http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/opinion/sunday/luhrmann-our-flinching-state-of-mind.html?_r=0
SundayReview | CONTRIBUTING OP-ED WRITER
Our Flinching State of Mind
ON Feb. 26, 1972, 132 million gallons of black coal sludge broke through a dam above the Appalachian hollow of Buffalo Creek, W.Va., and spewed onto the 5,000 people who lived in the scattered villages below. “It was a wall of water and debris,” one survivor remembered. “It looked like it was about 25 or 30 foot high coming running at us. And it was just black-looking. It was just rumbling and roaring and the houses was popping and snapping and they was breaking up.” In the end, 125 people lost their lives and more than 4,000 lost their homes.
There have been a lot of Buffalo Creeks in the last year or so — a lot of disasters we could attribute in whole or part to human choices (like those of the Pittston Company, which owned the dam). The mudslide that sliced off the face of a Washington mountain in Snohomish County in March was a natural disaster, but it became a human disaster because people had chosen to build in the floodplain below it despite the risks. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared, we assume, because someone made a mistake or deliberately altered the course of the flight, and it seems to have dropped into the ocean with 239 people on board.
The idea that a disaster was created in part by human action contains a kernel of hope: hope that we can prevent it the next time around; that there will be new, more stringent regulations; different zoning; transponders that can’t be switched off.
One of the most chilling features of the terrible tragedy in Isla Vista, Calif., on May 23, when a young man in a college town set out to avenge himself for his loneliness by stabbing the people he lived with and then heading out to shoot others, is that everyone else did things right. The young man had been in therapy. The parents warned professionals who warned the police, who came to his door and questioned him. When he sent his parents an email about his plans, they tried to act. The system worked. And still it failed.
In the book “Everything in Its Path,” the sociologist Kai T. Erikson told the story of the Buffalo Creek disaster. The book is a classic, first published in 1976 and reprinted after Hurricane Katrina. It’s worth going back to now, not only for the peeled clarity of the mountain-dwellers’ language — “Well, it seems like everything just don’t go right no more. There’s a part of you gone and you can’t find it. You don’t know what part it is. It’s just a part that’s gone” — but for the account it gives of trauma.
We understand a lot more now about trauma than we did in 1976, after the men who fought in the Vietnam War had come home and psychiatry gained a more sophisticated understanding of the fact that war assaults memories and minds as well as bodies. Mr. Erikson observed that those who survived in Buffalo Creek lived in a state of shock years after the disaster, emotionally numb, nightmare prone, the dead always present. One man told Mr. Erikson that he stiffened every time he looked out at the creek because he half-expected to see a decomposed hand reach out from it. That happens to people who live through horror.
But the book also tells another, sharper story about the way tragedy tears the tissue of community, because it makes people lose faith in the very idea of order. One survivor said, “I can’t get the idea out of my mind that the whole damn place is going to fall apart one of these days.”
Continue reading the main story
Advertisement
Mr. Erikson saw that the sense of community in the small villages of Buffalo Creek wasn’t a quantifiable thing, but a “state of mind.” It was “a quiet set of understandings” that shaped the trust between people, the fundamental expectation that they were a people who moved in concert in a shared and more or less predictable world. “Everybody was close,” a survivor recalled. “Everybody knowed everybody. But now everybody is alone.”
Mr. Erikson thought that these disorientations would spread through a modern America, not because all Americans would experience trauma directly, but because the awareness of trauma would grow more acute. We also have more various moral outlooks — there are just more different kinds of us — and that, in itself, disorients us. We have, Mr. Erikson thought, ever more technologies we can misuse. And so we imagine the world as a more unreliable place.
What strikes me about the media coverage of the Isla Vista rampage is the insistence that it will happen again. As the psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman warned in these pages, “We have always had — and always will have — Adam Lanzas and Elliot Rodgers.” And yet, the absolute risk for any one community is very low. There were about 15,000 homicides in the United States in 2012. Together the shootings in Newtown in 2012, at the Washington Navy Yard in 2013 and the deaths in Isla Vista accounted for fewer than 50 deaths.
But that doesn’t stop the slight flinching expectation of the possibility of carnage we feel as we walk into a school or office building. Some Americans — those in our violent inner cities — have lived with this flinch for years. It’s new to others. Mr. Erikson called it “skidding sideways” into uncertainty and fear about the condition of the world.
In fact, we’ve never been safer. In “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” Steven Pinker shows convincingly that violent deaths per capita have declined over time. “Today,” he writes, “we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.”
But that’s not what it feels like, and what it feels like is what damages our sense of who we are.
