Times are tough for a lot of people.  COVID did not cause the cracks in our social edifice of care but has exposed and widened them to make them more cruelly visible. Never before has everyone had to battle the same enemy, or faced the same threat of falling ill or dying. Mind you, if you have health care, if you are wealthy enough and living in middle class suburbia, you have services enough and resources enough to access them. But even then, COVID has not been a respecter of persons. Even the President got it.

For all that, the human race is normally hail and hardy, capable of overcoming or enduring flood and drought, fire and storm, and these times will be no exception.  It is bad but it is not yet the worst of times.  We are not in the middle of a Civil or nuclear War. This is not the Black Death.

But that is not how we sound right now.

One could be forgiven to think that the way we are talking about things, that these are the end times, Armageddon will hit tomorrow because the world is on its last legs. There is no future to promise, only a past to lament.  Our kids are mental wrecks and our leaders are corrupt and our economy is tanking and Wall Street is collapsing, and the nuclear cloud is growing darker by the minute and democracy is failing and human rights are being rolled back….and…..and. Like the Witches in MacBeth,

Double, double toil and trouble;

We seem to have talked ourselves into our own demise, and made depression and struggle so normative that for someone to thrive seems like an insult.  How dare you be happy or optimistic? What with Ukraine and Climate Change and Roe v Wade and January 6th and the rest. We feel so entitled to our misery, so let’s  cry into our pretzels and enjoy it while we can.

Life, Liberty and the pursuit of unhappiness has become the new code. Throw in the ever expanding expertise of emotional intelligence and empathy, trauma and triggers and you have a potent brew of roiling discontent that we can elaborate till the cows come home. What, you mean the cows are still missing? See- another reason to be sad.  Pain and suffering, anxiety and stress are dominating the headlines. But let’s not fool ourselves.  Pity is not our only aim. We are democratizing the n0-show, the go-slow, the don’t know, because now, everyone has an excuse. There are advantages to feeling/seeing the world this way. Malaise has a thriving market.

We can beg off the meetings and the appointments we don’t particularly care for, by just being exposed to COVID or having a sore throat. Could be Delta or Omicron, couldn’t it? Or we can pretend to attend in that faceless ZOOM way to at least pay lip service to our duty. If our workers tell us they need a week off for self-care, what are we to say? Show us a doctor’s certificate? Give us the stress test results or your blood pressure chart? We have had to be accountable to ourselves in a way we have never had the freedom to be before. How is that working?  I am not sure we are not  getting into the habit of taking the easy way out.

If we don’t have to prove medical reasons for not showing up, we don’t have to push through the headache anymore. We don’t have to dig deeper and find a resolve that resists the temptation to expect less of ourselves. We amass a lengthy litany of deficits and obstacles that make us seem like some patriot or martyr for whom the labor of breathing deserves a purple heart.  Showing up is something our bosses should be grateful for. We become such powerful witnesses to our weakness that we make ourselves more fragile by the minute, and any pressure, any strain we think will break us. It won’t, we know, but this is strategic vulnerability. We conspire with those who expect less, and we deliver on our own diminishment.

When the world needs to recover and renew, when the world needs to get back on track, we need to claim the resources that remind us of our strengths. One resource that no one is mentioning is memory, and the fact  that we as a race have always remembered our way back to resilience. That is why we wrote the book “Our Stories Rise Up.”

The hardships we endure are not meant to be wasted. They are meant to build memory muscle for the next challenge, and re-enforce a species confidence that no matter what befalls our tribe, we will prevail. It is the least we owe our ancestors who went through so much more terror than we can ever complain about. They must laugh at us for becoming so pathetic and flabby, so whiney and plaintive, so unbelieving in our own abilities to stand up straight,  and measure up right. We are standing down and measuring down and feeling down because its expanding our territory of excuse. We are fast turning failure into an achievement. Unless you are struggling, they insist, you are not living.  If we are not happy, no one else better be. Democratize depression. Down with contentment. Down with joy. Down with Resilience.  Well, Storywise says Ba Humbug to all that.

If you are under 30, and you have already dedicated your life to misery, then what kind of despair will you serve when you are 40, and what kind of catastrophe will you eagerly await when you are 50? No matter what decade we live, there is always enough life experience available for us to mold into an alibi for our disappointment. And there is always enough evidence for the opposite, that will give us cause for rejoicing.

Tragic, Comic, Romantic or Ironic? We get to decide the genre, even if the content remains the same. They tell the story of famous actor, Richard Burton playing Hamlet night after night and deciding, to stop getting bored that one night he would be the camp Hamlet and the next night, the fascist, and the next night the noir Hamlet. We can do the same with our life script.

At a young age, we are invited to commit ourselves to life, to make the decision to thrive, to pursue not the ‘happiness’ of feeling good, but the happiness the Founders meant quoting Plato and Aristotle,  eudaimonia, the Demon of wellness,  the quest for human thriving.

Live the best possible human life, they said, and to do that, one must pursue it, not presume it.  Life and Liberty is our birthright under God, but happiness in the Greek sense is doing justice to our human potential. That can never be pain free, and suffering part and parcel of the striving. It is more times than not the spur, not the threat.

Struggle is the catalyst for growing bigger than the obstacles we face, thinking larger than the timid souls around us who give up too easy, and growing a trusting heart to leap into life, not expecting it to be an endless joy ride that we resent because it is rudely interrupted by the bumps. After all, the bumps are the ride.

Imagine being a sociologist and wanting to conduct a mass experiment on the impact of isolation and loneliness on community health.

Imagine that you wanted to shut down the whole system of normal human interaction- jobs, churches, synagogues, schools, colleges, clubs, gyms, bars and strictly confine people to their homes. Not for a day or a week but a year.  If there was to be any human face to face interaction, it had to be with most of the face covered. Some essential outlets like food and liquor are permitted but only on a limited basis. The experiment would be strictly enforced.

To counteract the powerful natural social instinct, you add to the experiment the penalty that mixing could spread a deadly disease. You would also disorientate people by having authorities repeatedly send out confusing and contradictory messages about what is safe and what is allowed. You make it sound as real as possible by creating headlines of mounting death tolls and overwhelmed hospitals and mobile morgues parked outside for the cadaver overflow. You have the President act as if he knew nothing or that there was nothing to worry about, and then have him get sick and  offer to drink Clorox live on TV.

The other proviso is that people can still use the phone or other communication technologies so long as they are disembodied and virtual.  Whatever the tool, each must have a Mute All button so humans can self-isolate or other-isolate if desired.  Any other sort of human ingenuity is allowed so long as one does not degrade the point of the experiment which is to assess the lasting affect of  loss, the profound loss of normal human contact.

Lastly, the project guidelines say that it can only end when enough people decide that it has ended, which is when enough people see through the experiment. The researchers want to study the residual behaviors that outlast the experiment and to see how quick people adjust to a false reality and what part of the prior reality they reclaim. They expect that some will get so used to the new regime that they will collect Gucci designer masks as the epitome of style.

First up, if you were the funder or the expert panel reading this proposal, you would say that it is outrageous, that it could never happen, and there could be no justification for disrupting so many lives. Sorry Professor. Try it with mice maybe.

Then in 2020 comes Wuhan, and COVID19 and reality decides to stage the experiment anyway, on a global scale, only of course this was no experiment. The morgues were real, as was the pain and the loss. We humans have had to live isolated and deal with an enforced solitude for almost two years. So how did that experiment go? What did we reveal about ourselves?

First of all, people have mostly decided that the experiment is over. They want back to normal, even if it is not back to safe. The authorities have yet to adjust and they continue to lead with prevarication.  Doctor Fauci is having a Two Step dance named after him called “Yes It’s Over- No Not Yet”  Some late adapters are still wearing masks and living intimately apart in spaces of 6 feet. Hand Sanitizer is the new must-have accessory.

But the rest of us, most of us- this was no experiment- this was hell. There was nothing to learn here, and if there was,  it was not worth the pain. All we know is that it Sucked!  We want our lives back, our friends back, our normal social pursuits back. To hell with some grand social laboratory that we were forced into becoming. A judge says Masks are out, and there is mass national unmasking, on planes and trains and Malls. Take it off.  Face Reveal parties compete with Gender Reveals.  Is that what you looked like? I forgot. How do I look?

We are determined to recover the normal that we lost. At school, we will test and test to see how far behind our students fell, and knowing that, be able to sprint them to catch up.

But friends, have you noticed? Work does not want you back in the office. Or three days but no, we don’t have to rent that downtown building if you have proven you can work just as well from home, and in fact, productivity in some areas is up. Professionals  who have set up home offices don’t miss paying exorbitant child care costs, and if they can work and parent from the same place, what is not to like? The Board got used to your toddler crawling across the screen when you presented the annual report.

As for all the reported gloom and mental health decline, everyone, I mean everyone, even Grandpa, especially Grandpa, have learned to ZOOM, so that even with social distance, loneliness does not have to be the end of the story. The Tyranny of distance can be overthrown. Isolation does not have to mean No-contact. Isn’t that a revelation? Isn’t that a revolution?

You might be one of the essential workers who decided that not getting paid enough to take the risk of getting sick y0urself was just too much, thank you. You migrated to a different career. What was there to lose? Giant or Whole Foods loss is poetry’s  or plumbing or pottery’s gain.

If the normal you are striving to get back to feels like that old normal of old, can I suggest you have not being paying attention. That normal does not exist anymore. The grand experiment called COVID took place, and we were the lab rats for it. Perhaps lab rats don’t read the research findings on them, but someone out there surely is. And if we don’t know what emerged from the mess, then we risk wasting all the pain and it will happen again. Why would we suffer such an experiment at such huge costs of life, love and labor and not want to learn all we can from it?

What is this new normal and how can we get over the COVID blues? That is why I wrote the book “Our Stories Rise Up.” Like many events in our lives, I am daring to predict that over time, what we experienced as tragedy and loss will one day be the time we will look back on as the best in our lives. “Remember the time when we did not have to go to school?” “Remember the time when we did not have to go to work?” Remember the time when we were stuck at home as a family and got used to playing those stupid card games?” “Remember when I was on ZOOM and dressed the top half in shirt and tie and stood up to get the cat and they saw everything?”

Oh those were the days, my friends.

ON TURNING 10
Poet Lureate Billy Collins wrote one of my all time favorite poems called “On Turning Ten” that begins with

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,

and ends with

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now if I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

One of my Grandsons, Tazman, (pictured in blue at the dentist this week)  turned the big 10 this year and I revisited it for his sake, marveling at the milestone when you reach double figures. And the stitches on his head tell me he bleeds upon the footpaths of life too. (what we call ‘sidewalks’ in Australia) He has to learn to ride life like he rides his bike. I tell him, “Slow down Laddie. Use your brakes next time!”

ON TURNING 70
I wish Billy (who is 81)  could be as articulate about “Turning 70,” which was my fate on Monday of this week.  I say ‘my fate” because it is not something I looked forward to, or something I really noticed until others did. It is nothing that I could lay any claim to as my achievement, other than the sterling work of my lungs and my heart and my septuagenarian but grumpy stomach that has been upset since I was about 30. But 35+ of my family & friends came out in force on Sunday night and my 70 was as good an excuse as any to have a good time. Thank You son Ahmed and Lein and cousin  Dr. Phil team and all the celebrants.

ANZAC DAY
It made me pause, to think that my birthday is also Anzac Day, April 25th, the day of national remembrance in Australia and New Zealand. When I was born, the battle of Gallipoli was a bare 37 years past, a World War One memory of a tragedy hardly reckoned with. I was being born to a generation of grandparents who were the generation of Gallipoli. My Great Uncle Michael Patrick Cahill joined up months after Gallipoli and died less than a year later, in the days before the Somme campaign even began. He never made it past 25. He represented a whole generation lost.

HOW IT ALL TURNED OUT
In 2022, we ritualize the myth of Anzac in marches and speeches, looking longways back 107 years, but in my earlier life, I met some veterans from the Dardanelles. I had living contact with the life that has now, in my own lifetime, become the myth. Living long enough gives one the luxury of seeing how the story transforms, how it turns out, in the end. We might say the same about our kids and our careers, our investments and even about our nation.

BORN INTO THE AFTERMATH OF WAR
I remember once watching the newsreels of the last reunion of the American Civil War in 1938 and seeing the frail Gettysburg veterans of both sides. It got me thinking if they worried how they would be remembered, once the last of them had gone. That responsibility would be left to their children who, like me, were born far enough away to have escaped the actual trauma, but born close enough to know someone who lived it first hand. The ripples of their sadness seep down to the next generation who grow up knowing they too were born into a war, even though it had long ago ended.

In my 70 years, when every birthday, the streets are full of parades and bands, and flags fly at half mast, and the speeches all end with a famous poem, “They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old….At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we shall remember them.” Then like a response to a litany, we all recite Kipling’s “Lest we Forget.”  Every birthday I was asked to remember what I had not lived through, except as aftermath. Yet I  somehow knew my 70 years, always celebrated with this national holiday, were always fated to be entangled with this history. Some of my uncles, I am told,  used to even call me “little Zack.”

BORN FROM WAR, WORKING FOR PEACE
Since 1998, basing myself in Washington DC,  I have worked internationally, having the rare chance to play some small role in bringing peace to the world through the Washington Ireland Program, the South Africa Washington International Program and New Story Leadership. From Belfast to Cape Town, from Ramallah to Jerusalem, from Dublin to Durban, my work using the power of stories has taken me to scenes of other great conflicts and to meet a generation of young people who are survivors, or barely one generation removed from the battlefield. I have ended up working with people like my parents, who endured and are enduring the crucible of war, or like me, those for whom the wound of war still leaves an indelible scar on living memory.

EXPERIENCE IS NOT THE SAME AS EXPERTIZE 
At 70, perhaps I can indulge myself, or claim some authority to my experience. We all know the athletes living into dotage who comment on every game as if it was still them tackling in ’68, or shooting the winning hoop in ’73. For me, life moves far too fast to be making declarations of “How we won the war or kept the peace” especially when the Guns of February are destroying the famine fields of Ukraine- again. I know my parents who met in World War Two ( yes- another war story)  would rise from their graves to ask us what did we think they were defending and dying for, if 77 years later, we allow someone to do it all over again? Lest we Forget? Hmm?

THE BIBLE ALLOTMENT
At 70, if that is “the three score and ten” that the bible says God allots to us humans, then can I at least clock off?

Can I claim overtime from here? Perhaps I need a scene like the end of the movie Babe, where the farmer says “That’ll do Pig, That’ll do.”

Maybe I should tell my ever so strict Grade 3 teacher who was always giving extra homework, Sister Patricia Mary, that my Danny Dux exercise book of life has run out of pages.

“Sister,  See It is full.  Can I have a new book?”
She would check the pages to see if I was pretending.
Then she would say,
“Yes Paul, but only if you write it.”

When 9-11 happened, our leaders decided that the easiest explanation was that these attackers were Muslim fanatics, that they came from a heart of darkness and that they acted out of gratuitous hatred for everything that America and the West stood for. Nothing else could explain their unreasoning rage because this was a battle of Good versus Evil. This had to be joined at the moral hinge of human understanding. It was beyond the political. Such a certain conclusion had other dire consequences.

If we were good and they were evil, we could torture and deport and deprive these evil people and people like them of every human right. Our innate virtue would redeem whatever we did. But we were deluded.  Al Gharib and  Guantanamo Bay will share  the notoriety of  Auschwitz and Belsen-Bergen in the history of terror. The evil we did fighting for the triumph of good is even worse because we pretended to uphold the rule of law. As if a John Yoo memo could make torture into “enhanced interrogation” and no one would see the self- deception.

Anyone asking if there might have been some provocation for 9-11 was verboten. Was it connected to American involvement in Afghanistan and empowering the Mujahadin like former freedom fighter, Osama Bin Laden? To even ask the question was showing disloyalty. When we are attacked, we have to stick together in our shared sense of outrage. Asking questions is to be open to the possibility that there might be some logical explanation, one we might well need to understand if we we were to successfully counter what provoked the attack.

Moral certainty is the death of curiosity. It is lazy, because we can blame the devil for the details, and walk away with the sweet smell of innocence. Our lazy moral judgment not only prevents any rational response but leads us to double down on the reasons the terrorists gave for being so motivated to become suicide bombers. It was the West’s invasion and intrigue in the Middle East that lit the fire. And we decided that our reply was to invade and intrigue more. We gave even more reason for the next generation of terrorists that we helped recruit and whom we had to face in Afghanistan and Iraq. How lazy and irresponsible we were. Our ignorance was deadly.

We were humiliated in Afghanistan. There is no other way round it.  We had to retreat and hand back the nation to those we tried to destroy, the very government that had harbored Al Qaeda. Did we as a nation manage enough shame about all of that? We not only lost the war but we had to surrender, as if we were handing Pearl Harbor to the Japanese and saying, sorry for the bother. Clearly shame is not in our repertoire because here we are again, taking the same lazy way out.

No one excuses Russia and its flagrant violation of territorial integrity. That much is clear. But while we cannot offer excuse, we must try to understand. Explanation and excuse are not the same thing. The media circus right now is so Ukraine saturated that we are not even invited to ask the question as to why Russia or Putin would do this. It seems disloyal.  By dismissing him as both evil and mad, we have got lazy again.

For us, Russia is evil and the actions spring from an evil man, not from a dark history that implicates us. For instance, in 1918, the American Army were at war with Russia- killing the Bolsheviks. Russia has no reason to have fond memories of America. After giving up 20 million dead, we owe them big time for the liberation of Europe and ending World War Two. The way we tell the story, you would never suspect that. When Putin says the West does not pay enough respect to Russia, he is absolutely right.

Retaining our sense of innocence requires some necessary lies. I mean, our epic of freedom is built on slavery and Columbus’s epic of discovery is built on genocide. But innocence is too important to besmirch, and we must cling to it at all costs. Otherwise, we lose our sense of our selves as decent human beings.

Russia is using the wrong means because war solves anything. But the more we take sides, the more we defend Ukraine as this singular vessel of virtue and dismiss Russia as the instrument of pure malice, we make ourselves part of the problem. This is a European conflict. What gives us any claim to resolves it other than we and NATO have the biggest guns? Russia and Ukraine have a long and tortured history that they need to resolve themselves without us tipping the scales because it makes political advantage for our leaders.

The media seem to presume we care deeply about Ukraine, but I am sure that is news to the Ukrainians who knew, until a week ago, they were totally expendable, bribable and usable. The last President tried to bribe us and the current President is using us to show off to his local audience that he can be the strong man.

People see evil as a result of a dark heart, but that is simplistic. Evil arises out of a dark history. Putin was born four years after the siege of Leningrad but lost a brother in that sorry time  where Russians were forced to eat rats to survive. The USSR won World War 2 for the west. It’s armies defeated Hitler and we were a strong support act. But we exaggerate our claim to an American led victory that belongs more to the USSR than to us. You can imagine how that enrages them. Go to our WW2 memorial in DC and try and find any mention of allies who won the war with us?

Zelensky’s grandparents and their brothers also fought for the USSR against Hitler’s armies and only one came home alive.  These are two antagonists. How do we dare to even begin to understand that dynamic. But we jump in, take sides, casting Russia to play the part of the evil one, because we are just too damned lazy to learn that Putin is acting out of a dark history that only looks evil because of our ignorance and our bellicose realpolitik.

We are picking  a fight with someone who will fight to the death, and we totally fail to weigh our actions and their impact on Russia. This is not about Putin. This is about Russia. Why would we allow one man to determine their fate. But because it is CNN’s new OJ Simpson cover to cover show, we are not going to be hearing anything other than our self-righteous, ignorant and totally self serving coverage. When Putin pushes the button on the nuclear rockets heading for DC and Chicago, and we ask ourselves, how could he do such a madness, we need to be asking, how could we provoke that madman into such insanity.

When you see an armed and disturbed man on the street fearing any stranger, you know not to confront so as to provoke. But Putin thinks that the West is totally against Russia and nothing we have done so far has disproven that. And what has he got to lose? He has seen us do what he expects, and even if he goes down, he is happy to die knowing how much damage he can do to us. And we know that. And it still does not stop us.

Bring on the conflagration. We brought this on ourselves. He is mad, but that is no reason for us to act the same way. He has a grudge and wants something for Mother Russia  that Ukraine threatens. How could we dare to pretend to explain that? If we are to serve any real role, we must go to Ukraine and Russia and offer some way out, an off ramp. All we are doing now is giving Russia more and more reason to double down and take the risks. We might all be annihilated in the Third World War, but there will be one difference. Putin will die happy because he has made us suffer and we will die befuddled not because we were wrong but because we were lazy. We played the stupid priest moralizing when we should have played the statesman sagely weighing issues and interests. Sadly, statesmen no longer exist.

Marx once said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and later as farce. If only?

Modern consciousness seems to have decided that if history returns, it returns mostly as trauma, and this trauma treats the corrosive affects of history as eternal. Once scarred, we must embark on a lifetime of recovery and redemption. Our present cannot escape. It will always and forever remain the casualty of it’s past. The future is nothing more than a 12 step program. We teach trauma informed teaching- trauma informed therapy- trauma informed coaching. Trauma is informing just about everything.  After 9-11 and Black Lives Matter, George Floyd and COVID,  Trump and January 6th, you could almost guess that 2001-2021 will be called the Age of Trauma. Instead of the Roaring Twenties, we are well on our way to the Traumatizing Twenties. How times have changed?

If your religious funny bone says you have heard that plotline somewhere before, you might be right. It does indeed echo the Christian story of- Fall to Passion-to Resurrection. The star of the story is the “passion”, the “Suffering,” which trauma wants to spotlight as the experience that defines our surviving humanity. The struggle is significant not because of the future that we endured it for, and later lived into, but the torture we went through, the pain, the “never to be forgotten” humiliation, the wound, which is what τραύμα “Trauma,” in pure medical terms, means.

To suggest that there can be mental and emotional scars on the psyche that are like the physical wounds on the body is a great feat of imagination, poetic even, delivering a great metaphor. It seems however that the metaphor has migrated, as Susan Sontag was wont to point out, into a specific illness. Sontag wrote that cancer became an overused metaphor of industrial society. PTSD now repays the favor, as the metaphor τραύμα becomes an illness, and this illness has metastasized.

The Manual DSM V gives us a broad catalogue of symptoms so that insurance companies can pay therapists for treating patients. One set suggests that trauma is best characterized by flash backs and the startle affect, the hyper vigilance caused by the event recurring or being triggered by light or a door rapidly closing or closing too loudly, and in dreams and night sweats. The event creates an echo chamber down the corridor of time such that one is never rid of it’s haunting. As expert Van Der Kolk describes of returning veterans, these behaviors are real enough.

But equally there are another set of symptoms for trauma that indicate signs of total avoidance, that the event is nowhere to be seen, felt or remembered and that the person defiantly refuses to revisit it or even talk about it. That too can be PTSD. Then, of course, you can imagine the combination of symptoms where on Monday, you want to talk and on Wednesday, you clam up. The absurdity reveals itself in the contradiction. Each and all combinations up to a total of 636,120 of these can be classed as trauma or trauma related. Trauma becomes a lottery that everyone wins.

If you have a cold, there is a reliable set of symptoms. You cannot have a cold if you both have a runny nose and a headache and you don’t have a runny nose and a headache. Diseases might give the doctors a set of ambiguous symptoms but rarely are they contradictory. But with trauma, and the way the professionals have chosen to describe it, they are covering all their bases.  You have it when you have it, and when you don’t have it, that is also a telltale sign that you have it. My parents served in World War II and rarely spoke about it when we were growing up. Did that mean they must have had trauma? In their old age, they did talk about it and some would say, yes, See!  they did have trauma, but my hunch is that talking about it caused the upset, not the history of it. They managed most of their adult lives not having to look back or go back. They fought a war to deliver us to a future, not to a therapy.

It seems to be spreading like the common cold because now, anyone can get it. If you are in a terrible car accident and barely survive, you are a likely candidate for PTSD and if I am your mother in law, just hearing about your accident, I too am a likely candidate for vicarious trauma. Like a pandemic, it can even cross generations meaning the Famine of of my Irish ancestors in Galway 1845 could be carried in the genes down to me 175 years later. Again, one cannot but help think this is one great metaphor that leapt from the book into the bed, masquerading as medicine. But just in case you were skeptical, they call these genes, ‘epigenetic markers.’ Who could doubt that? DNA adds to PTSD in this game of scrabble.

Where the absurdity reaches it’s fartherest boundaries is offering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder treatment to the children of a live war zone like Gaza. I recently attended a meeting hearing mostly Israeli and American experts tell us all about the plight of Gazan children. The Gazan specialists were quick to point out that there was nothing Post about this PTSD. It was current, ever present and ongoing. They also wanted to say that Gazans have family, faith and a history of endurance way beyond the scope of anyone not born there to understand. Gazans have seen off Napoleon and the Romans, and the Greeks and the Ottomans, and the British and the Egyptians, and eventually, the Israelis. Applying an American model of medical treatment derived from wars in Vietnam and Iraq, treating combat soldiers for their war wounds and their moral injury when they find themselves in an unjust war, or bombing and napalming innocent children, or torturing and waterboarding detainees whose only crime is being Muslim,  is not the same a treating children who are the innocent victims of these soldiers. I irreverently dared to ask, who needs the treatment, the children who survive the killing or those who do the killing in a culture that grants them impunity?

Yet, our experts were unfazed, as most experts are.  They insisted that they admired Gazans, and knew what Gazan children were going through, and knew how to heal them. Unless they were like the 11 children on their way to a trauma recovery group in May 2021 who were bombed and killed by the Israeli Occupation forces. That was not exactly a textbook termination of their treatment.

The wounds of the soul and psyche are real enough in their own domain. They surely will manifest in physical symptoms but in ancient times, healing was done by the priest, the shaman, or the imam  and the tribal medicine man. It was never considered a purely medical problem. Suffering was seen as an unavoidable side effect of life’s effort and endurance. No one escapes life alive and no one can avoid suffering in one form or another. Buddha had some ideas on that.

But to make the wound, τραύμα  the Suffering the main focus, to give pain a second and third act, is to seriously distort the human journey as the story of an original “Fall in need of Redemption.” Even pessimist Christians grew tired of that when they created the sunny prosperity Gospel.  Trauma is an ideology that presents human beings to be essentially flawed and human life precarious. Humans are fragile flowers, so easily injured, physically, emotionally, morally and spiritually. No one escapes unscathed. No one is exempted. That flies in the face of a different understanding that is as ancient as Saint Irenaeus and as modern as Teilhard, that the glory of God is humans coming more fully alive. God told Adam and Eve not to go out and grieve but to Go out and Live, by the sweat of his brow. Suffering was not abnormal. It was the human condition.

Trauma turns the world into a triage ward. All we have to boast of are our wounds, our scars. All we can share are our resentments, of what we are owed by those who abused us or abandoned us. Life isn’t fair. Who wants to go that party?

I think its time to take this great metaphor and return it back to Professor Caruth and other literary critics and professors who wrote the most informing books on it. None of them are clinicians.  Let’s put their work back on the shelf with Tolstoy and  Wordsworth and the other poets from where they  came.

Life is not all trauma or if it is, surely the greatest trauma we all survive is being born. Somehow most of us leave that primal scream of terror behind to hardly reference it, save for birthdays. And then, what do we say to honor that totally unprecedented and terrible “coming into the world” moment? We say Happy Birthday. That flash back is a hyper-vigilantly happy trigger to remind us that we are still alive. Hopefully we will live long enough to appreciate that we are indeed alive, and that if anything, trauma is what makes us want to savor it, not sour it. It does not have to break us.

Let us all give thanks for this precious something that we all count ourselves to be, knowing that all of us started from nothing.

Once upon a time, before we were born, there was no hint that we might ever enter this land of the living, but by some genetic fluke of engineering, we arrived. That surely is the non controversial bonus of life itself.  We are all heirs to that biological fact, and its cautionary conclusion- We did not give birth to ourselves. Having Life is like winning first prize in a lottery, from the day we were born and every day we wake up after that.

That is not what you would think to be the case when you listen to popular executive coaches like Ben Crowe telling us that we must take the hero’s journey to believe in ourselves, know who we are, and know what we want, before we will find our Mojo. It is as if the size of the world we inhabit must inflate to the size of our ego and it’s Freudian id of unshackled desires. Crowe used to work for Nike and he is still preaching “Just Do It.”

We have to be famous or successful or purpose driven or something, the script goes, to hold back the cosmic void that will eventually engulf us. Crowe won his fame from coaching successful sports people and teams. He presumes life is like winning a super bowl. But losing a game on the field won’t cost you your life or your loved ones.  Playing “the game of life” is Russian roulette for the poor and starving, for the refugees and displaced. Poverty is a  game without rules.  Lose and you are dead. Tell a kid in Gaza how to find his Mojo, I defy you.

At Thanksgiving, We feel we have a right to count ourselves as special, blessed, gifted. In fact, it is a good tonic for our cynical times, we are told. Even if our gifts are grown off the backs of slaves whose sweat built our wealth, homes and monuments, or indigenous peoples whose land we pillaged to grow the corn to make into bread for Thanksgiving harvest, we survived that first winter and the natives even brought the desserts.  Why ruin the party with unhappy memories? That’s our myth and we are sticking to it. Can’t you just calm down and be grateful? Pass the gravy, would you?

What the victims of our colonization and enslavement are supposed to feel at Thanksgiving is not our concern. They might be grateful that they survived our rapacity. Or they might laugh at our hubris, knowing that we seem as smug and self assured as they were before the White man came. The Times are a Changing. And something seems off key.

Thanksgiving week used to be the day of pride for the town and its parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin and the “Dancing Grannies” were the highlight. Then someone ploughed his SUV into the throng and many died, including two of the Grannies and one 8 year old child. Happy Thanksgiving to them all. 

Just 55 miles to the south is Kenosha where the Rittenhouse family will be celebrating Thanksgiving with relief as their 18 year old “wunderkind” returns as the acquitted hero, having fought off the rioters in the streets and dispatched two enemy attackers and injured a third, all in the name of the great white freedom that we Americans are grateful for as the legacy of our founding.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, the 11-1 white jury deliberates the day before Thanksgiving,  deciding whether the black Ahmaud Arberry was executed judiciously for resisting white  citizen arrest, or whether his running through the estate was an act of any citizen enjoying his freedom since slavery ended, to run or to run away.  Expect a decision soon because who wants to enjoy a Thanksgiving in the middle of a jury trial. Imagine the chat over the turkey at their tables.

Thanksgiving this year surely gives us pause, that we may have survived COVID and we may have survived a threatened coup, and we may have survived economic hardship, but at least we survived. But there is little room for much pride.

There is no room for that cancer of a narrative that insists that we are special, that we are especially blessed, that we deserved our luck, that we are progeny of a beneficent God who made it our manifest destiny to be the beacon of hope and truth to the world. That myth has always taken a battering in harsh times, but this year, we realize more than ever before that it was never true, even as an aspiration. As Eddie S Glaude Jr writes, we indulge in intricate rituals of denial and self-deception” and “live willingly across generations, in a lie.” (WP Nov 24,2021)

We wish you a happy Thanksgiving.  We wish you all the humility that goes with it. We used to think our freedom and our success was due to the rule of law, the fairness of our elections and our system of justice and the common human decency that bound us together. But it becomes increasingly clear that our Thanks Givings are our sharing  the freedom and the land that we took, with no accounting for what that theft continues to cost others. Our Thanks rests firmly on another’s “No Thanks.”

Our feast is at the expense of  those we starved, or what Lincoln called those “wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” The civil war has not ended, and the wages of it must still be paid again and again, until, as Lincoln said,  “all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”

This Thanksgiving might be time for us in the more dominant cultures to boast less and bless less, and to set a table where we eat as much humble pie as turkey. We need to make room at the table for those who we have rendered invisible and whose truth we continue to deny.

Paul Costello

In July 2000, CNS was invited to teach at a special summer school in Tashkent, capital of the former Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan.  Conducted in Russian for a group of philosophers and teachers from Russia, Ukraine, Mongolia, Georgia and Uzbekistan, the seminar proved to be an exciting cross-cultural application of narrative method.
Instead of lecturing, we decided to conduct a series of narrative experiments to demonstrate our practices. From these, we deduced 12 guiding maxims of our work.

Uzbekistan is extremely poor and still searching for a way to escape its communist past. With half its people under 25, the country has yet to experience real democracy. The young people we met shared stories that revealed a great yearning for change.  Not wanting to sound like evangelists for American capitalism, we introduced them to a narrative method of searching their own collective memory. We were interested to discover where and how people had kept their voices alive in the face of oppression. What we found was a rich tradition of jokes, songs and stories that celebrated a resilient Uzbek spirit and pointed a way to the future. At the end, they told us our method “felt much more Eastern than Western” and that they were having too much fun for it to be a philosophy lecture!

CREATING A LISTENING SPACE

In both its local and international work with communities, CNS has tested the following assumptions. Though inspired by postmodernism, the Center is less concerned about theories and more concerned about what approaches open up space for community dialogue and renewal. We work to create a listening culture where reality is discovered to be richer because more voices are invited into the conversation.

TWELVE MAXIMS

The following maxims are offered as starting points rather than conclusions. They grow out of the stories of our current practice.

1-We recognize that we are born into language before we are born into life. Language both precedes us and outlives us as both ecosystem and ‘echo-system.’

As soon as family get news that we have been conceived, an expectancy is set up, an expectancy regarding ‘who we will be’ boy or girl, whose name we will have and where we will fit into the family system, first born, last born etc. News of birth contains notions of prophesy, hope, threat and promise into which we must fit ourselves. For example, examine the pregnancy narratives of sacred texts, Luke 1,26 announcing that Jesus will be born. The irony of personal identity is how language, that which becomes most personal and first hand to us, is what is also most impersonal and second hand. We mint original identities using a borrowed language.

THE PRACTICE

A favorite exercise for us is to give people a free writing exercise that begins “When I think of my name……… I think………”. In Tashkent, one of the professors from Russia reflected on how he was named after his dead uncle, Nicholas, who was a Red Army war hero. We examined what story he was born into by being given that name. Was it family grief? Or national Russian pride? Had he ever imagined being in the Army? My own brother is named Steve after an uncle killed in 1942 by the Japanese in the fall of Singapore. What does that suggest about family memory and expectancy, about how a birth is stitched onto the story of another’s death? Another teacher from Russia tells me of the tradition of celebrating your name day which in his culture replaces the birthday.

2-We recognize that to enter the human community of language, we give up our primal voice for the borrowed voice. We must find the “unsaid” of our unique existence in the “already said.”

To join the community of meaning-makers, we pay a price. We must alienate our unarticulated desires for the articulated desires of the culture. As Lacan said, desire is educated through language. We only know what we want by learning the language of desire, but in so doing, we apprentice ourselves to what the culture wants us to want.

THE PRACTICE

Doing a workshop where one has to use a translator is a funny and sometimes difficult experience. Yet it demonstrates perfectly how we are struggling to translate the unsaid into the already said.  At the end of one session, the moderator asks me on behalf of Elmira,” Does she have permission to live?” “Live?” I say,” She looks very much alive to me.” “No, live, live, live.” “Oh leave. Oh yes, of course.”  Later at lunch, I am eating a rather sorry looking peach. “You find warm?” I am asked by one of my hosts.” Yes, it is very warm, but I am used to heat coming from Australia’s north.” “No warm?” “What? Oh worm, worm.” We both broke into prolonged laughter. And we delight in retelling these stories for the rest of the seminar. At the end, he apologizes, “Your English is too bad for me to understand.”

3-We recognize that finding integrity is a life project bound up with making language serve our purposes rather than our serving its’ predetermined or borrowed intentionalities. Our quest for personal identity is a story about stories, about who owns them and who tells them, and who hears them.

Bakhtin warned us to be careful of words because “you don’t know where they have been.” Language forms this wonderful echo-system and archive of borrowed intentions and fragments of memories. Mixed together, they form a sediment of meaning out of which we try to form our identity. In every conversation, however, language is speaking us before we are speaking it, recreating resonances of its own past. Language pre-shapes our power to shape it.

PRACTICE

One way to gain an insight into whose language and whose story we might be echoing is to ask “Who are your heroes or heroines? Who inspires you?”  Being in Tashkent, a city full of decaying memorials to the Great Heroes of the 1917 Revolution, the class was not so keen on heroes. Yet they shared stories of who had inspired them-one spoke of his love for the philosopher Spinoza, a thinker who had to endure much rejection for his unorthodox teachings on God and free will. Another woman professor spoke of her little daughter, struck down with a grave illness, who inspired her mother never to give up hope.  The stories that inspire us most carry the signature of our spirit through which we breathe life into our language.

4-We recognize that our identity exists within language and only comes alive in stories.

Experts in language acquisition tell us that children do not simply learn words as isolated units. Rather they learn language within larger narratives of meaning. (Bruner) The experience of world literature tells us that the words we treasure most are songs, poems and great stories rather than congressional reports or scientific tables. Language survives and thrives through stories. If we have no story to tell, we cannot be fully recognized within the language community and will be impeded from growing an effective identity.

THE PRACTICE

If part of our identity is contained in our name, another part is contained in our place. We ask our participants to do another exercise-Write freely beginning with the following sentence stem,” When I think of the place that I call home, I think of…….” It is always exhilarating to hear people, often the most inarticulate, bring a special house or street, river or mountain to life through what they share. As the American poet William Stafford says, a place is “a story happening again and again.” It does not exist in the language unless we give it a story.  The group shared stories of the mountains of Georgia, the place that God created last and best. Others of their special village or farm. Others spoke of Moscow and the mist. If place is a larger story into which we can insert our identity, then what is Uzbekistan or Russia or the USA or any nation if not a larger narrative construction that we keep recreating

5-We recognize that our identities stay alive by those tellings and re-tellings that effectively recruit an audience and thereby replenish the language pool.

Stories shape us and we shape them through the living ecosystem of a language. Stories keep our identity alive at the same time as they keep words alive. When a story dies, the ecosystem of language is depleted. When people lose their stories, language loses its resonance. It is robbed of its capacity for depth since meaning is a layering process. (Imagine how much meaning would be lost if English forgot the Bible or Shakespeare.) Stories also implicate audiences. Finding our voice is first of all a function of listening to how others “voice” us.  As we learn to speak our life, the crucial audience becomes the self. Identity is the “me” that I hear when I say “I.”

THE PRACTICE

In our seminar, we always play the traditional kids’ game of “Telephone” I gave out the story “They married in Moscow. He wanted to divorce her because he said she drank too much. She said he drove her to drink. She wanted to take the children to Grandmother Olga’s farm in the Caucuses. He said if she did, he’d take her to court. She said “Try it.” As it was passed down the line, what was lost was all of the woman’s voice. What stayed as anchors for transmission were place-Moscow-a person-the Grandmother- and the fact that there was a conflict.  Imagine that was a story about you-what has just happened to your identity? And why does story orbit on the axis of conflict?

6-We recognize that stories are passed on in response to real community needs and desires, the dreams they cherish and the disasters they keep reliving. The oral tradition of any community is not an accidental memory but part of what the community needs to know it knows and what it is trying to forget it knows.

In our work, we presume that the stories that are told and remembered have stayed in circulation for a reason. They preserve a “worth remembering” account of how the community hears itself speak its identity and its destiny. The theologian Johann Metz calls them “dangerous memories of human suffering engaged in for the sake of the future.” They form the most accessible material for inviting a community to self-reflection, to hear and make new meaning out of what it is saying about itself and its purposes.

THE PRACTICE

We like to use the exercise that Rick Stone introduced to us-asking the group to think of and then tell a story that involves water or fire. We got some fascinating accounts of magic carpets and being lost as a child in a Siberian forest. “Why remember these stories that involve the elements?” “Because stories carry the soul of a people,” Katernia said. And perhaps, I added, water and fire are keys to the human tribe’s sustainability. I shared my work with Aboriginal cultures where stories function as maps for survival, and where finding water and making fire are basic technologies.

7-We recognize that for as many stories that get passed on, as many die out or are silenced. Some die with their narrators, some for lack of audience. Others die because they are overwhelmed by contesting stories or have simply outlived their relevance.

Every community is a site for the “contest of memory over forgetting,” (Kundera) and of stories that make claims on other stories or crowd them out of the listening spaces. For every story told, there is a story that is not told, especially in situations of conflict. The damage violence does to language and collective memory too often goes untold, and yet, it is its most telling effect.  Reconciliation becomes a process of making room for these untold stories and deferred dreams to resurface. A path to healing opens when the voices of the unjustly silenced are heard at last e.g. South Africa’s Truth & Justice Commission

THE PRACTICE

To look at recent works of history on the old USSR, it staggers the imagination to read the toll of terror and death. World War one cost Russia 2 million victims, the following civil war 7 million, the famine of the 1920’s 6 million, Stalin’s purges another few million and in World War Two, 25 million perished. (Review Washington Post  July 23, 2001) As a region, what does so much death and destruction do to intergenerational wisdom?  How can one ever recover so many memories aborted and legacies obliterated? It makes sense that Russia and its former Republics would develop a culture of forgetting as a way of coping with their overwhelming loss.  But the dominant story becomes the story that is not told.  I was very interested in how my participants were very guarded about telling stories that were critical of the State. They remembered what they had to forget.

8-We recognize that stories are related like families. They hang together in clusters and cycles that mark special times, map special places, ritualize significant events and portray special people. Stories live in their own narrative families. We ‘relate’ stories because they are related. They never exist by themselves.

In group process, one notices how stories of one kind lead to more stories of the same kind. Stories shape the listening space for relational fit, meaning that some stories are always more likely to be told than others. In any group culture, select experiences of reality will be heard as more acceptable than others, not because they are truer but simply because they better fit the established pattern of telling.

THE PRACTICE

I ask the group to share their childhood memories of fairy tales-they are now eager and ready to go into their small story circles and as I walk around, there is great laughter and high energy. I am always amazed at why that is-for something so simple to generate so much vitality.

Some of the stories they bring back to the whole group have to do with the Mullah Nasrudin- the Sufi folk hero. One story that Georgie shared and that I love concerns Nasrudin borrowing a large pot. When he returned it, he added a smaller pot telling his neighbor that his pot had had a baby. The neighbor laughed and accepted it. Later, Nasrudin borrowed two large pots and only returned one. When asked where the other was, he said it had died. The neighbor was outraged. “Give me back my pot.” But Nasrudin told him, “As surely as you accepted that your pot could give birth, so just as surely your pot could die.” Bettelheim says fairytales are life-rehearsals for children in that they educate the imagination. Of what kind of future is this story predictive? Perhaps how wit becomes the weapon of the powerless-and even more, how the real contest for power resides as much on the field of language as on the field of battle.

9-We recognize that stories and their exchange create our relational reality. Therefore, to study society means to study communities as narrative systems.

Post-modernists like to claim that reality is totally constructed, that we inhabit this prison house of language. Avoiding this epistemological battlefield, we concern ourselves with what seems at least pragmatically true; that language is our primary means of naming whatever we take to be “real.” Moreover, it is only through language that we create awareness that “we” and the “real” are in relationship. This approach makes us less focused on narrative as content and more interested in how narratives construct relationships. If stories are constantly creating communities of meaning, storytelling becomes a fundamentally ethical act. Thus, we need to find a new narrative ethic because stories matter more than they let on. They are never innocent.

10-We recognize that stories bind tellers and audience into networks of shared significance, or what we term “genres.” By studying these distinctive genres, we can come to understand how genre generates culture and vice versa.

If culture is about how meanings and symbols are exchanged, we believe that narrative method gives us a special window into how culture is created. As Ortega y Gasset says, every era (and culture) tends to favor a particular genre. By identifying the genre that underpins a culture, (Irish Tragic, American Epic) we can understand and even predict what will claim its attention. We can identify what makes its “reality” real. If the genre does not embrace certain parts of our experience, (genres can be exclusive) those parts will fall out of the story. By exploring the role genre plays in making or breaking meaning, we can better understand how culture is transmitted and transformed.

THE PRACTICE

Working as an Australian, living in the USA and constantly training young people in the cross-cultural settings of Northern Ireland, I have got used to what I hear as predictable cultural genres.  They may be stereotypes but they are rooted in particular literary traditions. When the young people from Northern Ireland come to the USA, they are amazed at the American optimism, the “can do” attitude. Americans who return the visit to Belfast are equally struck with the pessimism, the problem saturated peace narrative, that hovers between brink, breakdown and breakthrough. As Yeats says, the Irish are in love with tragedy, whereas Americans cannot tolerate an unhappy ending. What is the genre of Russian and Uzbek’s and Georgian stories?  Meaning comes in patterns that are repeated. If we listen, we will soon find ourselves being able to predict the story form.

An American and an Irishman stand at the bottom of the hill and look up at the mansion at its summit, its lights blazing in splendor. The American points to the mansion and tells his friend, “One day I am going to BE that guy.” The Irishman points to the mansion and he says in reply, “One day I am going to GET that guy.”

11-We recognize that in a globalized world, media multinationals accumulate a narrative power that supports and often supplants military and economic power (e.g. Hollywood, ABC-Disney, Microsoft-NBC). If we are to understand and challenge these imperial voices dictating our personal and political agendas, we must learn and teach a narrative way to understanding culture.

Since the fall of Communism and the discrediting of the socialist critique, the West has been able to sell the world a story about democracy premised on globalism and capitalist consumption. We believe this to be a dangerously misleading story because it drowns out the voices of other cultures and ways. It is inherently exploitative because it is so transparently self-serving. A true democracy in narrative terms is a Republic of Stories, not a chorus of the powerful drowning out the powerless.

THE PRACTICE

We talk about genre and power. What kinds of stories do Empires and Emperors tell? And what kinds of stories do colonies and provinces tell? Empires speak with the “imperial I” owning an agency that easily provokes envy and resentment from the less powerful. What stories did Russia tell in their glory days of Empire? It wrote its stories in the local geography. Tashkent still has crumbling monuments to Lenin and the October Revolution. And what stories do the provinces tell: that they never have a say, that they are too far from the center, that they are always ignored, that they are never recognized. Provincial narratives are prone to disown agency. Newly independent countries like Uzbekistan often have to learn a new story to claim their own power and take their place in the world.

…..All of this is taking place in a college campus guarded 24 hours by armed soldiers with machine guns.  It feels like an outpost of an old Empire now under threat from terrorists, not since September 11^th but since they were born as a newly independent nation.

12-We recognize that we always come late to reality. Our stories are always belated attempts to catch up to what has already happened. Being open to reality means keeping our stories open to constant revelation and revision and giving up our obsession with closure. As an “emergent reality,” the world resists being imprisoned in the word. Reality keeps breaking free from the chains of fixed meaning.

The paradigms of the new science (Einstein, New Physics) that speak of an emergent reality have yet to be adequately translated into mainstream philosophy or the human sciences. Our stories of the human reality are mostly out of date because they cannot capture the pace of social change that we now experience, nor describe how this reshapes cultural identity. If we are serious about giving reality a fresh voice, we always need to be in quest of another story. If as we say in our work ‘you have to tell a story to find a story,’ every story is prologue.

THE PRACTICE

How do you build a civil society in Uzbekistan?  One professor tells us that civil society cannot happen here because the traditional Islamic society is too strong.  I understand what he means, having spent a day with one 21-year-old man who took me on a tour of the market and proudly told me how very soon, his father would choose a bride for him. But we discuss the professor’s claim, ask what kind of story ‘that something can never happen’ is?  Is it a story that can ever entertain another possibility? What genre is it? Does the story reflect the reality or does it lock the reality into an unchanging pattern of interpretation?  But imagine if things do change.  All that story can do is either ignore it or label it “more of the same.” Stories focus our attention to find what fits the story.  They become self-fulfilling until a new reality repudiates their usefulness.

What if we took the Nasrudin stories that are so funny, and so disrespectful of oppressive authority, and saw them as stories of the folk keeping alive a memory of resistance. What if they are stories that are armed with humor as a weapon to humanize regimes that terrorize? Russian humor tends to have the same feature. What if we revived the oral tradition of the local communities and put back into circulation some of the stories about local heroes and heroines, about ordinary people who create a better life for their children-who bring up their children with hope for a better future. Would these stories challenge the story of powerlessness that is endemic to most societies that have endured great oppression? Is not the story of power somehow connected with the power of story? We have no more time in this seminar- but my challenge to you here is my belief that finding a future for Uzbekistan is not only about political or economic reform- it is about finding a better story. And this seminar has at least been a start.

SOME FINAL THOUGHTS

Since September 11^th and the start of the war in Afghanistan, the world has heard more about Uzbekistan than it ever has before.  A country that is extraordinarily hard to gain a visa to visit, it is hyper vigilant about terrorists. The army and police seem to be ubiquitous, never far away from the streets.

I had one day free to play tourist and took the obligatory trip to Samarkand with a driver-guide who didn’t know a word of English. What a trip, screaming along narrow roads at speeds close to 100mph, passing all kinds of dawdling farming traffic and stopping every few miles to go through military check-points.  I was miffed that if I managed to arrive in one piece, (which I seriously doubted) I would have to interpret Samarkand unaided.

But once we got there, a guide was superfluous. To see the shimmering blue domes that competed with the blue of the sky, and walk the courtyard of an ancient University that existed long before most of the famous European centers of learning, I was awestruck. Why had I never heard about this before? What other stories were buried with the great tombs of their kings and warriors?

We may only hear of Uzbekistan today because American planes are using their bases to fly over Afghanistan. But 600 years ago, people living here might have been forgiven for thinking that they lived at the center of the civilized world. They are rediscovering their own story, freed from a century of Russian imposition. They now claim their own heroes like Tamerlane the Brave. And to meet them in the streets and the market place, they strike one as wonderfully friendly people who have an earthy humor and a remarkable resilience.

As I flew home to Washington, I became painfully aware of how easy it is to become imprisoned within one’s own cultural story- the story of America and the West and the supposed triumph of our civilization. Terrorists may challenge it, and we may have a fight on our hands to defend it from the “new barbarians.” But here on the Silk Road, and close to where the bombs are now dropping, the West learned its math and astronomy; it rediscovered its Plato and Aristotle. Our story and their story were once intertwined, and somewhere along the way, they became separated. We forget theirs. They forgot ours.

If the world is to build a firmer foundation for peace, perhaps we have to let another Nasrudin loose, to poke fun at the arrogance of any power that claims to have the only story worth telling. And we could reinvent the United Nations as a Global Storytelling Festival. I know a few friends from Tashkent who have stories to tell.

The Center for Narrative Studies Washington DC

9-11 and 20 years on: act with haste, repent at leisure

We are coming up to 20 years since 9-11.

President Biden wanted to time the pull-out from Afghanistan to remind us of that. What he did not intend, I am sure, was to make the anniversary a time that would force us to reflect on the folly of war, 20 years of lying and bad faith, and deplorable executive decisions that have cost us incalculable losses in lives, money and confusion of national priorities.

The media are so busy blaming him for a debacle of a departure that they forget he is the President least worthy of such scorn. What can you do in 7 months?  President W Bush is the one who should be called to criminal account to answer for a war that never made sense then, and as every year went by, on President Obama’s watch and then President Trump reign, made less and less sense. No wonder that President Biden said, “Time to get the hell out of here!”

That might sum up to an odd assessment but it adds up to saying Trump and Biden were right and Obama and Bush were wrong. Bush’s folly became the longest war the USA has ever fought with so many resources spent for so little return. The invasion was to dislodge the Taliban. We did that. Now we leave and we have done a deal with the Taliban that allows their return. Imagine invading Berlin and then inviting Hitler back?

Let’s go back to the start. Who were the high-jackers and bombers on 9-11? Since we went to war with Afghanistan and Iraq, they of course had to be the main culprits. They had declared war on us, so war was the only answer.  But look it up. Google tells you:

The hijackers in the September 11 attacks were 19 men affiliated with the militant Islamist group al-Qaeda. They hailed from four countries; fifteen of them were citizens of Saudi Arabia, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one was from Lebanon, and one from Egypt.

There were none from Afghanistan and none from Iraq.

Did we invade Saudi Arabia? Or UAE or Lebanon or Egypt? Not at all. Osama Bin Laden was from Riydah, Saudi Arabia and there is evidence that Saudi officials were actively involved in supporting the high-jackers, but the Saudis are our oil friends.  The other Bin Ladens’ were important enough to fly their relatives out of the USA in case they came under scrutiny.

No, we decided that Afghanistan and Iraq would serve as surrogates for the people we wanted to hold responsible. At Tora Bora, the USA forces had Bin Laden trapped and could have taken him out thereby crippling the Al Queda network. But no. We prefer war because it gives our military something to do. If we give them 500 billion dollars a year to play with, we may as well give them some real war games to play.

The forces fighting us in Afghanistan were familiar to us, as was Bin Laden, because against the Russians, they were considered allies. And if supporting their extremist form of Islam, the Mujahideen, helped motivate their disgust for the invader, why not? Once they beat the Russians back, they were expendable. We left their nation to the wreckage of years of Russian occupation and vandalism. That was the first ending that predicted this more devastating last post.

How come we are such experts at starting wars, but as far as ending them, we have a track record of disaster. No one, least of all the Afghanis,  should be the least surprised. USA never cared before and they clearly don’t much care now.

What 20 years of war have done is the opposite of its intention. The clear goal was to take out Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, not run a recruiting campaign for terrorist schools. But that is what we did. And now when we pull out, and try to make the best of a bad loss, the media that cheered us into the mess now go self-righteous on the mess that the leaving had to be, well organized or not. Even if we had been able to leave with some decorum, all that would have saved us is the reality check of abject failure. We came here to destroy the sanctuary of terrorists and we end up turning it back into the hands of the same terrorists. We achieved the exact opposite of what we set out to do. If that is not a good reason to get out of Dodge, what is?

After Vietnam, we thought we had learned the perils of international war and the arrogance of empire. But no, the neoliberals learned nothing. They believed that Pax Americana could only be built by American muscle, exerted by bullying, torture and threats leading to violent overthrow. We will keep on doing this because no one is ever blamed or called to account. You can get away with murder.

Congress seems to have got used to an annual impeachment but in this scenario, the defendants are George W Bush, his goons and his torture squad, and President Obama and his accommodators.

Don’t blame Trump or Biden for this one. But no, we will pile on Biden because that is what media do. And we will let Bush and Obama escape any accounting. Such is the  United States of Folly that the United States has become.

People want to mark the American demise with President Trump saying our national corruption began with all his lies.  But Trump never lied us into war. He had the healthy disgust that any leader must have for “foreign entanglements.” That is what President Washington called them.  It is bad that you try incompetently to overthrow an election you lost by 6 million votes or try to use a foreign government to flood social media with lies that probably in the end only competed with the lies both campaigns were already telling. But lying the nation into war, that surely is a crime of treason that is most especially heinous.

We suffered it with LBJ and McNamara and  the Gulf of Tonkin. And no heads rolled. And we suffered it with Cheney and Bush and Rumsfeld and Rice and their concoction of “Weapons of Mass Destruction” that a nation that had nothing to do with 9-11 was supposed to have, and therefore was deserving of annihilation. This might have been good aggression outlet therapy. When you get beat up, pick a weakling and destroy them. All good bullies do that to make themselves feel better. And you can fly on to a aircraft carrier and declare “Mission Accomplished” and think people are still stupid enough to think that invading Iraq had anything to do with 9-11, when it had nothing to do with it. And invade Afghanistan, not because they attacked us, but because the would not give up the Saudi Arabian terrorist leader that we could have eliminated ourselves.

The end is a debacle, but the war was a debacle, and the deceit of previous Presidents a national disgrace that finally is revealed. President Bush knowingly lied us into war. President Obama knowingly continued to propagate that lie. And President Trump, not known for any foreign policy chops, could see it was folly, and demanded a pull out that President Biden must see through to its bitter end.

Americans are addicted to happy endings. When the script does not conform to our delusions, we understandably get upset. But just imagine what story we leave behind for the Afghanis. If some of them come after us for our invasion first and our betrayal now, no one can say we are innocent. We  just made the world more unsafe for everyone. What a way to remember 9-11, twenty years on.  Seems like we have not learned a thing.