Friday, June 22, 2018

Post Traumatic Stress

Last night over a candlelight dinner with friends in a peaceful, upscale neighborhood, we reminisced about the day we met walking our 5-year-old girls into kindergarten on their first day of school. How sweet that over the years those little girls have grown into wonderful thirty-something women with grace, intelligence, and beauty. How heartening that they love to be with us, the parents, instead of seeing us a necessary chore. How special that our families have remained close and intact.

And then, of course, the conversation turned to the inhumane crisis as immigrant families from south of the border are torn apart when they reach "America," land of opportunity. How cruel this myth and even more devastating the reality.

Ten-twenty-thirty years from now we will have a population of thousands upon thousands of deeply traumatized children grown up to be adults with terrible scars. Like all dehumanized populations, many will thrive nonetheless, but the majority will live with nightmares of all varieties, coping as best they can with deeply inflicted wounds on the psyche. Families will also suffer the horrors thrust upon them as they experience the worst possible nightmare...losing their children at the hands of a fascistic police force called ICE.

Post-traumatic stress is a real and debilitating factor that makes this current state of affairs a toxic brew. Unless the evil doers -  45 and his minions - are stopped, we will have a failed experiment called the United States of America.

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