AMERICA THE TRAUMATIZED

Step 1 is admitting the problem

I grew up thinking that my childhood was “normal.” During those years, I never talked to my friends about “the things best unmentioned,” and they never did, either. Not till years later. So I thought it was “normal” that my mother was always screaming at us, that it was “normal” for me to cower in the corner behind my bed with a chair pushed against my door while she raged through a bedroom in which a young girl and a young boy were raised together until the girl was 9 and the boy was 6. I thought it was “normal” that my father spent nearly all his time at home down in his basement workshop, only to emerge raging at us when Mommie Dearest screamed loudest at us for some moral failure we had committed that embarrassed her and proved “you’re a bad, bad boy!” I thought it was “normal” that - upon meeting the boy who would be my best friend in childhood when his family moved in across the street after leaving Salt Lake City and learning that people didn’t stay where they were all the time - that I began planning to leave and go as far away as I could from Denver (over the years since, people have noted my great interest in airplanes and asked why I joined the Navy instead of the Air Force, to which I reply that the Air Force Base I would have been most likely sent to for training was ten miles from where I grew up, while the nearest Navy base - I had researched this! - was 1,300 miles from Denver). I thought it was “normal” to wake up in the middle of the night and count the ways that I was a “failure” and a “bad person” - “a “moral failure” - as charged by Mommie Dearest. I knew for sure I was a “bad boy” because I could admit at that witching hour that I hated her, and only a “bad boy” would hate his mother.

As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one. My best friend who lived across the street reconnected with me (thank you, internet) 20 years ago, and in conversations with him I discovered that the reason he didn’t ever seem to go upstairs in his house was because if he was in the basement (which was fortunately furnished and even had a second! TV down there) he wasn’t being “ragged on,” as he put it. I never asked for the details; I didn’t have to. Another good friend revealed at the 30th year high school reunion that he had been regularly beaten by his stepmother - is it a surprise he grew up to become a family law specialist in child protection?

There was one actual “normal” kid: my oldest friend, Roz, daughter of my mother’s college roommate. I have a photo of our first meeting - too young to stand on our own and so our mothers are in the photo, holding us upright. I used to always love going over to her house. Her mother became my adopted Aunt Edith. After 35 years of not talking to Roz, when we did it was like taking up from the day before - a sure sign of real friendship. Her memories of us are confirmation that my life actually happened: she remembers how “nervous” my siblings and I would become just before Mommie Dearest came by to pick us up. Aunt Edith was a poet, who was good friends with Allen Ginsberg “back in the day.” It was great, 20 years ago, when Roz put her on the line one day (she was 92), and she told me how she had worried about us, and that one of her great regrets was not saying something at the time. “But you have to remember, in those days that just didn’t happen.”

That phone call and a chiropractor once telling me after taking an X-ray of my lower back - which has always been fucked up and which my mother told me was “genetic” - that the damage there was “old,” that if he saw an X-ray like that today of a child the law would require him to notify the authorities. I know that memory of my mother throwing me against the wall is real, no matter her denial of it in the last conversation I ever had with her when I confronted her about what I knew for certain - which led to me being written out of her will, except for the fact she had her massive fatal myocardial infarction a moment after her friend arrived to take her to the lawyer to sign the change.

As with everything, my parents were not complete monsters. I wouldn’t be the craftsman I am today had I not learned what my father taught me down in his workshop. I wouldn’t have the education I do if he hadn’t taken me to the library and let me use his adult’s card while I educated myself in spite of what was going on in my classes. And then there was that moment at Thanksgiving in 1977 when he apologized to me. It was an apology for the ages. He knew all the events to apologize for, and he explained himself and his life and how that made him who he was. And he apologized most profusely that “the only thing I ever taught you was the anger I learned that was the result of things I learned about myself that weren’t real, that weren’t real about you, either.” I never asked where all that came from, I was too happy to get it. The last ten years of his life we had the relationship I’d always wanted, and the Original Creative Genius In His Field was the greatest fan of his son, the writer - the one thing in the world he’d wanted to be and couldn’t do.

Even Mommie Dearest did amazing things, as I learned when I went back for my father’s passing and happened to take her to a local grocery store, where the manager recognized her as his elementary school teacher and told her about his life and thanked her for what she had been to him as his teacher, without which he wouldn’t have become who he was. I stood there listening to him, thinking to myself how much I wished I had known that side of her. I remembered how she got sent to that school as “punishment” for being a “problem” at the school she had been at; I remembered dropping her off and picking her up, and seeing the kids waiting at the door to the “temporary” classroom when she arrived and reluctantly leaving at the end of the day. Most kids don’t do that with their teachers. But they did with her. And this guy’s testimony was proof she would be remembered likely by many as a “good person.” As it turned out, when she died (according to my brother; I didn’t attend), a surprising number of her former students showed up to pay their last respects.

There’s a purpose to all this confession, beyond just doing it.

I’ve learned over all these years since I finally admitted in my 30s that my life had not been “normal” that perhaps it was normal. I have yet to meet someone who I get to know well enough to learn the private things of their history, who can’t tell the same story with different details.

There was a point after the initial realization when I thought that was only because I was in Hollywood - the place where The Truly Fucked Up go to live. I mean, what kind of a hole do you have to have in you that it can only be filled by becoming Rich And Famous? (I’ve kinda/sorta done the latter, but I failed at the former, let me tell you) And of course it doesn’t; I was just reminded of that last night, watching Elton John’s biopic “Rocket Man,” which I highly highly highly recommend even if you’re not an Elton John fan (do they even exist?) because there is a lot more to that movie than just the music. It’s an illustrated confessional, with a truly well-earned Happy Ending.

I think that the truth is, nobody in this country is “normal,” that to one degree or another, everybody can tell a similar story with different facts and events. And there’s a reason for that, that stares everyone in the face, so blindingly obvious that it gets missed.

This country, the way things are today, is the result of untreated PTSD trauma that goes back in time 150 years, to the Civil War. Bear with me - let me point it out.

Most people of my generation, if they can trace their family roots to the war, speak of their great-great-grandparents. Not me. They’re my great-grandparents. There is a missing generation in my family history. All four of my great-grandfathers fought in the war. On the front lines. And they did it when they were young: one was “the youngest drummer boy in Sherman’s March to the Sea” in the family oral history; he ran away to the war at age 14. Another spent his 16th birthday atop Little Round Top at Gettysburg. Another was 18 when he was wounded and captured at Cold Harbor and spent nine months in the hell of Libby Prison in Richmond. The last one was 29; he served on Sherman’s staff during the March to the Sea. All of them were unmarried during the war. That’s important.

None of the young ones married until they were in their mid 30s. This was a time when a man married by 21, so there was a missing 14 or 15 years of family development there. And none of their children, other than the youngest daughter of the oldest one, married before their late 20s to early 30s, again a loss of about ten years from the norm. My parents didn’t marry until he was 35 and she was 30, which was not the norm then, either. That’s a total of 25 years - one generation. Missing.

The 14 year old never went home, he stayed in the Army for a few years and went out to the frontier. I have a photo of him taken at around age 28; even with 19th century photography, it’s possible to see the spider veins in his nose, the sign of a very heavy drinker. He also looks like nobody you’d cross if you met him in a saloon in Deadwood, a place I know he visited. He was a professional “buffalo hunter” for the railroad after he left the Army, where he had served in the post-Civil War “Indian Wars” on the plains. (In other words, he’s one of those white men we today look “askance” at, though he was quite honored in the small now-gone farming town in western Kansas he founded) I have other photos of him after he married and had 12 children, the eighth of whom was my mother’s father. The photos of him with his children are interesting: he’s the patriarch surrounded by people glancing down at him with looks of fear that the live grenade in their midst might explode. My mother was his favorite grandchild.

The 16-year old returned to Catawissa, Pennsylvania, at age 22 after staying in the Army after the war and serving in the south during Reconstruction, and went into business selling dry goods. He died at age 92, falling down a ladder as he climbed down to his “root cellar” to check out several jugs of “corn squeezings” his son and grandson had found when they cleaned the cellar for him. His daughter married the son of the 18-year old, who was also from Catawissa. His family founded the town after the Revolution (another interesting story, but not for today). His father had been an ardent Quaker Abolitionist, a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad, one of the founders of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania, and a man so opposed to slavery that he let his 17-year old son leave the Quaker church to go fight in the war to end slavery. The son came home a different person, worked for his father and took over the family business on his father’s death. He married late and had one child, my father’s father.

My father’s memories of his grandfathers are that they were quiet men, who never spoke of their time in the war, though each had mementos of their service in their homes, and the youngest one took him along to the last reunion of those who fought at Gettysburg in 1913 when he was four, but it would be another 12 years before he would hear his grandfather tell him about those three days on that hill, the last conversation they ever had. (Interestingly, history repeated itself when the last conversation I ever had with my father was when he told me of surviving the Kamikaze that sank his ship at Okinawa). There was one interesting thing my father once told me, when he explained why he didn’t drink, that “whiskey liked my grandfathers too well.”

When I was growing up, I loved to visit my mother’s mother. The sneaky old lady had managed to convince my parents to give me her father’s name - Thomas McKelvey - and I was her favorite, an always-good thing. I also remember never wanting to be that close to my grandfather, feeling there was danger there that a kid can’t figure out. My grandparents slept in separate bedrooms on opposite sides of their house from each other. There was always tension between them that kids feel but don’t understand. After he died and I got to know her as an adult, I asked her about that and she told me the marriage “... was not the best.” She was shocked when I asked why she stayed and told me “One doesn’t divorce.” (Tell me about that after my two) She also mentioned that her father drank, which was why she didn’t.

A final bit of family history: in my 20s, before I had any real understanding of what had happened in my life, only knowing it was one I wouldn’t have wished on my worst enemy, I decided I would not have offspring, because I was afraid I would do to them what had been done to me. That happens to be the exact way that multi-generational “family dysfunction” happens. The one and only time in my life I ever had a serious conversation with my mother, a night we were alone together while waiting for my father’s passing, she told me she had made a similar decision at a similar age, “but then I met your father and changed my mind.” I didn’t voice my response, which was to say to myself “Why didn’t you stick to your guns?”

Over the years, from childhood friends, other friends, and from studying history, I have found that the story told above is not out of the ordinary. In fact, it could be called “normal” outside of the specific details.

And now, consider a few historical facts:

Two-thirds of the men in America served in the two armies during the Civil War. After the war, there are some accounts to be found of a phenomenon called “Reverie,” reported across the country involving war veterans. It’s particularly strong in the South.

Before the Civil War, there is no serious Temperance movement, but after the Civil War, the Temperance movement grows by leaps and bounds, to the point that by the time the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified taking us into national Prohibition, over half the states - and the majority of those in the south and the west - already had Prohibition. The South, land of the defeated who couldn’t admit that, and the West, the place men like my ancestor went to - away from the lives they had known before.

Domestic abuse of women and children - something that had always been around, given the way society was organized back then, but was not thought of as something to talk about outside of Dickens’ novels before the war - becomes so widespread in the last part of the 19th Century that welfare societies are formed in cities across the country to aid the victims. Prohibition is advanced as a solution to the problem, which is identified with men, drinking.

I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, once I picked up on the clues in reading history, and then when I finally admitted I had to find some way to understand my life and started putting the clues and evidence together over many “Thursday afternoons” with a therapist, talking it out and in ACA meetings, listening to others talk it out.

PTSD only became a “thing” when my generation returned from America’s most fucked-up war and tried to make sense of things. As a member of the GI antiwar movement back then, I was among those who started “rap groups” to talk about the war. At first, I thought I was “facilitating” things for people who had “the problem” because I couldn’t have had it since I was never in direct combat, killing people. As it turns out, that’s not a necessity. Of those two-thirds of American men who served in the Civil War, the ones like my four ancestors were only about a third of all those in uniform. But “reverie” was widespread.

For me, the clue that direct combat wasn’t necessary came from a friend I had who had served in the German Luftwaffe during the war, later immigrating here. He hadn’t been in combat; he spent the war as a flight instructor, which was how I met him when he taught me aerobatics. But he felt tremendous guilt for having served at all, after he learned the truth of his war. And my eyes got opened by that - I found out the truth of my war in the middle of being in it. I came home not proud of having served at all. I felt guilty for having done so, and as I later put things together about how I had learned as a kid that I was a “bad person,” it became clear that my feelings about the war only magnified the childhood feelings. Yes, I had PTSD. The psychological cure for PTSD is to “change your point of view.” To learn that you weren’t a “bad person” for having been involved in those events.

They didn’t know that back in the years after the Civil War. So those guys sat there in their “reveries,” drinking and doing other things, to tamp down those feelings they couldn’t face. Which led to all the destructive behaviors that are now seen as the result of PTSD.

And the kids who grew up in those families thought it was “normal.” And they never learned that wasn’t true. And their kids grew up in those families and thought it was all “normal.” By the second generation and beyond, it was normal.

And so we have today. A country in which “normal” is to be traumatized so deeply the trauma is background noise. Like the woman I remember in an ACA meeting, getting up and declaring “It’s ALL fucked up!” It is.

And that’s how we now have people yelling “Let’s Go, Brandon.” They’ve received permission to act out all the anger that has fueled their traumatized lives. We’re seeing “Acting Out” as a national phenomenon.

America, the traumatized. The first step to a solution is recognizing the problem.

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