Elaine and I have just had a discursive chat which may be important, though it was not full of laughs. We were discussing the scale and scope of trauma in the lives of people we have known, studied and read about. Obviously, our experience began after WW2 and included Jewish and other fighting horrors. It continued through the second and later generations. We discussed Wittgenstein whom we both studied. He went through a hellish WW1 and was violent towards kids he was teaching and weird, as the normal portrait shows. But then there were millions of others when we were growing up, at university, in each generation, through multiple causes and different wars. We think of “normal” people, but the scale of suffering that has resulted from sin and evil is vast and the tragedies are clear – suicide, drink, aggression, taking it out on others, insensitivity, murder and more. Many soaps and films reflect trauma and it plays a part in life, national politics, social care. States can do collective trauma. Art is full of it – Blaue Reiter, the Scream or Otto Dix.
Of course, trauma has many causes. Personal abuse, violence, hate, oppression, poverty, pain, isolation, exclusion and military attack – shooting, explosions, destruction, killing, injury, refugee status, famine, rabid fear. Those of us who have had an easy life rarely understand the suffering involved, the triggers, the depression and the weight of memories. Jesus understood it. The need for a full Christian understanding of it now is great.
I have been aware of it in relation to my war and militarism studies and realized how big it is involving one or two billion people last century. There is the collective Jewish trauma from the great evil. Poland, Russia (twice) and all occupied countries have been through it. We see the problem across generations when we realize that Hitler and Stalin had it. World War Two occurred when traumatized and vicious Nazis were old enough to be close to power. Military trauma repeats itself endlessly.
The military hide it. In the US for years after the Iraq war twenty veterans a day were committing suicide. Our western armed forces are full of it and it plays out in military families. Killing and facing death takes its toll. But, of course, for every military trauma, serious though it is, there are ten or more who are traumatized by militarism. There are perhaps 200,000 Russian soldiers who are traumatized now but twenty million or more Ukrainians whose lives are blighted, including children who will live into the 22nd century. We cannot hide it any more, because we can see it. It is also happening in Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo, Sudan, Libya, Palestine, China, Syria, Eritrea and in other places of repression involving untold millions. It is the central world fact, caused by pursuing weapons and militarism. Of course, militarism unaddressed could destroy the planet anyway, but perhaps you will stand against this blot on humanity, the system that does not work, this commitment to destroying good human lives.
Surely, he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.