Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
This is not an essay about racism. I need to make that clear because it begins with the deaths of two black men, the actions of several police officers, and charges of racism that arose in both cases.
I can’t judge whether the officers’ actions were right or wrong because I wasn’t there in either place. That’s why we have citizens sitting on grand juries to review the available evidence and decide these things. No, juries aren’t perfect or immune to prejudice. I remember the photographs of grinning, acquitted Klan defendants in 1960s civil rights murder trials. But juries of “we the people” are the best we can do.
I also can’t determine whether either man’s death stemmed from racial bigotry. I don’t know if Mr. Brown’s skin color had anything to do with the officer’s actions, any more than I know if the store owner’s South Asian ethnicity had anything to do with Mr. Brown’s actions in his store. It’s also worth noting that both white and black officers were involved in Mr. Garner’s case, and that the officers recently murdered by a black man in New York City were Asian and Puerto Rican.
I’m not pretending that bigotry and prejudice, on every side, no longer exist in the United States. They exist in Ferguson, on Staten Island, and in my own hometown, as they do in every society on the planet. Prejudice is sadly universal. Only the grounds for our bigotries are local. On the other hand, it’s insupportable to argue that things haven’t changed in the United States since my childhood 1960s. Our half-black, half-white president, chosen twice by a majority of Americans, is only one evidence of that change.
Protests, some lawful and others violently unlawful, followed the grand jury decisions, which, while approved by many, were opposed by many others, including some law students at Columbia University.
Here is what this essay is about.
The protests coincided with exam week. Some Columbia law students, asserting they’d been “traumatized” by the juries’ decisions, petitioned to postpone their exams and reschedule them “at their own discretion.” The university agreed to grant them extensions, citing university policy covering “trauma during exam period.”
Critics of the school’s decision, including other law students, pointed out that the policy was intended to cover “a death in the family,” or in Columbia’s official words “illness, religious observance, bereavement, and other exceptional and documented circumstances.” The petitioners and their supporters countered that the grand jury findings constituted a “national emergency” and an “existential moment,” and that they couldn’t “walk away from their pain.”
The law school’s dean justified the postponements on the grounds that the jury determinations had “shaken the faith” of some students in the law as a “fundamental pillar of society,” a declaration greeted by one protester as an acknowledgment “of how we felt.” In consideration of those feelings, Columbia also provided “special office hours” and a “trauma specialist.”
A trauma specialist?
I don’t care whether you’re more appalled by Mr. Brown and Mr. Garner’s deaths, and they are two separate cases, or by the sometimes senselessly violent mob protests that resulted, or by both. Can we please agree that the genuine trauma involved in these cases was suffered by Mr. Brown, Mr. Garner, the officers involved, and their families – not by me, and not by law students at Columbia.
Across America students are invited to leave class and seek counseling to deal with feelings they don’t have but in response to the offer are induced to manufacture. Meanwhile children around the world go to class while they’re being shelled.
What will these future attorneys do when they’re one day practicing law and another jury inevitably renders what they consider an unjust decision? Will they request a procedural delay until they can deal with their feelings? Will we need trauma specialists in our courthouses for disappointed, even outraged attorneys? Or will only decisions that may involve race trigger their trauma?
The students who feel themselves “traumatized” aren’t our only problem. We’ve grown so narcissistically self-absorbed that many of us no longer recognize what actual trauma is. We paralyze ourselves and our children in the name of sensitivity. We place ourselves at the vortex of every drama. After 9/11, for example, commentators declared that the falling towers had so scarred us all that “we knew that America would never be the same.”
America will never be the same for the Americans who lost their husbands and wives, their mothers and fathers, their brothers and sisters and children in the fire. It may never be the same for those who fought their way through the rubble. For them 9/11 was personal.
The rest of us, however, watched it on TV.
Dresden, Hiroshima, Gettysburg – we need to keep our catastrophes in context. The London blitz lasted nearly a year. Their support groups were the subway tunnels where they sheltered all night.
We no longer expect or encourage fortitude. Here in northern New England a group of mental health workers scheduled a “community support meeting” so area residents could cope with their post-9/11 “psychological responses.” When nobody showed up, the counselors “were really concerned.” They didn’t see the empty room as evidence that nobody needed their help. Instead they brainstormed strategies to “reach people who need help” but just weren’t “coming forward” to receive it.
The same thing happens whenever any shooting or student suicide visits any school anywhere. These are undeniable tragedies where they happen for those to whom they happen. But across America students are invited to leave class and seek counseling to deal with feelings they don’t have but in response to the offer are induced to manufacture. Meanwhile children around the world go to class while they’re being shelled.
When a toddler falls down, he commonly decides if he needs to cry based on his parents’ reactions. If they’re alarmed, he bursts into tears. If they remain calm, he picks himself up and goes on.
It’s good to feel empathy for those who suffer. It’s not good to confuse empathy with actual suffering.
It’s good to defend those you rationally believe have been the victims of injustice. It’s not good to act irrationally or to claim the status of victim solely because you uphold the victim’s cause.
When we make our New Year’s resolutions, we can start by resolving to be more resolute.
The post Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Trauma and resolve appeared first on VTDigger.