News Notebook Friday 9.10.21
Viral Wars, Bounty Hunters... + Some Reflections on Coming Clean
Warm Friday newShrink greetings, this beautiful weekend of pensive memory both shared and personal.
With the Saturday 20-year anniversary of the 2001 9/11 attacks as paired bookend to our recent troop-withdrawal and end to the Afghanistan war it precipitated, the news this week is heavily loaded and layered.
A central, overarching purpose and theme had seemed clear and obvious:
Look for what’s involved or required for many kinds of healing, health and wholeness — for a nation or an individual.
Look at both history, as with the 9/11 anniversary, and at history’s first-rough-draft, the news.
And consider that theme of needed healing with this week’s news of the escalating battle against the resurgent Covid virus, unfolding developments with the Texas abortion law, and the historic 9/11 anniversary.
That’s still the basic plan.
Yet this week is also different. Even as topics and historic news events are disparate, connecting them along threads of common theme is usually a fairly smooth process of weaving back-and-forth.
This week, that weaving has instead been more like a zigzagging pinball. It caroms noisily between the chaos of today’s news issues and what keeps pulling me, a bit mesmerized. The magnet is Ground Zero, the richly symbolic and experientially riveting 9/11 commemorative New York City Memorial site and complex, itself — not even so much the week’s news retrospectives, many meaningful feature stories, first-hand accounts, podcasts, video and verse about the attacks.
So today’s Notebook is structured in two parts, the first updating major news developments regarding Covid and the controversial Texas abortion law. (For space and time constraints, I will hold my psychological and soul-perspective comments on these continuing issues for a later Notebook.)
Then part two is a more immersive visit and reflection on the NYC 9/11 Ground Zero Memorial experience. My focus and comments from the soul perspective are on its parallels in depth psychology, effective psychotherapy in working with our individual ground zeroes, and on what the Memorial might teach us about America’s healing, health and wholeness.
First, news updates…
🦋💙
on covid…
In breaking news Thursday afternoon:
President Joe “Biden Mandates Vaccines for Workers, Saying, ‘Our Patience Is Wearing Thin’” (From The New York Times):
Initially reluctant to enact mandates, the president is now moving aggressively to require vaccination as the Delta variant races across the country.
President Biden also is calling for a Covid summit later this month. (From The Washington Post.)
An editorial take from Jennifer Rubin (WAPO)
And some commentary on Covid misinformation and bizarre veterinary remedies.
🦋💙
On Abortion: Texas Senate Bill 8
In breaking news Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland sued Texas over the law. (From The New York Times)
“It is settled constitutional law that ‘a state may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability,’” the lawsuit said. “But Texas has done just that.”
-
Here’s an excerpt from political historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American newsletter on September 3, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal last week to block the law without ruling on whether it is unconstitutional. Now the nation’s most extreme attempt to halt abortion, the law bans abortion after about six weeks--when many women are not yet aware of a pregnancy and much earlier than the legally established time of fetal viability.
“The new anti-abortion law in Texas is not just about abortion; it is about undermining civil rights decisions made by the Supreme Court during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The Supreme Court declined to stop a state law that violates a constitutional right.”
-
Noah Smith of Bloomberg highlights potential business impacts of the law on Texas as a long-desirable business environment. (From The Washington Post)
“The law has gained national attention because of a U.S. Supreme Court decision in its favor, which threatens to relitigate the constitutionality of abortion itself, as well as raising various other thorny legal issues. But the law is pretty wild in its own right — it allows citizens to personally earn money by suing people who get, perform or assist abortions, effectively turning the entire population of the state into bounty hunters.”
-
From lawyer-activist Robert Hubbell’s Today’s Edition newsletter:
“The development is deeply disturbing on many levels. Although the effect on reproductive rights is devastating, the cause for alarm transcends the extra-judicial demise of Roe v. Wade. The law portends a society in which pregnant women are prey to be stalked by bounty hunters. Women have been stripped of autonomy over their bodies and have become chattel under the dominion of white, evangelical Christians who codified their religious beliefs as civil law. The law pits neighbor against neighbor, encouraging vigilantism and gross violations of personal privacy in the name of the state—tactics utilized in pre-war Germany and post-war East Germany.”
And the outcry was swift from more mainstream religious leaders, such as these United Methodist Church pastors weighing in. These wear ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ costumes, from the hit HBO series based on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, on TikTok to decry the Texas abortion law.
Now, a shift to this historic anniversary…
🦋💙
visiting Ground Zero: reflections on healing and wholeness
As mentioned, the Lower Manhattan NYC site, commemorating all three 9/11 attacks plus the one there in 1993, has a particularly magnetic pull, or maybe an electrical charge, for me this week.
It’s that immense stillness amid pounding waterfalls that drown-out city noise, intensely embodied experience of the entire site’s interplays of so many opposites. There’s loft and depth, absence and sensation, sadness and hope, the emotional and the conceptual, symbol and instinctual punch.
Perhaps most powerful to me, and most relevant for newShrink from the psychological and soul dimensions of the Memorial, is the long process of how the united effort of Ground Zero’s complex excavation, clearing, design process and execution came to be a site of living, continued healing. If you have opportunity to experience it, even if you’ve been before, it’s one I recommend for visits and revisits. (With New York on the short list for eventual returns to true post-Covid travel, in my ideal life this site would be annual pilgrimage — preferably around Halloween when Manhattan is shared with thousands of vibrant marathon runners.)
I’m aware of irony in this subterranean pull to all of that body-remembered stillness and peace, given the site’s history and the various wars waged daily in news. It makes more sense when I consider how the words healing, health and wholeness (as well as holiness) share common roots. For we Americans, especially as a collective, are today in so many ways far-removed from anything resembling paths of healing or wholeness, on so much that wounds and divides.
Thursday marked another 20-year anniversary, premier of the deep retrospective HBO miniseries on World War II, Band of Brothers. (You can find this MSNBC Morning Joe interview of 9.9.21 on You Tube.) Former cast members of the now-iconic, seasonally repeated miniseries were asked to reconsider in today’s environment the program’s theme of America as a force for good in the world. One qualified his answer by saying:
“America can be a force for good, when Americans pull together.”
That wholeness in America, such a key aspect of our soul both collective and individual, for now seems a distant stretch goal. Perhaps a visit at Ground Zero in NYC can offer a glimpse of what that kind of healing might look or feel like.
Here are informative posts from an accessible and well-written blog by one of the Memorial’s tour guides. (From 911groundzero.com.) Details on the complex’s symbolic design elements are powerful.
Here’s the Oculus (eye), the site’s massive, experientially and symbolically powerful transportation hub for both rebuilt PATH commuter rail and 10 other subway lines.
—
My take on Ground Zero from soul and psychological dimensions particularly includes its parallels with the healing processes of depth psychotherapy.
The entire process, international design competition and felt-experience of the Ground Zero Memorial embodies and illustrates how good, effective healing happens, works much the same, in psychotherapy as for us collectively as citizens.
In psychotherapy it is often our individual ground-zeroes that precipitate the work toward lifelong healing — ie. crises of physical disease; fresh or long-buried losses and grief; and trauma either developmental (from childhood) or situational (from violence, war, disaster.)
At ground zeroes of all kinds there’s a necessary, at-times-excruciating process of facing, digging, sorting through the rubble of memory. And rubble, itself, can be toxic or even lethal — as with the now-tens of thousands who have died of the cleanup from exposure to the toxins of excavation at 9/11 Ground Zero. (Similarly, in healing psychotherapy the very habits, patterns, addictions, and other ways we’ve developed to cope, cover, and adapt to bear-the-unbearable can also become toxic traps that impair or even halt the necessary energetic, cleansing movement toward health and wholeness.)
Such phrases as “never forget” and “always remember” are apt for ground zeroes. As a re-membering, the cleansing process is about putting things back together in a new and whole, not fragmented, way.
This week a brief TV news clip on an unrelated story, devastating aftermath of the Hurricane Ida floods, caught me. A small boy about 5 or 6 is providing the reporter a guided-tour of the waist-high pile of utter trash that had been his family’s homesite. Pointing to the giant pile of shredded material — which at best looks like mulch, or maybe aromatic cedar shavings in the bottom of a hamster cage — describing favorite toys there he says, quite matter-of-fact and upbeat:
“These were my memories. Now, we will make new memories with them.”
This is what we do, individually and collectively, when we take on the work of deep healing.
The contrast is great, with what happens when we don’t. Therapists often point out that we cannot move past, “put-behind us,” “get-over,” “rise-above”— or build an enduring structure on — things we have not first allowed ourselves to fully experience and feel. This essential fact is at the core of all work with our inevitable griefs, and with trauma.
Instead, the wounds are often, and too quickly, covered and buried, followed by structures (like habits, language, relational behaviors) and even towers (like public policies, laws, political battles, whole new institutions, even wars.)
Among public-news examples of this today are still-haunting and frightening reverberations from the January 6 attack and riots at the U.S. Capitol — the inherent war-zone workplace trauma of which is still largely denied on one side of the aisle, stoically ultra-rationally frozen-out on the other.
Meanwhile, eight months later we have hearings and criminal trials under way at one end of our extreme divide… While on the other are plans for a September 18 rally there in support of the rioters, requiring defense strategies to protect our center of government from more acts of domestic terrorism. Structures built on buried, unsorted, toxic rubble.
Another example in today’s news points to far older, buried wounds and scars: The post-Reconstruction/Jim Crow era “Lost Cause” monuments erected to the Confederacy 40-50 years after the Civil War and whitewashing both realities of slavery and freeing of enslaved Americans.
The Wednesday removal of the long-iconic statue of Robert E. Lee in the former Confederate capital at Richmond underscores contrast with the 9/11 Memorial. With such endeavors as the 1619 Project, slavery and lynching museum in Alabama and re-visioning of many former plantations we are only beginning the needed Ground Zero sorting and clearing of rubble regarding race and our slavery history.
We Americans, individually and collectively, simply tend to be lots better at burying and building the structures and towers than at taking on the deep foundational work of first sorting and cleansing the rubble to create something whole and eternal.
This for me is what makes this Memorial, and how it has been undertaken, not only compelling but hopeful from the standpoint of the soul and its processes of sorting and energetic “cleansing of the memories.”
It’s a kind of coming-clean — as with all of that pounding, reflective, water.
🦋💙
I wind-up this visit to Ground Zero with a similar hopeful companion piece much like that of my pre-Covid one there. That began a Halloween weekend 2019 trip mainly to see the last original-cast, Sunday matinee performance of To Kill A Mockingbird on Broadway, with Jeff Daniels in the lead as Atticus Finch.
This fall Broadway, the Aaron Sorkin play, and Jeff Daniels in the Atticus role, will be back, for all-vaccinated audiences, starting October 5!
Here a thoughtful interview with Daniels is so much more about life and love and wisdom than just acting. (From CBS Sunday Morning 9.5.21, accessible on You Tube.) Starting about 4 minutes into the 8-minute video are moved-to-tears and synchronistic moments to catch — especially if you have ever been a fan of Daniels, writer Aaron Sorkin, and/or the 2012-14 HBO series The Newsroom.
And, that is all I have. Talk to you next week!
🦋💙tish
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”