| P.S. The other thing that I think occasioned this situation is the mass trauma event of the 2020 protests, which a lot of us were directly involved in. I know HN is not a bastion of revolutionary thought. But say what you will about the movement, or its outcomes; we can & should all at least agree that it was expensive, in the blood-and-treasure sense. There is a whole generation of progressives that now have a permanent stress reaction when we see so much as a cop car. And it's not always the people you think: I was having brunch today with a sixty-something friend and she nearly fell off her café stool when a police van pulled up nearby and disgorged several tac-vest-wearing cops, who were apparently responding to (I think?) a domestic situation in a nearby apartment block. I think this sort of visceral reaction to armor and weapons is probably a longstanding commonplace in Black communities, but in my (embarrassingly white) circles, this is new. I myself can't really look at officers dressed in gear without flashing back to that night at CHOP, when the snatch vans showed up, and the mercenaries in fatigues and gleaming gas masks took formation. The trauma of that summer and fall will probably be with me until my last day. And there are lots of us who are permanently scarred from what went down. Even when I wasn't on the ground (which admittedly was rarely) I remember watching a 3x3 of protester body cams, from nearby Portland, every night, from nine to midnight. I remember watching footage on Twitch that would cut away just as the car drove into the crowd, as if that TOS-compliance measure could do anything about the psychological impact of what had been shown. There is trauma in just witnessing. And collective trauma finds its expression in community contretemps. Therapy-speak provides a convenient way of reframing some of these post-traumatic behaviours as personal growth. Whether this is helpful to anyone in the long run is debatable, but I'd put my money on 'nope'. The difference between actual (good, real, effective) therapy and pop-cultch therapy-speak is that therapy involves being uncomfortable, whereas therapy-speak is often a way to avoid feeling uncomfortable. |