The Reckoning

The Reckoning

Adult essential read nonfiction
"The insurrection on January 6, 2021, shouldn't have come as a
surprise--my Uncle Donald had been sowing the seeds of discontent for
two months and promoting division and grievance for four years. It
was a watershed moment--deliberate, planned, incited, yet another
assault aimed squarely at everything I had always thought this country
stood for..."
Mary Trump, niece of a certain United States president of whom
she is not a fan, has a PhD in psychology and is an expert in trauma.
In her The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma And Finding A Way To Heal
she invites us to rethink the word in both its individual and societal
dimensions.
"When we think of trauma, we typically imagine dramatic,
violent, singular events--rape, a car accident, a mortar shell
exploding. Trauma can be quiet and slow, too, occurring over time in
a tense drama of sameness, of hopelessness, of unbearable isolation
and lonliness, of helplessness. We often fail to recognize that we
are being traumatized while we are being traumatized."
If you're anything like me, when you read that paragraph you
found yourself thinking about COVID-19. Indeed it's one of the
focuses of the book. Trump began writing it in October 2020 when
researchers were still scrambling to create a vaccine. She
compassionately discusses how we all suffer from experiences of loss,
uncertainty, fear, and division in what she describes as an
"unprecidented-in-our-lifetime horror." In a particularly poignant
paragraph she illustrates multiple traumatizing events by portraying a
nurse in a COVID ward who, as if being surrounded by those dying in
agony and knowing the danger of bringing the pathogen home wasn't
enough, is part of a group blamed for shortages of professional
protective equipment, hears dying patients believing to the end that
COVID is a hoax, and knows that even among nurses who have seen the
worst there are some hesitant to accept the vaccine. She reminds us
that when (if) this crisis comes to an end we'll need a whole lot of
therapy for real healing to happen.
She also reminds us of the role of betrayal and treason in the
worsening of the crisis. The commander in chief made pandemic life
more perilous in every possible way. Coming into office he'd
scrapped a plan by his predecessor of preparing for exactly this kind
of emergency. He'd underfunded agencies like public health ones with
much needed expertise. He'd made it much harder for people including
front line medical workers to get enough personal protective
equipment. He lied about the pandemic and the peril it posed, created
a false dichotomy between health and the economy, and opined that real
men didn't wear masks or get vaccinated.
Trump also explains a much longer and more deeply rooted trauma:
how America was born from trauma--a nation proclaiming all men being
created equal while killing and stealing from the Indigenous people,
enslaving kidnapped Black people, and dehumanizing the victims to
rationalize the evils whites committed in the name of greed. She
tells how efforts by marginalized peoples were continually thwarted
both by new draconian laws and practices and by premature
proclamations of enough progress being made to render America post
racial.
According to Trump, we shouldn't be surprised at her Uncle
Donald's election. It was four hundred years in the making.
"And right now this is exactly who we are. This is exactly how
things will continue to be in an America that values whiteness above
everything else if we, those of us who can, refuse to make a different
choice. There is no moving on from this. For once we need to dig in
our heels and demand what's right, even if it hurts. Because the
first step in healing is facing the truth and healing the pain."
The Reckoning gives us the reasons why and ways to start
engaging in this important and challenging work.
On a purrrsonal note, right now Maine is locked into this cold wave
that makes an hour long commute by bus and foot a challenge. All week
I've been encouraging myself to keep on going by thinking how the
weekend would give me two days of staying with Tobago in my nice warm
home. Friday I was home cooking up supper when Eugene invited me to
spend the weekend at camp with him which would necessitate leaving the
house. Fifteen degrees below zero is not exactly in my comfort zone.
I said I have too much homework I need Internet connection for. And
that is no lie. (Jules)
She chose well. That kind of cold is not fit for feline or human.
(Tobago)
A great big shout out goes out to Eugene. We love him.
Tobago and Jules Hathaway


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