What is the Meaning of this City?

by Matt Bennett of the Coldspring Center
the complete think piece from this month's newsletter

I was recently inspired by a poem by T.S. Eliot, entitled Choruses from the Rock. There were four lines in this poem that really got my attention – I believe they speak powerfully of the call for not only trauma informed helpers and organizations, but also trauma informed communities:

    When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city?

    Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”

    What will you answer? “We all dwell together

    To make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?

There is the suffering caused by a person inflicting trauma on another (for now, let’s just gently hold on to the fact that those who hurt people have been hurt themselves), but there is an equal, if not greater, suffering caused by the community’s reaction to the victim’s pain. Eliot’s question of why we come together as communities hits at the very heart of whether communities dedicate themselves to healing trauma and fulfilling the call to love one another, or whether they perpetuate suffering and pain, by caring more about short-term profits than the well-being of people.

As so many are thrust into the darkness caused by trauma, there is a moment that challenges us all. Do we collectively have enough understanding and strength to recognize and sit with the fact that these terrors exist in our community? A trauma informed community takes a breath and mindfully looks at not only what the victim needs, but also what societal issues contributed to the abuse, neglect, or “criminal” act. This mindful response allows both appropriate reactions to the pain of the victim, and justice (and hopefully true rehabilitation) for the person causing the trauma.

We live in a time where the philosophy is most often, ‘Profit,’ not ‘Love.’ A community that is created to maximize profit will damage a large portion of its own population as a means to this end. Senseless drug policies, cuts to successful social programs, failing schools, and the highest imprisonment rate in the world are symptoms of our historical choice to prioritize profits over love. We have powerful science to show that crime, poverty, violence, and the inability to succeed in the profit-driven city is not the fault of the person, but a failure of the community. We can show scientifically that the behaviors we judge, and often punish people for, occur not because these people are evil or criminal, but because something happened to them. We can show how poverty prevents the development of the brain areas needed for success in school, the workplace, and achieving the American Dream. We can show that investment now will yield long-term economic, intellectual, and cultural benefits for decades and centuries to come.

Communities’ actions have the power to perpetuate or stave off the suffering and pain caused by the traumatic act. If pain is met with empathy, compassion, and love, trauma loses its destructive power and transforms into strength and wisdom. If it is met by judgement, punishment, and fear, the suffering is multiplied, not by the abuser or the abused, but by the community.

May we continue to engage Elliot’s question and continue to build our answer: “We are a community!”