UNSPEAKABLE EVIL
I’m still trying to process the unthinkable. Last night, I lay in bed thinking about the children who were witnesses to this carnage in Connecticut, but survived. What will their lives be like from now on? Can children survive an event that is likely to bring on what is essentially Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome? Can they be helped? I cried when I saw how the police and the teachers led them out, eyes closed, hands on the shoulders of the child in front, hoping to shield them from an event that in no way can be avoided. They *will* be affected by this. Short term, they will probably bounce back. Children are resilient. But long term –
This horrible, unspeakable event has brought back deep childhood traumas. I grew up in London, during the nightly bombings of World War II. I laughingly say I spent my childhood in a bomb shelter, but in reality it’s no laughing matter. My mother (my father was in the army) wouldn’t let me be evacuated with the rest of my class when my elementary school was bombed – during daytime, while we kids were in the bomb shelter on the playground. Instead, she took me to the relative safety of a great-aunt’s thatched cottage in rural Essex. Alas, a few weeks later, the Luftwaffe discovered the presence of an American airbase just a mile out of town and began bombing it. My mother decided that if we were going to be killed in our beds, those beds might as well be at home in London. Thus began my relationship with bomb shelters.
The nights in a shelter were scary, but the mornings were something else. Kids still in London during the Blitz developed a routine: scour the neighborhood to see whose house wasn’t there any more (i.e., it was a casualty of the bombing). Of course, this meant some friends weren’t there any more either, but we managed not to be concerned with that fact. I remember one frantic search when a rumor circulated that a German pilot had been shot down and the wreckage, plus his body, were in our area. One kid was reputed to have found a finger bone! How that set us off! I remember my mother despairing that the war was turning us into savages.
So I survived the damage of the bombing of London relatively sane and intact, but I remember a college psychologist who presciently warned that kids who grew up under those circumstances bore lifelong scars. When I married, we moved to Indiana, and the stress of marriage and a move to a new country triggered nightmares. A car dealership celebrating the new cars of the year by a searchlight probing the sky was enough to terrify me. My young husband spent a couple of hours driving around Bloomington, Indiana, to show me the innocent cause of those menacing lights crisscrossing the sky. A single engine plane droning across the sky at night catapulted me into nightmares from which I woke screaming. (As a child, I’d processed the sound as “normal” and buried it; but apparently my brain always knew it had signaled danger.)
I could go on, but this isn’t about me, or even those children who survived other battle zones, or even the Holocaust itself. I’m thinking today of the little children in Connecticut, saved from seeing the bodies on the ground, but not protected against the future nightmares because there isn’t any way to protect them from that.
Dear God, we are a flawed and foolish race of beings. Help us.
This horrible, unspeakable event has brought back deep childhood traumas. I grew up in London, during the nightly bombings of World War II. I laughingly say I spent my childhood in a bomb shelter, but in reality it’s no laughing matter. My mother (my father was in the army) wouldn’t let me be evacuated with the rest of my class when my elementary school was bombed – during daytime, while we kids were in the bomb shelter on the playground. Instead, she took me to the relative safety of a great-aunt’s thatched cottage in rural Essex. Alas, a few weeks later, the Luftwaffe discovered the presence of an American airbase just a mile out of town and began bombing it. My mother decided that if we were going to be killed in our beds, those beds might as well be at home in London. Thus began my relationship with bomb shelters.
The nights in a shelter were scary, but the mornings were something else. Kids still in London during the Blitz developed a routine: scour the neighborhood to see whose house wasn’t there any more (i.e., it was a casualty of the bombing). Of course, this meant some friends weren’t there any more either, but we managed not to be concerned with that fact. I remember one frantic search when a rumor circulated that a German pilot had been shot down and the wreckage, plus his body, were in our area. One kid was reputed to have found a finger bone! How that set us off! I remember my mother despairing that the war was turning us into savages.
So I survived the damage of the bombing of London relatively sane and intact, but I remember a college psychologist who presciently warned that kids who grew up under those circumstances bore lifelong scars. When I married, we moved to Indiana, and the stress of marriage and a move to a new country triggered nightmares. A car dealership celebrating the new cars of the year by a searchlight probing the sky was enough to terrify me. My young husband spent a couple of hours driving around Bloomington, Indiana, to show me the innocent cause of those menacing lights crisscrossing the sky. A single engine plane droning across the sky at night catapulted me into nightmares from which I woke screaming. (As a child, I’d processed the sound as “normal” and buried it; but apparently my brain always knew it had signaled danger.)
I could go on, but this isn’t about me, or even those children who survived other battle zones, or even the Holocaust itself. I’m thinking today of the little children in Connecticut, saved from seeing the bodies on the ground, but not protected against the future nightmares because there isn’t any way to protect them from that.
Dear God, we are a flawed and foolish race of beings. Help us.
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