Turning Points for a Post-Traumatic America

The Virginia Tech killings are a wrenching reminder of the fragile nature of life and the capricious nature of death. Living or dying can sometimes hinge on something as mundane as hitting the snooze button on the alarm clock and missing class on a day when everyone who showed up for that class died.

I’m reminded of a friend who stayed home from work one morning to care for his distraught girlfriend. Their new puppy, symbolic of the couple’s budding commitment to each other, had been sick throughout the night and the woman didn’t want to leave the dog. My friend, usually keen to get to the office, didn’t want to leave the woman. So they called in sick to their respective jobs at the World Trade Center. It was September 11th.

The America we live in today is often referred to as “Post-911,” the term frequently used to describe the changed and charged political landscape. But in a deeper sense, it speaks of our emotional landscape and all the defining ground between Before and After. We are perhaps more accurately a Post-Traumatic America, living through the symptoms of the still-shell-shocked, living out our individual and collective sense of anxiety, anger, sorrow and helplessness. We are alternately numb and hyper vigilant, withdrawn and confrontational. It’s not surprising that in the years following 9/11, we went to war, became obsessed with celebrities, color-coded our security risks, got fatter and used more antidepressants

As in the weeks following 9/11, the news has been saturated with Virginia Tech stories. Some of that coverage has been informative and reflective, but much of it has been sensational and exploitative. And that coverage has been repetitive and relentless. The newspaper headlines and lead-ins to televised stories have been peppered with the “record breaking” kind of language so characteristic of us. We are a country of “best” and “worst,” of “unprecedented” and “groundbreaking.” We too often calculate our wins and losses by scorecard. The trouble with repeatedly announcing the body count of an event relentlessly referred to as “the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history” is that it invites the public to become indifferent and the deranged to best that score. Meanwhile, the deeper lessons of loss are squandered as we bicker back and forth about who is to blame, or use the opportunity to advance a political agenda or career, or give up entirely and seek numbing comfort in the Anna Nicole saga with a side of fries.

There are many turning points in life. Some of them are met with great intention and others without a second thought. Some of them are presented to us by others, with or without our consent. Every terrible event presents its own turning point, on both an individual and collective level. 9/11 presented such a turning point, but the trauma of it, largely unacknowledged and unprocessed, led us astray in some significant ways, led us deeper into a kind of spiritual Ground Zero. It is no wonder. When we fail to truly acknowledge the trauma of terrible events, when we move too quickly from grief or too slowly from anger, when our desire to triumph over difficult things outstrips our desire to learn from them, we lose a critical piece of ourselves: the ability to become more fully human and humane. We also lose the opportunity to grow up.

We want to be a perennially young country, to have simple, singular resolutions for multiple, complex problems, to be certain, to be right. We want to be entertained and to be left alone. We want, on some level, to believe that violence is outside of ourselves, that there is no connection between the violence in our culture and the violence in our people. We mourn the innocent dead while defending our right to buy ammunition on E-bay. We concede that the killings at Virginia Tech could have happened anywhere, that violence, like life, is random. Yet we also insist that everything happens for a reason.

People often say that “everything happens for a reason” but people less often say what that reason might be and how, or if, they came to discover it. It would be comfortable to believe that the reason my friend called in sick that September morning was because he needed to continue to live, because he had something beautiful and unique to bring into the world. But then, presumably, so too did the people who died.

The reason for, or more precisely, the meaning of our tragedies is found after the fact by the people who are willing to search for it. The depth and quality of the life we live after the loss honors or dishonors who and what was lost and who and what remains. And so much remains: worlds of shadow and light within each of us and within our country.

What, if anything, will we learn from the Virginia Tech killings? Will we use this fresh tragedy as a catalyst for growing up or for simply growing more resigned? Will we continue to elevate the trivial and trivialize the essential? Will we begin to call ourselves to a higher standard of thinking, of conduct, of language, and of decision-making or will we dumb ourselves down, numb ourselves out and carry on?

This morning I saw a banner ad on the internet for Blockbuster. The headline flashed: “One Tragedy—Your One Place to Rent It.” It was an ad for Bobby, the movie about the killing of Robert F. Kennedy.

Of course, it was just an ad for a movie. It has nothing to do with us, nothing to say about us. It’s “topical,” it’s typical: it’s just entertainment. And so, we carry on, no longer young and not yet wise.