One Small Voice: Many of us now suffer our own PTSD

by Lynn Mandaville

Such a bleak week it has been. And it started only two days ago.

February 14, 2018. Wednesday, St. Valentine’s Day, Ash Wednesday.

Interesting it is to me that it was already a day of ambiguous meaning.  Valentine’s Day, when we celebrate love in all its wonderful, Hallmark variations, from romantic to familial to platonic. Marked by the color red. Ash Wednesday, when we begin the season of Lent, a time of  profound retrospection, introspection, repentance and self-reform. Marked by the color black, of the ashes worn on the foreheads of believers.

And, now, for the families of 17 murdered innocents, it will be the first of a lifetime of days of grief and anger. And for the peers, classmates and teachers of the dead it will be the start of a long, maybe never-ending lifetime, of unresolved trauma. Marked by a darkness that may never lift.

Let me digress for a moment.

Wednesday, within an hour of this mass carnage, I was writing my intense anger about this incident. I was angry all day and through the fitful night.  I hoped I would get over it, as I always have when these things occur.

Thursday was my normal day volunteering at the library. On a normal day, I would be smiling my ass off at the antics of the little children whose moms had brought them for the children’s programs. Kids love to peek through the book return slots into the circulation area where I work, and I love to wave and make faces at them.

This Thursday, however, I was consumed with an intense sadness, and as I looked at their precious faces all I could think was that someday, maybe not too long from now, they might be staring down the barrel of an AR-15, hearing the ear-splitting reports of that gun, watching as one of their classmates’ little bodies was torn to smithereens by an armor-piercing bullet. Or that, maybe, they would make it to high school before one of their tortured, bullied classmates decided to show them all what it meant to be ostracized their whole lives, and punish everyone for their misery with a long gun. I prayed that by Friday I would be past this darkness.

Today is Friday. And today I am no better. My darkness has turned to an unbearable sympathy for the parents who are making preparations to bury their dead children.

When I crawled from my bed my mind went to the movie “The Godfather,” and the part where Vito Corleone went to the undertaker for whom he did a favor on his daughter’s wedding day, asking that he, the undertaker, use all his skills to prepare Sonny’s body for burial so his mother wouldn’t have to see her son’s bullet-riddled corpse. What kind of skills would be needed this week by the morticians of Parkland, Fla., to make these innocent children and their three teachers presentable for the mourners?

Grisly thoughts?  Troubling thoughts? You bet. And the not-so-funny words of an old song I can’t place sang in my brain “handsome Jack ain’t handsome anymore.”  Then, as I watched the morning news updates, I cried.

So back to the subject of healing for the survivors of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. I’ve touched on it briefly before, and now other talking heads are broaching the subject, too. That being post-traumatic stress.

After these horrible tragedies, it’s common to hear the sentiments “we’ll come back better and stronger than we were before,” and “one deranged person is not going to bring us down.” And that’s a great philosophy to subscribe to. It’s a frame of mind that indicates a  positive attitude toward the healing that one hopes will take place.

We know that survivors of rape carry fear with them, for years, fears of being alone or isolated, or of being watched or followed. People who have been assaulted or battered wear the psychological effects of the experience, sometimes for the rest of their lives. It is not unlike what soldiers suffer, because it is the result of a battle on a civilian front for which none of us is prepared to cope.

These kids are afraid to return to the scene of the crime. Many will have nightmares. Their grades may suffer, and their social skills may degrade. They may have serious mood swings or suffer depression. They may develop mental “illnesses” of their own due to the mental illness of the perpetrator.

This will also occur for the adults at the school. If they were physically injured in any way, these wounds will likely heal without consequence. The mental injuries are less predictable in their ability to heal.

If we multiply the post-traumatic stress injuries by the number of school shootings and the number of mass killings among the general public, and project those out to the unpredictable number of future massacres in our future, it isn’t far-fetched to assume that there will be hundreds of thousands of non-military Americans who need health care for PTSD.

And, not to put too fine a point on this, what are we to make of the toll that will be taken on you and me as we try to process this from our couches? I already wonder why I haven’t reverted back to my joyful, grateful self. Why can’t I shake this funk? How many other Americans are feeling unnaturally blue on day three after the catastrophe?

I’m dismayed that the same old tripe is being trotted out by politicians. Paul Ryan has slightly modified his rhetoric. Instead of saying that it’s too soon to speak of gun reform, he has said it is too soon to “politicize” this event. Our president, for once, has been quick to express condolences to the survivors, but never once in his remarks did he mention the word gun.

Other voices are echoing the old, worn out excuses that this is not a gun issue, it’s a mental health issue. But Congress has only undermined restrictions against the ability of mentally ill people to purchasing firearms, and the Trump Administration has eroded health care of all kinds, with no provisions to restore funding for mental health initiatives in its proposed new budget.

I heard on NPR this afternoon a young man talking about the Parkland massacre. Angrily, he said, that it is not too soon to talk about gun control.  Angrily, he said, that the minute the first bullet was fired it was too late to talk about it.

He’s right. Talk is cheap.  

Congress is full of cowards who will not step up and scream in anger at that to which they are accomplices. Congress is full of chickenshits who pussyfoot around the issue while collecting blood money for their next run at re-election.

My husband says I sound angry. He says I shouldn’t write when I’m so mad.

I say this is exactly when I should write, when my blood boils at the injustices heaped upon the innocents in our country.

Who goes to college to become a teacher so he can take a bullet (or many bullets) to save his students? Who becomes a teacher so she can herd her room full of 6-year-olds into a small bathroom and shush them until the madman with the gun passes them by for another room of sitting ducks? Who aspires to be an educator when part of his or her training may include, one day, small arms training and a permit to carry concealed?

I don’t believe it’s naive to pine for a simpler time when our government wasn’t bought and paid for by special interests. I don’t believe it’s unrealistic to insist that elected representatives actually listen to the desires of the people who elected them, instead of to the voice of personal avarice.

Just as I sensed a cultural shift with #MeToo, I sense a revolution coming where Americans will no longer worship the gun more than the lives of its children.

I hope my Spider-Sense is true.