies that get us through the day as a society instead of Thunderdome.
At least an entire generation of children was not schooled at all; they were indoctrinated and now actually cannot read or do simple arithmetic.
There's so much more, but you can fill it in for yourself.
Now, barely a week after a former president was almost assassinated on live TV, the mood of the country is as if that never happened (I've never seen anything like this in my lifetime).
Recently I understood that the past year and a half, especially, left me traumatized again. Please don't hear melodrama in that; I'm trying to be honestly descriptive, not to invoke a pity party.
My childhood has given me a pretty heavy load of emotional baggage, but the recent past has added to it. It has set me back. People with PTSD are already less able to cope well with new dangers, and my experience pulled the scab off old wounds and re-injured some of them.
Many have lost more than me, yes. Still, I've lost enough to feel it. The cancellation campaign that started within the organization I worked for for 20 years hurt me more than I've understood until recently. Already mistrustful, I have almost no capacity to trust at all anymore.
My story isn't unique; this and worse has happened to millions. I lost not only my career and security, but relationships that spanned two decades. People I trusted enough to sleep in their homes while traveling, well, they abandoned me, and they helped others ruin my reputation.
Six months later, a historic flood wiped out half my house and cost me almost $60,000 out of pocket, money that's a huge sum to me.
Today in 2024, the world is not any more stable than it has been for the past four years. In some ways it's even less stable and normal. There's not much to look to for hope, or just a moment of peace.
All of this has left me depleted, reactive, defensive, and frightened.
I think something like this is probably true for millions of Americans right now.
When we look around and say to ourselves, "How is it possible that people are acting this way?", a big part of the answer may be that our countrymen are walking around with real trauma that's not being realistically acknowledged.
I saw your post about this on X and I commented so I guess I will put the comment here as well. Really, what you are saying is so important.
Those of us who stood up for the truth lost everything. I started looking into it deeply when COVID first started and I was living in Luxor, Egypt, where life went on as normal. That part was great but for other reasons, because I stood up against a violent mob of men, life became dangerous and I barely got out of the country alive. I started writing about the psychological abuse we are all facing at the hands of what I call the "gods of tech and pestilence".
We can understand it better if we consider menticide.
“Menticide” is a “killing of the mind and the spirit.” Joost Meerloo explains this in his book, The Rape of the Mind:
“Menticide is an old crime against the human mind and spirit but systematized anew. It is an organized system of psychological intervention and judicial perversion through which a [ruling class] can imprint [their] own opportunistic thoughts upon the minds of those [they] plan to use and destroy.”
In order to accomplish this, the elite must manufacture waves of fear within the populace. Each wave is followed by a period of relative calm, but after each calm, the fear is brought back even stronger next time.
Joost further explains:
“Each wave of terrorizing . . . creates its effects more easily – after a breathing spell – than the one that preceded it because people are still disturbed by their previous experience. Morality becomes lower and lower, and the psychological effects of each new propaganda campaign become stronger; it reaches a public already softened up.”
Emotion, without reasoned thought to temper it, becomes the automatic response and, we feel, justifiably so. Meerloo again:
“Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot—it confuses those who think straight. The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal … than logic and reason. While the [people] are still searching for a reasonable counterargument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault [them]with another.”
If we understand this, it helps. Because it isn't going to get better. It will get worse. Now with AI we no longer can tell what it true and what isn't. We have to become stronger mentally, spiritually
I'm not the same person I was before 2020. Part of my soul was killed and can never come back. The world I knew is gone, forever, and the left wants it that way. Their forces of evil conspire daily to figure out ways to make it worse, and worse, until we are crushed. If anyone thinks that's overdramatic, too bad.