The trauma inside all of us
The terrible things that keep happening have a place inside us — but they don't have to control us.
This time last year I was neck-deep in investigating election deniers. I was also drinking heavily. That’s always been the case but my drinking had accelerated by this time last year. Then Uvalde happened. Noah Schactman, editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone, asked me if I would go to Texas to do what I’ve been doing for a long time now. I was still one of the best reporters in the country at flying into a place in the wake of tragedy and sorting out the madness, I thought. Of course I’d go. Then, I told my wife it was time to do what I knew had been coming for a while and she drove me to a building down the street from my home and I checked into rehab. I never made it to Texas.
Things were already pretty bad and had been for a while before Uvalde happened. But reading about a bunch of kids being murdered helped push me over the edge. For many years I have witnessed and written about American bloodshed in all its forms. I have covered daily, senseless killings that largely occur in poor communities of color. I have covered police killings and their riotous aftermath. I have traveled the country to write about spree killings, mass killings, and serial killings. This is my CV, a resume of horror. I have been drinking hard — too hard — for longer than I have been in the news, but reporting on American terror certainly didn’t slow me down. I read about Uvalde and drank. I became angry about Uvalde and drank. My anger turned to blackout turned to hangover turned to anxiety turned to reading about Uvalde and drinking. This went on for two hellish weeks. It was a distillation of my experiences of the last decade-plus of my life: consume horror, ignore the trauma by distracting yourself with the reporting process, then drink the feelings down. Finally, punish yourself for having feelings in the first place. Except I wasn’t even reporting on Uvalde for anyone. I was just doing it for myself. I was punishing myself.
That’s why I was struck with such a strange feeling last week as news came of another horrific attack in Texas. I found myself staying up late and consuming the horror with an addict’s appetite, just like I used to do in my drinking days. Then the anxiety came. Why? I wasn’t there, in Texas, on the ground reporting on the tragic chaos as I had done so many times before. Then it dawned on me: Uvalde, trauma, drinking, and one year sober. My body remembered what my mind didn’t. Or maybe it was the other way around. Like Uvalde, I didn’t travel to Texas to report on the attack there last week. But there will almost surely come a time when I do pack my bags and fly or drive to a place that is reeling from what should be the unthinkable but isn’t anymore. So I have to be prepared, because what I was doing before was a one-way ticket to anguish and a slow death through alcoholism.
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For the first time in my life I’m sober and dealing with the news for the first time. For much of the past year that hasn’t been that big of a deal. But the alignment of the massacre in Allen last week with the one-year anniversary of Uvalde and my own milestone of one year’s sobriety surprised me with its toll. These events and many others take a heavy toll from all of us. Going through recovery has taught me a bit about how to handle them.
Mostly what I have done in the past year is learn how to balance things in my life. I have probably consumed less news, been less online and have certainly engaged less on social media than I have in any year since I started in journalism. This isn’t to say that I haven’t partaken in the often toxic environment of social media. (I occasionally read comments on Facebook posts from local news sites, for instance — perhaps the worst place to go if you want to have any hope for the future of humanity.) Being a bit less online while going through the daily routines we all do has made me more perceptive to peoples’ swings of emotion and states of mind. Where before I often concluded too much about the national consciousness through the words coming across my screen in the online world, I now make more of those observations through my interactions in daily life. My powers of observation are only increased by my sobriety. Not only am I fully present for my own life, but sobriety allows me to take in more of the world around me than I ever did while drinking. There is no break. I feel everything all the time, whether I like it or not.
Make yourself available to it in your daily interactions and you will feel a tension and anxiety that has put people so on edge that any given interaction could end in bloodshed. Because this is America, it’s always been like this. But the tension seems heightened recently. In Cincinnati last month, I saw Black citizens on edge over an aggressive gentrification that is rapidly changing that city. In the South, I see White Americans equipping their trucks to look like war machines, covering them in stickers that proclaim their belief that an arsenal of high-powered firearms is the only thing that can guarantee them safety and freedom. Across the country, I see and feel a desperation that I’ve witnessed in cities experiencing unrest: an isolationist mentality that calls for securing the personal borders of your life for those closest to you, to hell with everyone else. Obviously, much of this aggression comes from right-wing Americans who are goaded ever onward by Republican politicians and conservative media, exacerbated most recently by the insanely politicized grievances of the pandemic and the attempted insurrection of January 6. Those on the receiving end of this aggression — service workers, medical professionals, government employees, minorities, the left in general — can’t be fully blamed for responding with frustrated aggression of their own. But as it has always been, there is only one political party in this country that is willing to take power by force in its authoritarian quest to have things its way, and that authoritarian instinct is only becoming more pronounced.
In a different time, a Nazi-supporting madman who had just killed innocents in a shopping mall would prompt politicians of all stripes to condemn those racist beliefs. Forget gun control for a moment and consider the silence from Republicans about the racist beliefs of the Texas gunman.
The massacre in Texas represents the two major problems facing our country, which also happen to be the two driving tenets of the Republican base: gun fetishization and right-wing extremism. In another country, we would call this an insurgency. Everything from election deniers on your local election board to sitting politicians who see white nationalism as just another political belief are part of this insurgency. These are no longer polite disagreements between political parties. Republicans have an extremism problem, an not-insignificant portion of their base are would-be domestic insurgents, and the party’s leaders aren’t doing anything about it. A reasonable leader would look around them at all the death and destruction and decide that quashing this right-wing insurgency is far more important than any short-term political gains like controlling elections in the name of election lies or illegalizing abortion. If left-wing terrorists routinely murdered innocent Americans would Democrats insist that, while violence isn’t the answer, those terrorists had some good points? Because that’s what the Republican party is doing. The terrorist in Texas was obsessed with stockpiling firearms, as was the National Guard airman who shared intelligence documents online. Both acts were rooted in a belief system that holds that the government is planning to take Americans’ guns and that left-leaning Americans are fundamentally changing the country for the worse. The Texas gunman and the National Guard airman were acting on these beliefs through two tactics of the modern insurgent: a terrorist attack and information warfare.
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On a hot June day in 2019 I stopped by a 7-11 in my old neighborhood in Dallas to grab a taquito on my way to the office. By the time I arrived someone had shot up the courthouse downtown. I quickly found that the attacker had been posting right-wing memes online and wrote about it. That day, I thought about the weirdness of this way of living: one moment I was just like anyone else, running a silly errand like getting a taquito and saying hello to the cashier I saw a few times a week, then heading into a downtown that was cordoned off by police in the midst of a manhunt. A conflict zone, to put it another way. I have seen many of these moments of American terror over the years and have always been struck by the absurdity of carrying on a normal life knowing that at any moment I could find myself in the middle of a chaotic environment that many people go their whole lives without witnessing. Except as the years have gone on these moments of terror seem like they’ve been increasing, and with them an increasing number of Americans whose jobs have nothing to do with covering the news or being a first responder have found themselves in the middle of a life-changing act of violence. The most recent one was at a shopping mall on a Saturday in Allen, Texas. Like the Dallas courthouse shooter, it will become a blip. It used to be that events like the one in Allen would change something. They would become a Columbine or a Waco. But now they just happen all the time and no one does anything about it.
For the past few months I’ve been under contract for a book I’m writing called If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened. It details the many acts of American terror I’ve witnessed in my journalism career. In the course of writing, I have been reminded of many other blips that in a different era might have caused the country to enact policy changes to prevent further carnage. I have been surprised to see the sheer number of them. I guess it’s good that I’m surprised because it means that I still possess the ability to be shocked by something as terrible as what happened in Texas and shocked further that nothing will be done in its wake to prevent the next one from happening. As I go about my daily life, running ho-hum errands and reading about something that we would call a terrorist attack if it happened somewhere other than here, I think about the collective trauma all of this terror causes. I think about the role it plays in how we carry ourselves every time we leave the house and go to public spaces where at any given moment, something terrible could happen. All of the horror I’ve seen over the years lives inside of me, which is why I spent so long trying to drown it in alcohol. I didn’t want to feel any of it because it caused anxiety. That trauma lives in all of us, too. Every attack is somewhere inside of us waiting to exact its anxiety-inducing toll, just like how the phantom memory of Uvalde and my last drinking days came creeping up on me when I wasn’t expecting it.