Hey Dad!
I hope you don’t mind me going off topic this week.
I’m reading this book called The Body Keeps The Score because I’ve seen it recommended everywhere. It has nearly 73,000 reviews on Amazon with a 5-star average score.
I bought it and can already tell, 20 pages in, that this is going to be one of the best books I’ve ever read.
Anyway, the book is about trauma, and the author spends the first few pages writing about his experience working with Vietnam veterans going through PTSD.
The author tells a story about a particular Vietnam vet suffering from extreme PTSD. Apparently his entire platoon got killed while traversing some rice paddies. Enemy forces launched a surprise attack from the tree line, and this guy watched in horror as some of his best friends got killed right in front of him.
The next day this soldier snapped and went to a nearby village for revenge. I wanted to pause and let readers know what they’re about to read is pretty horrific. I’ve put this part into the page dividers below.
Apparently this soldier went into a frenzy, killing a few children, an innocent farmer, and raping a Vietnamese woman at a nearby village.
Now, this soldier had a wife and kids back home. When he came back, he said it was pretty much impossible for him to connect with them or feel anything at all. I understand why.
What’s even crazier?
This soldier was a practicing lawyer after his time in Vietnam. He was pretty good, too. Everything seemed pretty “normal” from the outside, but you’d never know this man did things that many of us would view as irredeemable.
What’s even crazier is that the author worked with this man. He didn’t just throw him to the side and view him as a monster. The author had empathy for him and strived to continue helping him.
Man’s Depravity Is Central To The Core Of Modern Movies
I watched a movie called Poor Things the other day with Dalia. It’s up for Best Picture, and it’s weird as all hell. It’s also hilarious, and graphic, and depressing, and intelligent. I can see, past the weirdness of it, why many consider it a fantastic movie.
Anyway, this same “truth” is central to that movie’s core. Many human beings suck. We’re either monsters or capable of being monsters with the slightest push. That’s what Heath Ledger’s Joker said in The Dark Knight:
“As you know, madness is like gravity...all it takes is a little push.”
Oppenheimer is the favorite to win Best Picture this year. It’s all about a genius who created a weapon so powerful that it’s only been used twice ever since—by us. Spoiler Alert: the movie ends with planet earth being engulfed in flames—a nightmare in the mind of J. Robert Oppenheimer as he stares off into the distance, contemplating what he’s done.
It seems the movies being made today are particularly graphic, depressing, and dare I say honest. I’d like to contrast this to The Lord of the Rings series made 20 years ago.
That’s a story that also doesn’t shy away from showing the barbarity of evil, but the overarching message is one of hope and inspiration.
With friendship, courage, and kindness, we can keep the forces of evil at bay.
In the Hobbit, Gandalf says “Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.”
My question is, where the heck has this message gone, lately?
It seems modern media is edgier these days. Game of Thrones captured the world’s attention, being a story about horrific people doing horrific things to gain more power.
Perhaps the media I’m consuming is having an effect on what I pay attention to.
Trauma Is WAY More Prevalent Than We Think
I was raised in such a beautiful little bubble. That’s no knock on you or Mom. It’s not really a knock at all on anything. This is kind of what I want for more kids, but it’s only later that I realized I was luckier than I realized.
Apparently, one in five Americans have been molested.
One in four grew up with alcoholics.
And one in three couples have engaged in physical violence.
Dalia and I spoke about the plight of black folks in America and she brought something up I never thought of..
Just 170 years ago (or so), most black people in the US were literally slaves. That’s just a few generations back. In the context of the totality of human history, that’s basically yesterday.
She opened my eyes to the fact that overcoming something that traumatic as an entire race, culture, or nation takes an unbelievable amount of time and effort. In fact, it’s nearly freaking impossible.
Because trauma gets passed down through generations. How many children of Vietnam veterans were adversely effected by their father’s outbursts, drinking, beating, and absence?
It left scars that got passed down to the next generation, and the next generation—because the US is all so ready to send kids off to war like pigs to a slaughter.
We’ve paid the price for our wars in the trillions of dollars.
But we’ve also paid the price in a currency that we can’t touch. Trauma is like launching a rock into the middle of a pond. It creates a ripple that eventually covers everything.
The long-term effects of trauma have haunted our country for generations.
Poor vs. Rich Mindset
I watched a movie called Life of a King recently with Dalia. It’s about an ex-con who gets out of jail and teaches inner-city black youth how to play chess. In one moment, he says:
“These suburban kids, they know they get good grades, they go off to college. They know they'll own their own business some day - they envision the end-game. But poor kids don't think like that. I was taught like that. I didn't see the end-game, and it cost me, man, it cost me big.”
That’s why I’m in awe of my wife. You know her story. Somehow, someway, she got out of her own hell hole and started thriving. But she knows, more than anyone, how hard it really is to do so.
When your parents don’t encourage you, when you have a mindset that you’re less than, when you have no forward thinking or sense of “can do” attitude, it keeps you in poverty.
And the cycle just keeps repeating.
Over. and over. and over again.
I walked around a pretty impoverished city here in Mexico recently and I got depressed after just five minutes of being there. It is awful what poverty does to your soul. How can you overcome that when you live there full-time? When you have no role model at all to tell you that you can be more at any time in your life?
Dad, it’s pretty much impossible.
It takes years of therapy—maybe even decades—for a broken person to start believing in themselves. These people don’t have therapists.
There’s no therapists in a place where trash litters the streets and stray dogs scrounge for scraps. The only hope these people have is in religion. In the idea that someday, somehow, all of this will end and they will be in heaven.
I don’t mean to say anything about religion here—it’s just a fact.
I see all this, Dad, and it’s terrifying. This world is full of fucked up people, and it’s hard to find any hope in any of it.
All I can say is that it’s a miracle that we live in the United States, where we have a government that actually has programs to look out for the disenfranchised. But even then we still have a plethora of problems we need to solve.
Are People To Blame For Their Actions, Or Should We Blame Their Trauma More?
I guess what I’m trying to say is, trauma is like a cancer. It’s hard to get rid of it, and the effects it has on people is absolutely devastating—it’s worse than I ever imagined in my 20’s, when I visited the Philippines and tried to understand why it was so poor. I just blamed the politicians. Sure, that had something to do with it, but a lot of these people had a rotten mindset that was given to them through no fault of their own—through the corrupting nature of being dirt poor for generations.
My point is, some of these people do horrific things, but is it really even their fault at the end of the day? The Vietnam veteran I spoke about earlier on in this piece.. Would he have ever killed children if he never went away to war? Obviously not.
He got pushed. The monster inside him—inside all of us—came out, and he did unforgivable things. But, weirdly enough, through the haze of these horrific actions, I can understand that it’s not his fault at the end of the day. Or at least it’s not mostly his fault.
I can see the human being behind that monster.
What a weird thing.
Thanks for listening, Dad.
Yes, great article. One thing keeps coming to my mind, is in one of the classes undergrad psychology, the prof said, in order to be able to do serious cruelty to another, one has to justify one’s actions. And, it has stuck with me years later.
Is it possible the guy in your story who went to Vietnam and even killed a child( children) justified it, then he could do it. And is it possible the reason he looked “normal” afterwards and continued being a lawyer as though nothing had happened that the justification that he had come up with is still working for him, thus no regrets! ( thinking out loud)
Interesting to see what your father responds.
I really relate to all of this, Tom. I have struggled with PTSD since I was twelve and still have some trouble with it today. The book you recommended is excellent. I actually think writing has been more healing than anything I’ve tried. I can’t wait to read your dad’s answer.