History and Generational Trauma
- ajpott
- Sep 11, 2020
- 6 min read
Updated: Sep 11, 2020
September 11 is always a sobering day on the calendar for me. You know the litany of epochal events that define a generation in this country.
Where were you on December 7, 1941 when Pearl Harbor was attacked? And where were you on August 6 and 9, 1945 when you heard the news that the first atomic bombs had been dropped?
Where were you when John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, when Senator Robert F. Kennedy was murdered on June 6, 1968? Where were you on April 4, 1968 when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down in Memphis?
Speaking of Memphis, where were you on August 16, 1977 when Elvis was found dead in his bathroom at home? Or when Jim Morrison (July 3, 1971), Jimi Hendrix (September 18, 1970), and Janis Joplin (October 4, 1970) likewise passed away suddenly at the height of their talent and fame?
I am a proud member of Generation X (we who spent our youth saying 'whatever' and grew up to be passionate, caring, outspoken, and pretty darned accomplished—so much for apathy). We have our own liturgy of dates and tragedies that either happened in our lifetime, or that we remember vividly. The death of Elvis might be on that list for some of the older members of Generation X.
Where were we when CBS announcer Howard Cossell interrupted an NFL football game on the night of December 8, 1980 with the news of John Lennon's murder? I was three, and don't remember. I've seen the broadcast on YouTube, and a documentary that showed a fascinating clip of Lennon carefully but compassionately speaking face-to-face with another deranged fan who showed up on his door step. I wonder if anyone warned Lennon that love is grand, but love can kill? I'm afraid he didn't get the warning in time when a young Mark Chapman pulled a gun on him, again, outside Lennon's home.
I remember TV news footage, blurry and choppy, showing the moment on March 30, 1981 when President Ronald Reagan was shot. I was four, and I didn't understand it though I remember knowing a bad thing had happened.
I was in third grade on January 28, 1986, watching the Shuttle Challenger rocketed into the air on live TV. My teacher was excited, and told us of the significance of that day: the first civilian school teacher, a woman, in space. I remember the excitement turning black with shock and confusion, then dismay and grief, as the space shuttle suddenly exploded.
I remember the World Trade Center bombing on February 26, 1993. I kept up with my very first story arc in the news between February 28 and April 19, 1993 when the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas was under siege, and finally destroyed in a botched raid by the federal government.
I was never a fan of Nirvana, but I will never forget the horror and pain on the faces of numerous high school classmates on April 5, 1994 when it became known that Kurt Cobain had committed suicide.
I watched the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City Bombing on April 19, 1995 on television that day. Something deeply sympathetic in me awoke watching those images, and it may be partly why I decided to attend college down there the following autumn.
I had moved away, graduated from another college somewhere else, and found myself returning to live in the Oklahoma City area again during the summer of 2001. In the intervening years, whether I was there or living somewhere else, Oklahoma City really was (and still is) another place that I call home.
What was I doing on September 11, 2001 when two airplanes flew into the World Trade Center towers in New York, another plane was driven into the Pentagon building in Washington, D.C., and a fourth hijacked aircraft was forcibly re-taken by true heroes and driven into a Pennsylvania field before it could reach any other human beings—no matter what the target was supposed to be?
I was in Oklahoma City, where the people knew a thing or two about terrorism—on the day that, for maybe the first time, people from Oklahoma and New York had far more in common than just a shared nationality or human nature. I will never forget how utterly quiet it was throughout the city, and how it seemed that every head and every eye was looking east to New York City and every heart was saying 'We know'.
Charles Kaiser has written a terrific generational memoir, for lack of a better term, titled 1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation (New York: Grove Press, 2018). In this book, Kaiser chronicles a series of political and cultural events in a single traumatic year in the life of the United States that makes 2020 a distant and shadowy comparison.
The book got me thinking a great deal about the events I've alluded to above, and how they 'define a generation'. I'm not even sure what it means for a generation to be 'defined', actually, or whether it's even possible—but I understand the thinking behind the use of the word. It's not so much that a generation is 'defined' by an event like the attack on Pearl Harbor, the assassination of a Kennedy, the explosion of a space shuttle, or a pair of buildings in New York City tumbling down pancake-fashion. 'Defined' is not the right word.
Rather, I think a generation can be 'traumatized'. I think the individual and collective trauma can burn its way into the psyches of even those who are hundreds or thousands of miles away—as surely as for others suffering far more closely to 'ground zero' of the same events. Maybe it's something about live television and mass communications: being able to witness from far-away safety, in real time, what others are seeing face-to-face.
Then, I think about the history with which I'm most closely aware, and I wonder just how much technology really has to do with collective or generational trauma.
Another generation in another place could have asked similar questions:
Where were you on the Ides (15) of March, 44 B.C. when Julius Caesar was assassinated? Where were you when the news finally reached you of the death of his heir, Augustus, after a 'reign' (though they wouldn't have called it that) of 45 years?
Where were you between July 20-25, A.D. 64 when the great fire destroyed significant parts of Rome?
The Romans might, perhaps at first, asked where they were when this or that emperor was assassinated. But after a couple of hundred years or so of imperial rule, it had happened so often and (frequently) so soon after an emperor had assumed power that maybe they just stopped asking altogether.
Where were you when Alaric, once a trusted general in the Roman army, led a band of foreign warriors into the streets of Rome on August 24, 410?
Where were you in September 476, when Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor in the West, was deposed?
Depending on your point of view, you could go on asking further questions if you were a Byzantine/Roman in the East:
Where were you, starting in the year 541 (and continuing sporadically until about 750), a bubonic plague devastated the countries surrounding the Mediterranean?
Do you remember April 12-13, 1204 when the city of Constantinople was sacked by so-called 'Christian' armies from the West? Where were you between April 6-May 23, 1453 as the last Roman emperor, Constantine XI, rushed hither and thither to defend the city that would henceforth be named Istanbul by its conquerors?
Mass media was not even a distant dream, news traveled excruciatingly slow, and yet these events unquestionably brought collective trauma that can certainly be said to 'define' each respective generation.
But history is not just a list of traumatic events, deaths, assassinations, drug overdoses or suicides. It's often the 'bad news' that makes history as well as making the daily reports on TV, radio, and the Internet. We can ask 'Why?', and we can point fingers at this or that easy solution.
Or we can simply remember. That is, after all, maybe what history is really for. It's why we tell each other the same stories of what really (or 'really') happened, who was there, why it mattered, and why it still matters. How it makes us, individually and collectively, who we are. And when we remember, we might be able to learn something, make different choices, fight for a different perspective, bring real and maybe, just maybe, even lasting change.
Looking back, we remember; but we do so in order to look right in front of us in the present, and forward to the future with hope.
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