Djelloul Marbrook

What if nations dealt with each other as if we’re all victims of post-traumatic stress disorder? All of us, the whole of humanity.

Shell-shock, we used to call it. But now we know verbal abuse can traumatize a single child as much as the Holocaust or Pol Pot’s atrocities traumatized the world. And yet we keep pouring it on. Consider politics. Many of the candidates’ most likable attributes are the ones we castigate: John McCain’s daffy streak we call shallow, Barack Obama’s reserve we call elitist. Joe Biden’s exuberance we call blabbering. For being outdoorsy Sarah Palin gets to be called a hick.

We know PTSD can cause you to jump when someone unexpectedly comes up on you from behind. Stuttering, sleeplessness, paranoia and many more familiar demons are related to PTSD. Almost all abused children suffer from PTSD, and that is a very large number indeed.

And yet it’s rather like alcoholism, we’d rather not confront it. We know perfectly well that alcoholism is the root cause of many of the diseases we so expensively treat, but we choose to address the symptoms, giving the cause a pass, even though it’s boosting the cost of everyone’s health care.

We know that the horrors of poverty, war and injustice have traumatized us, but we insist that flag-waving, saber-rattling and secret connivance are the proper remedies.

What if the foreign policies of every nation presumed that we’re all victims of PTSD? It won’t happen, of course. But even as a fabulist idea it has value, and at the end of the day it might be easier to achieve a universal consensus about this than it is to impose our religious convictions on each other.

True, there is populist skepticism about psychology, but there is just as much skepticism about religion. What is not at issue is that many of us exhibit PTSD symptoms, both as individuals and a nations.

Perhaps we could test the waters by observing a day at the United Nations in which we admit that there’s been a whole lot of shakin’ goin’ on and it hasn’t done humanity much good.

That is the premise of the UN, isn’t it? Not so we’d know it after the lawyers had at it, but we do remember, don’t we, that the world was pretty shaken up when the UN was born?—DM