TRAUMA DOESN’T MAKE YOU STRONGER, BUT SURE CAN MAKE YOU A STRONG ADVOCATE.

If you asked me to list the people I find most deplorable, I would mention, the 28th and 30 Australian Prime Ministers, the current Federal Leader of the Opposition, the former occupant of the White House whose first wife died last Friday and the pilot of the Enola Gay. The pilot of the Enola Gay was a dogged individual completely incapable of accepting that a number of his beliefs were wrong. A particular one was the belief that there was no such thing as an innocent civilian.

Children born and being raised in Hiroshima at the time that the atomic bomb was dropped, who had been withdrawn from school to assist in labouring for the war effort had no say in which country they were born in and nor could they influence the direction of the country’s politics. And nor did they have the ability to be able to tell when that the war was lost.

I remember a lecturer at university saying that the Hiroshima Peace Museum makes the Japanese out to be victims of the war (this was a conversation between he and I, not in a lecture) and I said that, in a way, they were. The Japanese had less say than the Germans (before 1934, when Hitler held the election where people were forced to vote for him at gunpoint, that is) as Japan did not have universal suffrage.

Nuclear disarmament is strongly associated with Hiroshima, and a number of Japanese have become advocates for it, especially those who survived Hiroshima. But just like I remember a tetraplegic woman on a Christian Television Commercial saying that you don’t have to break your neck to find God, you don’t have to have survived an atomic bombing to become an advocate. You might have survived conventional warfare, childhood trauma, robbery or many other tragedies to become such an advocate.

I remember seeing a line from a Child Abuse Advocates group saying that your courage as a child allowed you to survive and that you can do the same as an adult. To that, I say, possibly. The ridiculous doctor who claims that men and women cannot be platonic friends quotes Viktor Frankel’s example of how some prisoners in concentration camps started smoking cigarettes, the currency in those camps, and died within weeks and that it wasn’t smoking that killed them but a lack of hope, and to that, I say, at the time, cigarette packets did not come with a courteous admonition that smoking was a health hazard, let alone graphic depictions of throat or mouth cancer and gangrene in toes, and you didn’t have to start smoking to lose hope. And nor was it a case that only those who had hope survived the concentration camps in Germany, Poland or Asia for that matter. That is Social Darwinist nonsense. Some people became quite ill due to malnutrition and did not survive. If we examine some people who survived those concentration camps, many of those who maintained a pathological hatred of the Germans or the Japanese died embittered people, but many of those who forgave lived happier, more contented lives. Some may not have been receptive to German or Japanese people, but they may have driven Volkswagens or Toyotas, purchased Bosch, Sony or BASF products.

I, myself, survived abuse at school, and opposition to bullying is something that is close to me. Where I strongly differ from the ridiculous doctor is that while I don’t issue pleas for everyone to be friends, I take the attitude that, you don’t have to like everybody, but you don’t have the right to torment them. If you are in a class with people you don’t like, you may have to work with them on group activities, in which case you try to break it up and say, “You do your bit and I’ll do mine,” but when you’re not in class, you go off with your group, let them go off with theirs and if they prefer to be alone, leave them alone.

Unlike kids who had football or skateboarding groups, or whatever, I didn’t have a tribe at school, a fact that was exploited by bullies.

It is a platitude to say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but that doesn’t mean that someone who doesn’t turn to drugs or die by their own hand is weaker. And let’s face it, you don’t have to be a trauma survivor to turn to drugs. Sometimes, there are some seemingly together people who go to a nightclub, and someone says, “Hey, let’s go to this next one!” and a group member says, “No, I’ve had enough. I want to go home.” And someone says, “Hey, I’ve got something here that’ll make you feel better,” and they give them a drug and they want more and become addicted.

I remember, from my own experiences at school, kids being idiots, and one prime case was the school cross-country. I didn’t particularly want to do it, but I thought, “Okay, if I have to, I can be by myself and walk or jog,” but one kid was nearly 14 and carrying on like a four year old emulating grandpa and saying, “Here, have a smoke, real good shit,” when he wasn’t even smoking a real cigarette; he was holding his index and long fingers up to his lips and pretending to inhale on nothing. I was annoyed. And then, another, who was being stupid and trying to get me to inhale on his Ventolin. Now, as an asthmatic, if I had been having an attack and I didn’t have an inhaler and a teacher yelled out, “Quick, has someone got an inhaler?” I would have appreciated it, but, if I had been a teacher and seen the kid doing it, or he’d been doing it in class, I would have told him to put it on my desk and at the end of class exploded at him and said, “This inhaler is here for YOU! What is going to happen if you puff it around pretending it’s some sort of drug and you need it and there’s nothing left?! Think about it!” before returning it to him and sending him out of class.

Trauma gives you nightmares, flashbacks, sleepless nights and impacts upon your health for YEARS afterwards. You can be lucky to survive trauma, but I remember a teacher telling the story of a kid he taught who had been asked to write an answer to a question on the blackboard and when the kid returned to his desk and was going to sit down, the kid at the desk behind him pulled his chair back and the kid slipped back and hit his head on the desk of the kid who pulled his chair out and he died. That teacher was an advocate against bullying and giving the class some vital lessons in what can go wrong. It was a terrible memory for a teacher.

How I rate the former occupant of the White House as a deplorable, too, is that after a school mass shooting, rather than taking the logical step (yes, I know how influential the NRA is), he made the idiotic statement that he would arm the teachers. Many next of kin of those killed in such shootings or those not fatally wounded have become advocates not for more good people to be armed, but for gun control! I have only ever met one person who became an advocate for gun availability after surviving an armed robber, and they wanted to join the police force, and thank goodness they were unsuccessful. And that being would be a trump supporting deplorable!

Nobody should be put through trauma with a belief that it is character building, it isn’t. Nobody should be lauded as being brave for surviving trauma, they are, but they need support (if they decline, simply letting them know it’s available is sufficient). But it is time for people to stop electing privileged people to power and time for people in power to start listening to trauma survivors to try to alleviate trauma.