By Kazu Haga, October 27, 2020, Waging Nonviolence.
As we head into what may be the most chaotic election in our lifetime, many people on all sides of the political aisle are reeling from anxiety and responding from a place of panic. With many of us on the left organizing for mass mobilizations and actions in the post-election season, we must make sure that we are doing so from a grounded place to ensure that we are not adding more panic to the world.
To ensure this, we have to have some understanding of how panic and trauma work in our own bodies, and then see what we can learn from that about how trauma is working in our collective body — this thing we call the United States of America.
Panic and trauma
“It happened 20 years ago, I’m over it.”
For most of my life, that’s what I had told myself about some traumatic experiences I went through as a child. “That was ages ago.” “It wasn’t a big deal.” “I’ve moved on.”
It was a conversation about our core, childhood trauma. About what seeded so much of the pain and separation that we would all experience as a family. In some ways, it was the thing I least wanted to talk about.
And that is what this country is needing to do, and attempting to do right now. To excavate and look at our collective core, childhood trauma. To face the reality that in the early, formative years of the founding of this nation-state, we experienced two of the grossest forms of violence human beings can enact on each other — genocide and enslavement. And both of these things were carried out on a systemic level.
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