This Trauma Will Change Us — But We’ll Never Know How

Something very intense is happening in America. I am in touch with enough people, and with the picture of all that has been happening in America since Trump regained the Presidency, to declare with confidence that many millions of Americans are feeling very different in their lives, in their country, in their world than they have ever felt before.

This is a special kind of history — when a whole lot of people are going through the same profound stress, even trauma, at the same time. At any given moment, many people will be dealing with something profoundly difficult — a diagnosis of terminal illness, the death of a spouse, and the like. But in America today, it is not unique nightmares sprinkled through the population. It is many millions of people feeling the same kinds of fear and pain and rage and incomprehension.

What have the effects been of this shared bit of wrenching history, as people watch a duly elected President take a wrecking ball to the nation? People say things like: “I never thought I’d see anything like this happen in my country.” “A lot of this will be impossible to repair, or will take generations.” “Are any of us going to be safe?” So much that was of value about the America we knew can no longer be taken for granted as the America we will be living in from now on.

What is happening to the American consciousness — its heart and soul and worldview — as it is being changed under the impact of such a profound blow to one’s sense of the world?

Psychologists have told me they are seeing more people struggling with anxiety. But I have also been told that the most important changes wrought by such collective nightmares take considerable time to form, and that the causal connections are subterranean and largely invisible.

Take the American Civil War.

The experience of the Civil War was huge for America. A whole generation went through a long, brutal nightmare. The death toll, relative to the population, was far greater than even that of World War II. A whole region of the country was left in ruins. Americans had spent years trying to kill one another.

It is widely understood that the Civil War greatly changed the United States. Yet historians have largely been left to speculate about how, in 1890, the mind, heart, spirit, and soul of America differed from what they would have been had there been no Civil War.

Such reverberations take place in a deep, dark sea of human affairs, with many forces operating and many aspects of culture changing at the same time.

We will probably never really know how this Trump nightmare is changing Americans and the nation itself.
• We will always be a nation in which a president – – to name but one example of unprecedented actions — once sent armed and masked forces into American cities — only those governed by his opponents — to violate constitutional rights, terrorize the citizenry, and compel submission to his will.
• We will never again regard the Rule of Law as something securely established.
• And who knows how long it will be before Americans can again regard each other as their “fellow Americans,” rather than as enemies?

I wish I knew how all this will influence what kind of society we are becoming. As with the Civil War, we will see a complex society change in major ways over several decades, but we will not know how much of what we find — more cynicism, more distrust, more bitter political conflict — is the result of how the trauma ramified through the culture over time, and how much is simply where the evolving society was heading anyway.

Would the Age of the Robber Barons have been any less exploitative had the Civil War not occurred? Was that age as corrupt as it was because trauma had damaged the nation’s moral sentiments?

In both cases, divisions among the people are intense, the struggle is waged as if the very definition of the nation is at stake, and politics no longer operates as an arena for compromise. And in both cases, the trauma of so high-stakes a battle runs so deep that one can assume such a collective experience will produce deep and lasting changes in the future minds, hearts, and souls of the nation.

After the Civil War, people did not forget which side you were on while the killing was happening. I can imagine a future America in which the question, “Which side were you on while Trump was doing all those destructive things?” continues to shape the social spirit of the nation.

As a Yankee living in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, I can testify that the divisions of the Civil War have persisted for more than a century and a half.

Or will Americans be able to do a better job of binding up the nation’s wounds?

One aspect of healing would be people who had been led astray coming back onto the proper American path. (Though, regrettably, I can testify that after the Civil War the side of America that fought for the Slave Power largely refused to embrace the truth about what its Lost Cause actually represented.)

But the other part of America also has a chance to change for the better. As a result of having lived through this, the Liberal (and pro-Democracy) side of the nation might learn the importance of vigilance in the protection of a healthy democracy. And one of the ways this trauma might lead to that improvement is for Liberal America to have come to recognize what might be called the Reality of Evil.

At the level of the spirit, one group of Americans needs to learn not to mistake evil for good; while the other side of this divided nation needs to learn that there is a Problem of Evil, and that addressing it requires recognizing it.