“An unfed soul will sneak out behind our backs and steal its food without any regard for our values, consequences or even logic.” (Tiffany Sankofa)
When Trauma Fuels Debate
I don’t typically engage in debates. I don’t like them as their purpose appears to be about jousting for a victory rather than understanding one another better. It feels like talking to hear ourselves talk. I find that to be an exhausting waste of inner resources.
However, I recently responded to a social media post of an acquaintance who was repeating the lie that FEMA was only offering $750 to people who had lost everything in Hurricane Helene. I felt it was important to note that $750 was an immediate stop gap measure. Once people have registered, they become eligible for multiple streams of support. I provided links and mentioned the measures in place to help people access the internet in order to register.
I was not surprised when people came at me with rhetorical guns a blazin’. They wanted to be sure that I and all of the internet knew that I am an idiot who has been duped by the lies of the Democratic Party who want nothing more than to “destroy our country.”
The Unraveling
One person went so far as to say, “Kinda hard to get those checks when your mailbox has been wiped away.” Personally? If the entire infrastructure of my town was wiped out, I would be quite grateful for the otherwise annoying and problematic digital banking world in which we live. If FEMA made a direct deposit into my virtual account, I would then be able to purchase needed goods and direct them to deliver to safe places. The poster’s response sounds poetic and poignant, but I smell something else in the linear logic disconnection.
The vitriol was so powerful that even when I offered empathy for their loved ones who were suffering, instead of accepting compassion, they doubled down on name calling and accusation and used the opportunity to stump for Trump.
That’s when it clicked for me: This is trauma.
No Administration Good Enough
In the course of the conversation, I did a little bit of reminder research. I wanted to recall how other administrations have responded to disasters like hurricanes. I want to make sure I wasn’t talking out of my neck.
One thing emerged in crystal clear fashion: When we lose everything, when our stability is literally washed away, there is no help that will seem like enough. FEMA, churches, our fellow community members, will never be capable of doing enough to make the horror, insecurity, and fear go away. We can lighten their load and make sure they know they are not alone, but we cannot undo what has happened.
Kissing Cousins
Trauma and grief are most often entwined. As such, in the aftermath of disasters, most of us do some iteration of Jack Wordens’s Four Tasks of Mourning. Here is my adapted version of those tasks:
Working through the pain of the grief
Accepting the reality of the loss
Relocating our lives in the aftermath of the loss
Finding an enduring connection/ a “new normal.”
Listening to the pushback and misinformation, I hear humans fighting hard against a storm surge of grief. Just as in other kinds of grief, we are doing all four of these tasks all at the same time, and they tend to set one another off in our awareness.
Ceilings, Floors, and Orientation
The “relocating our lives in the aftermath of the loss“ task is one that I also call “disorganization.“ Emotionally, everything is everywhere. It can be phenomenally confusing. Working through this task means figuring out what of our pre-loss life still remains, what things are gone, and what things need to be placed differently. With an event like a destructive hurricane, this is also literal.
Working through this task on the emotional level often leaves us confused and struggling to find the ceiling and the floor. Which end is up? Some of our human family in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee are trying to figure out how to live quite literally with no ceiling and no floor. While others can certainly help, no one can really do this re-orienting for us. At some level, it is too intimate for anyone outside of our own minds to work out.
And Around We Go
Accepting that plants us squarely back in the task of accepting the reality of the loss. See how the tasks work to push one another? It can all feel unreal.
A terrified part of us wails, wondering why we were not protected from this thing that happened. It can take time, pain and struggle to come to terms with the quiet entitlement that tells us these things shouldn’t happen to us, here, in this country, in this day and age. It can take a minute before we realize that we don’t wish this kind of terror on anyone, in any country, at any time.
Making It Right
When we carry the punitive justice mentality that is commonplace in the USA, it nudges us to look for blame and malicious intent, in hopes of finding justice. We try to soothe our souls with the anesthesia of justice as a kind of revenge.
The harder truth is this: The Earth is not acting with malice. The natural world deals exclusively in a linear, utterly impersonal cause and effect. Our longstanding habits as humans have set things out of balance, leading to climate change. The over-warming of the ocean has created more fierce and more frequent hurricanes that do greater damage than in the past.
In Search of Anesthesia
While it may help to counter our powerlessness to accuse whoever is in charge of failing us, the target is all wrong. People in the middle of it all didn’t immediately see FEMA representatives in their area, had limited access to information, and assumed they had been forgotten. I can imagine, in the middle of that kind of chaos, this would make sense and be terrifying.
However, in truth, the federal government did what the federal government is designed to do: They engaged the FEMA disaster resources and protocols. The Administration immediately contacted the governors of NC and TN as well as the Mayors of devastated towns who let them know, from their vantage points, how, when and in what ways the federal government could be of use. The Executive Branch then created a strategic plan to execute those steps in coordination with the local governments.
It’s literally what every U.S. presidential administration does when we have disasters.
Biting the Hand
However, those who didn’t know these protocols were in place were vulnerable to manipulation by those who chose to use pain and suffering for political advantage, as politicians of every ilk have been known throughout history. Misinformation like the post I originally responded to take off like a wildfire fueled by understandable fear. I woke this morning to reports of armed protestors confronting FEMA representatives. They told FEMA they don’t want the government’s help; The help they said FEMA was not providing.
I’m not saying that our federal government is so wonderful and so benevolent, or that Democrats are not just as likely to spin for political advantage as Republicans. What I am saying, however, is that trauma, grief and fear can make us extremely vulnerable to manipulation. Seeing our own grief work can give us clarity in times like these.
The Bigger Picture
This is why paying attention to mental health matters for every person. This is also why paying attention to politics and history matters. These are not optional hobbies: This is the context in which we live. Don’t we want to do it all as well as possible?
When we listen deeply to our own inner world and take good care of ourselves, we find resilience. When we consider politics and current events from center, with discernment, we find wise choices that support the good of all.
I encourage every one of us to be thoughtful, self reflective and discerning as we heal.