November 11, 2005

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                                    Too Many Silences
                                Someone Else's Problem?

  
  

  Yes, I'm still here, having yoda-ed myself through something difficult in my own life over the past month, finding some truth and resolution and some happiness.

  
  

  About "too many silences" - to me it was not only that no one tried to call the cops, or tried to stop the fight; these were two big men.  The biggest silence of all has to do with the America's refusal to deal fully at the state and national level with the poverty and outright racism that produced those two men, the complete failure to understand the historical devastation of family structure that underlies some of this behavior.  

  
  

  Questions.  I'm starting with the premise that the family is where one learns the world is a safe place, is loved - the things that allow a person to grow up healthy and emotionally stable - focusing on that alone, for the moment. . 

  
  

  Given that, has anyone out there ever tried to think through the implications of the slave system on the destruction of family bonds?   How we know now that something like being sold into slavery, the actual experience, the dreadful trip and witnessing the accompanying loss of life, living through terror and threats, constituted a trauma, the likes of which a person would now be treated by a specialist in trauma were it to occur today?  Tried to imagine the effects of that on an individual?  Tried to think through the devastation of being sold from one plantation to another, pulled away forcibly from one's tenuous family?  Then tried to figure how many generations down the road this destruction lingers or echoes, compounded by things like I see all the time, men rousted at my streetcorner by the cops who are looking for an  hispanic and decide to take in the black man I'm talking to just because he's there?  What a lifetime of that does to a man's soul?

  
  

  The aftermath of Katrina brought America's ignored people into our homes on the TV screen.   Is it someone else's problem?  

  
  

  I've a young black woman living with me now, from a relatively well to do family, but one in which she was both sexually and emotionally abused.   She's a treasure, seeking to learn, to understand new things, to find her way into a non-abusive relationship.  Given my own personal limits, that is all I can do, yoda her, give her shelter.  But it's something.....

  
  

   

  
  

  pearlbamboo

  
  

  copyright  e.p. hodges

  • 1:24 pm
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