America the Adolescent: Living Horizontally
I woke up this morning thinking about our world, and our moment in time. Also about our culture. Everyone trying to make sense of it. Me too. I want to look deeper though, see what’s going on underneath. A teacher of mine points out that when a couple is fighting, there are a whole lot of words going back and forth, and as a therapist working with them one can get caught in these stories and narratives. But one can tune those out to feel into the giant subterranean currents of anger, rage, loss, or grief that lie down below, often connected to grievances far in the past. These subterranean currents seem slow and almost imperceptible, but they seem to somehow be orchestrating the stormy tempests on the surface like some magical, secretive underwater conductor.
So what is happening here? What is actually going on? Beyond fake news, the electoral college, and Trumps latest tweet.
As far as I can tell, we have a systemic problem on our hands.
Recently a couple wise men in San Quentin told me that they were mighty frustrated with the ‘youngsters’ who were now being allowed to come into the prison. These kids, 18 up to 24, are being transferred to this low level security prison because of its great access to programs and education (as are more men coming out of long term sentences of solitary confinement from different CA prisons), despite the fact that such young men are often hot-headed and caught up in the games from the street. Politics and who’s who in the zoo, as they say. There had been a lot of hopefulness on the side of the older men to help these youngsters, welcome them in, mentor them, who knows, perhaps they would be willing to let go of their fight or flight entrapment in gang mindsets, and do some self help groups. Maybe get curious about what’s under the mask.
This day I sat between these two men, not quite elders, but established in their inner life, curious, open, and deep in the practice of waking up to what lives beneath the surface. One of them is a minister as well. On this day one of these men let out a low groan and mentioned not knowing what to do with these youngsters. I asked him what he meant. He said, with a slight, noticeable, pause, “don’t get me wrong, I know it doesn’t sound good, especially for this class, but man, these kids need to get a whoopin.” I looked at him, startled, almost smiling from surprise, looking to the other man, who was nodding vigorously. They proceeded to explain to me the boys in their late teens and early twenties seemed to have no respect for their elders, no understanding of rules or etiquette in general and certainly not for prison life. They told me when they had come into prison at 18 or 19 years old, they knew the unspoken codes of respect and obeisance. What was allowed and what wasn’t. There were somehow still rules of conduct and respect, and that youngsters could never, in a million years, have strutted around the prison yard, calling the older men whatever they wanted, ignoring their impact on the community as a whole. These young men were, in their eyes, entitled, unruly, disrespectful, arrogant. Mini trumps running around. No relationality.
They said it was because these boys had grown up with no fathers — all their fathers and uncles and grandfathers even, were swept up in the epic moral failure of the experiment in mass incarceration. All the black and brown male bodies were locked in cages, and these boys grew up in broken homes and broken neighborhoods with no male bloodlines to help contain them, challenge them, protect them, model respectful and healthy attachment. Play with them, pray with them or demonstrate how to channel rage into power. Even with the nurturing protection and core inner strength of empowered women to raise them (and of course these women were coping with unimaginable levels oppression and violence, even more so in many ways) there was an unspoken emptiness in their psyche. This indeed was about intergenerational trauma, historical as well as psychological.
In essence, they were a lost generation of boys from the deserts of America’s inner cities, with an understandable and unspeakable rage. Strutting around with puffed up chests, outdoing each other’s bravado, looking for affirmation from each other, yet carrying around invisible wounds of tremendous rejection, alienation, disconnection. They didn’t seem able to be parented (another word for contained, seen, met) at this late age, no interest in self-examination, a frightening numbness, cut off from all others.
But isn’t that what we are seeing all across our culture? Wouldn’t this very alienation and wounding be present in those white bodies and minds that helped enact the policies that so drastically and methodically tear apart communities of color?
I certainly see this in myself, and see it in those around me. The struggle to feel, the struggle to become embodied, the struggle to feel connected. And I can feel it alive and well in our broader culture — all you have to do is watch our movies, listen to our music, look at our advertisements, eat our food, and observe our politics. And I certainly see this in Trump — that mirror of America’s grandiosity that we all love to hate. And to pretend is so different and ‘other’ from ourselves and our own America. But it seems more and more to me that they are flip sides of the same coin.
Isn’t this same numbing disconnection and inability to feel what has driven the passionate machine of white supremacy and heteronormative patriarchy? In the documentary “I am Not Your Negro” James Baldwin speaks directly to this, saying, hey white, rich, America, do you really not realize that if you do not engage and address and heal the rift with Black America, it will seal your fate, that you will flounder and go under? Do you not realize how desperately you are holding onto your delusion that you can oppress and violate others and be whole and happy yourself? The great laws of all ancient religions prove this to be utter delusion, a desperate and profound ignorance.
There is a story that when Mother Theresa, who, after a lifetime of working with the sick and dying in Calcutta, came to New York City and met an old woman who was afraid to leave her apartment to walk along the streets. Mother Theresa said of our great American culture, “I have never seen poverty like this.”
Trumpism can only take root in a culture so water-logged, with institutions so rotted, that blatantly immature and disrespectful adolescents can take the highest offices of the country. We must remember to look to the soil within which the vast weeds of fascism are rising exponentially now. We are officially a culture of adolescents, uninitiated and uncontained. Most of the adults have left the building, it seems. I loved that written piece by the Council of Grandmothers, who called those rising to power ‘moys’ — that is men but mostly boys, those who are not fully developed and are still children. These Grandmothers encourage us to hold a steady presence in “an unsteady world,” in order to contain the destructive energy that is rising in the world. Feels like we are being called to Witness, to hold, and to midwife what is coming.
But it seems at times that as a culture we are lost. We cannot initiate our youth because the sacred art of initiation has been lost. Our adults were never initiated. We are like youngsters with no clear sense of home or of homecoming, disjointed from the earth and the land, cleaved from mythology and cosmology of meaning, uprooted from ritual and initiations that for millennia fed the hungry souls of our ancestors. Instead we feed on the rituals of reality-television, compulsive material consumption, and the addictive humdrum of political commentary — all of us suddenly aghast as we watch the Titanic of our American Dream swan dive into open space.
I will end here by saying I have come to believe that the cornerstone of our poverty is the poverty of the vertical dimension in our human society. All past societies and civilizations had sophisticated technologies to access and be informed by the vertical dimension of life, but somehow we’ve lost it. Somehow it has become taboo (at least in intellectual, or progressive circles) to talk about religion, god, and the myriad layers of mystery that surround us and in which our very human experience is embedded. Somehow conservatives have been given the monopoly of getting to talk about religion therefore the bulk of organized and symbolized spirituality. Religion, we should remember, comes from ‘religio’ — meaning to bind, to reconnect — and is therefore at the root of the trauma that has disconnected and numbed us in the modern world. At the deepest level I believe we suffer from a spiritual wounding. And, it should be remembered, religion has had the privileged role of pulling us up and out of our daily lives through the elasticity of our imagination into the archetypal domains of creativity and poetics.
The vertical dimension, looking downwards and inwards, into our rich depths of ourselves and the collective unconscious, or looking upwards past the stars, to angels and the divine, is still alive and well, but our access to this vertical dimension has atrophied. We have lost elders who know about it from personal experience, and we have lost our rituals, tools, technologies, and maps for navigating its wild and electric mytho-poetic landscape. Gone seem the days when witchdoctors or shamans or priests could cross between worlds to feed us the truths that our souls, as well as bodies, need for vital living. We seem progressively stuck in the flatland of the horizontal world, hence our shallow culture, our racism, our cannibalizing of the planet like a parasite incapable of relational, sustainable partnership, and our collapsing sense of meaning.
Perhaps that is the silver lining and deeper teaching in this moment in time. A chance for repentance and atonement (to use deliberate religious language in an attempt to reclaim sacred metaphor), an opportunity to re-align with our ancestors and finally address our intergenerational trauma. Our intergenerational karma. Like some massive energetic or spiritual constipation, karma has accumulated individually as well as collectively as a species, an as a country, and it needs to be cleaned out, purged and atoned for before the toxicity kills us. Slavery, the refusal to ever honor the treaties with the Native Americans, the systematic oppression of women, the accumulated violence of ‘profit at all costs,’ these are energetic and deeply real breaches of sacred contract. And they must be atoned for. Atonement, according to the dictionary, means to “make amends or reparation… make restitution for, compensate for, recompense for, expiate, redress, make good.”
I believe this is our work now, regardless of our race, age, gender, religious affiliation. But white people, white men, must be at the forefront and take charge, and our culture at large must do this. But I also believe its an inward and spiritual journey to atone for what is in our personal historical lineages of intergenerational trauma as well. Both the inner and the outer must be included in this time. Separation and splitting in all its myriad forms must be healed. Whatever this next chapter for our world or our country looks like — and the metaphors of death-rebirth, of an addict hitting rock bottom, of midwifery of birth, aka ‘not a tomb but a womb’ — it will certainly be calling us into deeper relationship with ourselves, each other, the planet, and in my opinion, the Source or Divine, whatever that might mean beyond the binaries of language.
And may we remember to laugh and love and sow seeds of joy amidst it all.
May it be so.