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To Avary
Introduction
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. America is a deeply imperfect country—a country that has never actually been a democracy for all of its people, just for a privileged majority—but it always had the potential to become that hoped-for more perfect union. Did the last four years push us further from that goal, or did they simply bring to light that we were never as close to it as we1 thought?
This country was born in trauma—trauma inflicted on the native inhabitants of a land from which they were forcibly removed, trauma sustained by the generations that have succeeded the kidnapped and enslaved Africans who’d been brought to a continent both foreign and hostile, the trauma of those bystanders who failed to intervene when they could, those who could not intervene at all, and even those who committed the atrocities and continued to perpetuate a system that benefited them at the devastating expense of so many others.
In order to understand our current situation, we have to assess the extent of the impact of those early traumas, as well as the knock-on effects of not only ignoring them but pretending we have somehow transcended them. We most certainly have not; 2020, and the three years before, and the last many decades have borne that out.
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 loneliness, of helplessness. We often fail to recognize that we are being traumatized while we are being traumatized.
When I started to write this book, in October 2020, I was focused on the historical trends that have combined to leave us vulnerable in the wake of COVID-19, the intersecting economic crisis, and the looming mental health crisis. New York, where I live, had already been on a fairly severe lockdown since March. Our numbers had improved by the fall but, having failed to heed the warning of our experience, COVID cases were spiking throughout the rest of the country.
I wondered what it might be like to emerge into a world altered by months of separation, isolation, and division. How would the long-term effects of inactivity, economic uncertainty, boredom, fear of death, and the stress accumulated from all of those things manifest themselves? What form would the trauma take—of not knowing if you carried a virus that could kill you or those you love, of feeling like you were taking your life in your hands every time you left your home, of not knowing when it would end, of the most simple tasks being complicated by fear, of constant worrying about your children? How would the trauma play out if you were an essential frontline worker—stocking shelves, making deliveries, working in a COVID ICU—who could do very little to avoid the risk of coming into contact with the virus? And to that burden add the betrayal by our government: completely unwilling to help us through this unprecedented-in-our-lifetime horror, and actually allowing the horror to happen, allowing it to worsen.
Things became much more complicated by the November election. COVID time had already wreaked its havoc, but election time was somehow worse. It’s one thing not to know when something will end, it’s another thing entirely to know that something will end, but you can’t see how. To me, the November 3 election loomed like a wall, obsidian and monolithic, obscuring all light and beyond which there was no imagining. Even after Election Day passed, we had an uneasy four days during which the results were still unknown, giving Donald an opportunity to claim a victory he had not won and to continue the project he’d embarked on months earlier: to undermine people’s faith in the ultimate outcome if Joe Biden won. After November 7, when it seemed we had finally dodged the bullet this country wouldn’t survive, the situation grew more dangerous, not because Donald continued to tell the Big Lie, but because, instead of silencing him by acknowledging the Biden-Harris victory, members of the Republican Party remained silent, offered excuses for the delay in conceding, or, worst of all, repeated the Big Lie and championed Donald’s attempts to undermine the incoming administration, which included more than sixty lawsuits, all but one of which he lost or were rejected by the court before trial.
He continued to have rallies in which COVID was spread with the same carelessness as his lies.
He continued to disseminate disinformation on Twitter with the dual purpose of deflecting attention from his decisive loss (while it is true that he received more votes than any Oval Office occupant in history, Joe Biden received at least seven million more votes than that) and keeping his base angry, overheated, and feeling cheated.
Too many people wanted to believe Donald. Too many people were susceptible to his ability to appear aggrieved on their behalf. Too many people had wanted him to win. Seventy-four million people, in fact—despite, or because of, the four years of incompetence, cruelty, criminality, grifting, unconstitutional behavior, treachery, treason, and most breathtaking of all, the fact that almost three hundred thousand Americans had died by Election Day as a direct result of Donald’s willfully malicious inaction. But for him, we would not have become so divided. But for him, a simple lifesaving maneuver like wearing a mask would not have become politicized. But for him, we would not have suffered a mass casualty event in this country every day, for month after month after month.
* * *
When we’re all suffering versions of the same trauma simultaneously but separately, what can be shared? Betrayal by the government and by people in our communities destroys our sense of security. To be traumatized is to be initiated into a world without trust. It is to be burdened with all of the darkness the world contains and deprived of its considerable light.
Trauma can be compounded when multiple traumatizing events occur in the same time frame. You would think, for example, that a nurse in a COVID ward would only have to deal with the trauma of being a nurse in a COVID ward. But then her trauma is compounded by the fact that the ostensible leader of the free world is accusing frontline medical workers of stealing personal protective equipment (PPE) and blaming them for the PPE shortage. And then compounded even further by the fact, as at least one nurse reported, that her patients who are dying in front of her eyes from COVID-19 believe COVID is a hoax. And finally, her trauma undermines her entire professional identity when fellow nurses who, despite having witnessed firsthand the devastation COVID can cause to the human body, are hesitant to take the vaccine.
The collective personal trauma of having our country knocked to its knees by the least worthy person I can imagine, and an extraordinarily clear sense that we came very close to losing everything—our democracy most importantly—made me realize that this book couldn’t simply address the trauma caused by the int
ersecting crises caused by COVID; it also had to address the trauma caused by the political crisis that exposed the long-standing fragility of our democracy.
I have heard people say, “This is not who we are,” but right now this is precisely who we are. Thanks to an outdated and inherently biased political structure, exemplified by the undemocratic electoral college, which has repeatedly put the losing Republican candidate in office, and a divided Senate in which one “half” of the membership represents forty-one million fewer citizens than the other, we are a nation in which a virulent minority has an outsized voice and the majority—underrepresented and forced into a bystander role—suffers mightily in silence. We are going to be dealing with the consequences of the Trump administration, the pandemic, and particularly the insurrection of January 6, for a very, very long time, just as we are going to be confronting the fact that seventy-four million people wanted four more years of whatever they thought they got in the last four.
It may have taken somebody like Donald to hold up the mirror in which we finally are able to see ourselves, but the possibility of somebody like him finding his way to the Oval Office was decades in the making. He is the symptom of a disease that has existed in the body politic from this country’s inception, which has, because of our failures to root it out, let alone acknowledge it, metastasized, infecting his followers and affecting the rest of us in ways we may not completely understand for the foreseeable future. From increasing levels of rage and hatred on the one side to increasing levels of helplessness, stress, and despair on the other, we are heading toward an even darker period in our nation’s history.
If we look at our experiences as individuals—our isolation, our fears—and extrapolate outward to our experiences as a society—our dissolution, our daily incidents of violence, our loss of power and agency on the world stage—we can begin to understand that the cascade of largely avoidable depredations on our sovereignty, our humanity, and our sense of justice has, over time, left us not just unprepared for one of the worst periods in our history but uniquely vulnerable both emotionally and psychologically.
* * *
I come to this not only as somebody who understands from a clinical perspective the havoc unresolved trauma can wreak on a psyche, but as somebody diagnosed with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. On the gloomy morning following Election Night 2016, I wrote down the following: “demeaned, diminished, debased.” For months I alternated among states of dissociation, rage, and befuddlement. Once or twice a day, the reality that the so-called leader of the free world was my uncle hit me with the force of a punch to the solar plexus. I kept thinking about those three words I’d written and how America would be forever tainted by what it had done.
By the time I reluctantly accepted an invitation to an April 2017 birthday party at the White House for my aunts Maryanne and Elizabeth, I was in the worst psychological shape of my life.
Several months later, I made the decision to leave my home in New York and go to a treatment center in Tucson that specializes in PTSD, among other things. I would be there for weeks, excavating decades-old wounds and trying to figure out why my uncle Donald’s elevation to the White House had so undone me.
Nobody used last names at the residential program since many of my fellow patients were there for substance addictions. Even so, I found it unthinkable that anyone should find out who I was or, more relevantly, who my uncle was. Long before my uncle had entered the political realm, I had never admitted to anyone that I belonged to the Trump family. The very first time somebody asked, “Are you related?” I was paying for a plane ticket. “No,” I said. The man behind the counter said in all seriousness, “Obviously. If you were, you’d have your own plane.” This assumption was so far beyond the reality of my life that when the inevitable question came any time I used a credit card, I continued to say, “No.” The response was usually some variation of “I bet you wish you were.”
The first few days I spent in the Arizona desert, I was angry beyond words, and I carried my rage like a shield. Outside of group and individual therapy, I didn’t speak to another human being for the first five days I was there. Other than calling my daughter to check in every day, I had no interest in what was going on in the wider world. There was no one else I needed to speak to, no news I needed to hear.
So in the desert, I attempted to chart the territory of my trauma. I was a shoddy cartographer, and often lost my way, forced to detour by my desperate need to avoid the very thing that would help me get home—but facing the trauma was the only way to deal with it, so during those weeks in the desert, that’s what I did.
As my stay came to a close, I booked a 5:00 A.M. flight, and stayed at a hotel near the airport the night before I left. When I arrived in the lobby at 3:30 A.M. to catch the airport shuttle, I noticed a bank of five televisions set high up on the wall, each set to a different channel. Donald was on every single one.
* * *
As Donald was for me, he was for this country: what therapists call a “presenting problem.” He may have triggered my PTSD, but my original trauma resulted from something that had happened to me a very long time ago, when I was very young and just at the beginning of my life. Post-traumatic wounds don’t disappear, although they can be buried. But no matter how deep down they’ve been submerged, they inevitably surface, taking us by surprise and forcing us either to confront them at long last or to get out our shovels to dig them under again.
What does the fallout from the calamitous year that was 2020 have to do with this country’s origin story? I would argue, everything. In this book, I’m going to talk about the trail of impunity, silence, and complicity that winds its way through every generation of our history, from the economic, social, and moral justifications for slavery and Native American genocide, through the failures of Reconstruction, the horrific legal, quasi-legal, and extralegal quagmire in which Jim Crow expanded alongside the cultural expectations and disappearing of oral history that followed both world wars and the 1918 pandemic. The story of our nation is shot through with contradictions that have never been reconciled, hypocrisies that have been brazened through, and crimes against humanity that have been folded into our story of democracy.
These things are all connected—our tragic beginnings; the ensuing transgenerational trauma inflicted on both the overwhelmed Native American and enslaved African populations; the white majority’s tendency to exclude perceived out-groups from the protection of civil society; the evolution and reemergence of white supremacy; our society’s insistence upon silencing those who have suffered because of our cruelty, indifference, and ineptitude; the economic and racial disparities that have only worsened since 2016; our devaluing of human life; the increase in anti-Black policies like voter suppression and gerrymandering; the resurgence of lynching as a means of terror and control. We are a nation shackled by a cultural imperative to move on from the pain of war, mass death, disease, and government-sanctioned barbarity in the name of “peace” or “healing” or “a return to normal,” when all we’ve really been doing is preserving the unchecked impunity of the powerful to inflict pain again and again and again.
Our current trauma is the culmination of our history, the logical outcome of the stories we tell ourselves, the myths we embrace, and the lies we perpetuate. Trauma shapes us in ways we may not be aware of, and will always do so unless we face what has happened to us, what we’ve done to ourselves, what we’ve done to each other. Without looking through that lens, we cannot fully understand what has unfolded. My goal is not only to define trauma as it relates to us today but also to try to understand how trauma lives on from one generation to the next so we can find a better way forward. Our country is on fire—literally, metaphorically—ravaged by flames, disease, and civic strife, all of which have been fanned by the willful indifference of a significant minority. The danger has abated but not passed. The flames are waiting to jump the line.
PART I
A Short History of American Failure
: 1865–2020
CHAPTER 1
Atrocities
Technically, a “lynching” doesn’t require that the victim be hanged, even though hanging is what people usually think of when they hear the word. Rather, it refers to any extralegal mob action against an individual or individuals. In fact, hanging is the least of what happened to the more than sixty-five hundred Black men, women, and children who are known to have been murdered at the hands of white mobs from 1865 to 1950. The actual number of people killed was almost certainly much higher, and the vast majority of the victims had committed no crime, broken no social convention.
That is likely true of Luther Holbert, who was accused of killing a wealthy plantation owner named James Eastland during a dispute, and certainly true of his wife, who was accused of nothing and was not named in news reports. The two were hunted by a white mob through a hundred miles of swamps and brambles before being cornered by hunting dogs. Killing the Holberts at the place they were caught would not have served the cause of “justice.” Instead, they were brought back to the woods near Doddsville, Mississippi, the town from which they’d been driven, and tied to a tree. While a pyre was prepared, the men nearest them amputated Mr. and Mrs. Holbert’s fingers one by one and handed the severed digits out to the crowd of bystanders, which had grown to over six hundred men, women, and children, as souvenirs. Then the couple’s ears were cut off and also distributed. Luther Holbert was beaten so severely that one of his eyes popped out of its socket, hanging “by a shred.” Even that wasn’t enough. Large corkscrews were produced and inserted into and pulled out from the Holberts’ legs, torsos, and arms, over and over, until there was no more sport in it. Only then was the fire set. They were still alive.
The Reckoning Page 1