It is hard to believe we are about to observe the fifth anniversary of the barbaric murder of George Floyd on May 25th, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. I feel compelled to make sure we observe and remember him, even as he drifts further into a muddy haze of years. Admittedly I do think of him or am haunted by him fairly often throughout the year, an iconic reminder of the persistence and extremes of injustice, brutality and violence. I remember from my activist days, a ritual call and response as we honored fallen revolutionary heroes of Chile and Latin America. A speaker would ceremonially call out the name of the martyr, the crowd would roar back a united chorus of response “Presente!” as if to reassure them, “you are still with us!” The energy of all those voices in a powerful unison was a boost to our battered morale. “Your death was not in vain, your spirit, our struggle, continues.”
I do love call and response. It seems many cultures and religions seem to incorporate them. They are unifying, uplifting, perhaps hopeful. Yet somehow hope seems perhaps elusive these days. And how we do need it!
Neuroscience researchers Ruth Lanius and Frank Corrigan are busy studying the most primitive regions of the brainstem: The PAG (Periaqueductal gray) and the superior colliculus, which I know little about. Except that when they fail to develop, another missing capacity becomes the ability to predict. So, the failure to stimulate those regions in the earliest attachment experience (or missing experience!) affects the ability to predict. And thus, the ability to hope. Is there any wonder, therefore, as to why the child of neglect suffers bitterly, lacking the ability to hope? How could they? Lacking the stimulation of a present other to arouse growth and development in those regions, there is similarly no future. Dangling seemingly nowhere with an empty past, of course they are left to believe nothing matters. And events in the modern world don’t seem to help much with that. Have we learned anything at all since George Floyd gasped his last?
Past
On the plane to Boston, the WiFi was spotty to non-existent. I was pretty much unable to work. Oh well…I guess I had no choice but to watch movies, something I rarely do at home. Admittedly I am not too much of a movie person, much too stingy with my reading time. But I was tired, so I combed through the offerings. I had wanted to see the Bob Dylan movie, A Complete Unknown, being a child of the 60’s who grew up with and dearly loved his music. I can’t say I liked the movie too much. I did enjoy the music and there was a rich dose of it, but I suppose I objected to making a centerpiece of his mistreatment of two adoring women, swinging back and forth, cheating on both, and appearing indifferent to either of them, or their devotion. I guess I prefer not to see the steamy side of my cultural heroes and icons, preferring their idealized images. But somehow it seemed as if the film maker by seeming, at least to me, to put such a spotlight on that part of Dylan’s character, was exploiting or making some sort of unnecessary point. I suppose I did not want to come out disliking him.
I did love learning or being reminded of how profoundly Dylan’s work sprang from deep roots in the music of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. And where Dylan’s love was most palpable was in his grief and admiration for the dying Guthrie. And I did love how Pete Seeger was portrayed as the iconic, all-around good guy. I grew up with Pete have always loved him. I was visited by the memory of the one time I did see him in person. I had not thought of that in many years. I recently learned that the sense of hearing, of all the senses, is the most richly endowed with brain receptors associated with emotion. We feel more through hearing, than the senses of vision, smell, taste or touch. No surprise there for me – I who always have a song in my head.
However, I was surprised to emerge from the movie with hope from an unexpected direction. I had forgotten that the rich ferment of the nineteen sixties in the US sprang from the muddy soil of the 1950’s “Red scare.” Activists, artists, writers, actors, people of every stripe were being spied on, vilified, rounded up and locked up willy nilly for being spies or communists, or some other so called “subversive” element. Everyone was terrified, suspicious of everyone else, and fearing they would be thrown under the bus one way or another. Thinking of the current state of the world, and remembering that somehow, we emerged from that horror and swung into a generation of anti-war sentiment, free love, women’s liberation, drugs sex and rock and roll, I remembered the history of humankind is a story of pendulum swings from one pole to the other, endlessly through time.
I came out of the movie thinking I wanted to call not only “Presente” to George Floyd, but something more. Do we learn from experience at all? Or are these pendulum swings nature’s design? I guess the answer is blowing in the wind. Interestingly I also remembered my dad used to sing that song…
The movie ended and I still had a ways to go before landing in Boston. I found another documentary, called Becoming Madonna. Although never a great fan of Madonna’s music, I was always enthralled by her dancing and fascinated by her character. I was interested to learn that Madonna had started her dancing from a foundation of classical ballet. I was amazed to see the grainy old black and white footage of the little girl in a tutu, on toe, in that tightly circumscribed form, from there evolving into the later dynamo and sensation she became.
That movie was great. Again, I was reminded of the tides of history, and how the culture around sexuality has whipsawed back and forth through the epochs. Madonna through brazenness, chutzpa and a measure of shock value, woke the world up to the beginnings of non-binary awareness, AIDS education, research and prevention, as well as sexual outspokenness and pleasure for all. History does waddle along, not always at the pace or in the ways we had imagined or intended, but it seems never to stop, and is unlikely to now, although when we are deep in it, it can be devastating nonetheless, and many are lost along the way. Somehow, I was able to emerge from that movie with hope. I wanted to tell George Floyd, “take heart”. We will spawn something better from your ashes.
Future
Here at the trauma conference, I had another burst of hope. Dr. Karlen Lyons-Ruth from Harvard, is an attachment research rock star from way back. I have followed her work for three decades. Today she presented new research, that as I sat in the first row where I could see and hear everything, brought me to tears. She showed with hard data, absolutely everything I have been working hard to teach. It was as if she was providing the evidence basis in hard science, in effect putting the legitimizing legs under all that I had anecdotally put together over the years. I don’t know if I have ever felt so utterly validated. She was proving that early infancy attachment trauma is the most profoundly injurious of any trauma there is. And the inter-generational transmission of neglect trauma is insidious and must be treated and prevented. She talked about the dissociation, the scourge of nothing, the injury of nothing. Wow. So, I do feel a new wave of hope and conviction. Nothing matters, history advances. Like neglect trauma, invisible in plain sight, George Floyd, Presente! We can’t see you, but we know you are there.
Today’s song:
