Immunity is now a filthy word, but once it wasn’t, not to me. I’ve long been convinced of my immunity to post-traumatic stress and its disorder. But the other day, I realized this is not so. Or, rather, the accumulation of traumatic events has affected me.
Postponement. I postpone tasks. Right now, I’ve a blouse needing dry cleaning sitting on a chair. It’s been thus reposing for a few weeks. Our local cleaner is in the building’s basement. No effort required to get the blouse down there.
But the blouse isn’t down there getting that spot removed.
Other things here aren’t where they should be, or ordered in plenty of time. I’m startled by the numbers of meals I can make out of a variety of breads and pastas, how slim I allow the pickings to get before I go shopping.
I’ve been breaking down and flattening boxes all my adult life. So why do I limply claw at one before deciding I’d better do it later? Whenever later is.
So, not for the first time, but for the first personal application, I’ve been facing the traumatic events all of us have lived in and are still living.
One major event alone, such as COVID, sent us all into major, extended stress, but I’m suggesting that we’ve been socked with one event after another. Has there ever been a period in our history when so many traumatic public events have occurred one right after the other?
I think we’re living with serial PTSD.
You probably think I’m being satirical because it is my wont. I’m not, though. It is merely a theory of mine (having theories is also my wont), so see what you think.
Here are the series of traumas which have battered our society:
- December 14, 2012, Sandy Hook Elementary School and all the other mass shootings, especially of children. GOP congress does nothing to restrict guns.
- November 8, 2016, that election. (I’d think even Trump voters were traumatized, in a state of shock.) The four years of that term presented shocks almost every day so maybe each and/or all in accumulation could qualify as traumatic.
- December, 2019. The first information about a deadly virus called COVID that might affect all of us. But like anyone who paid attention to the Ebola scare of 2014, I was pretty confident the CDC and our other health agencies (Ebola occurred during the Obama administration) would limit COVID damage as they did Ebola, with which 11 people in the US were infected and 2 died. Then COVID appeared in Westchester. On March 11, 2020 the WHO certified COVID as a world pandemic. COVID would have been a trauma under any presidential administration. But under Trump? I’m not going to remind us of his daily “briefings.” But I will recall how his bizarre antics caused the death of hundreds of thousands and instigated the death of our national pride and belief in American science.
- May 25, 2020. George Floyd is murdered by a white cop. All such murders before and since are a contemporary trauma recalling American’s still-supporating wound, slavery.
- January 6, 2021. Even if you watched the whole attack on TV, as I did, and then watched the House Select Committee investigation, you probably were as stunned by the individual testimony as I was. The more we learned, the deeper was the trauma. How could this happen in the United States? And it prompted a recurrence of the 2016 trauma: how the fuck did someone like Trump ever worm his way into the White House?
- The Supreme Court Six. Capping off a string of gobbledegook (that’s a word Roberts used in an pro-gerrymander decision so I’m throwing it back in his face) decisions with the immunity one, the Six have cut down voting rights, women’s rights and health, unions and the governmental agencies which developed over the centuries to protect us. Instead they promoted guns, lies, corporations, Christianity, wealth and corruption. I’ve probably left out other sterling decisions. The ones I read parts of kicked me in the teeth. Over and over and over. (Maybe that’s why one of my teeth split and I had to have it extracted.)
And climate change overshadows everything. If you, like me, first became aware of it through Al Gore’s efforts and 2006’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” are you as shocked at the speed of it as I am? This is a major traumatic event, and it’s a rolling one.
♦
That’s my observation for why we might be knocked off balance, losing sanity, clinging at over-simplistics, having rages and fits of despair. Being hyper-hyper-vigilant about maybe the wrong things.
Now I’m going to get expert and professional descriptions, definitions, causation and effects for this syndrome called PTSD.