There was a drive-by shooting in front of my home a couple of nights ago. I was having difficulty sleeping, as, given my PTSD, I sometimes do, so I migrated to my living room and balcony to read and relax before another attempt. Just as I began to try to settle in, shots rang out. I saw the plateless gold car speed away. I saw the man they shot. The police, much hated in this city, arrived swiftly; the man is alive and stable.
We like to discuss whether such occurrences are common, but that strikes me as strange language. I can say with certainty that there aren’t as many drive-bys or even shootings here or now as there were where and when I grew up. There it was daily – often literally in the middle of the day. I saw my first murder at something like 3pm when I was 5 years old. I saw many more. Ergo the PTSD.
This shooting was like a time machine for me, dragging me back to the childhood that I had very little business surviving. In that, the event was not unique. I had banking fraud alerts to handle, as I tried to unrattle from the shooting, per someone stealing $800 from me, and that dragged me back too. Moreover, the police murdering people of my melanin concentration, the CHOP and its violence, every time people of my melanin concentration murder each other, the storming of the U.S. capitol, every suicide-by-cop mass shooting, the trample deaths of dozens of souls in Israel, war footage – every bit of news we’ve got, I guess – is a time machine back to horror for me. I suspect this is why it’s said that PTSD is anxiety over events which, for the sufferer, have never stopped happening. I acknowledge the peculiarities of my condition.
I put this to the world though – the trauma that impacts me daily, and that I believe has created a global cult of looping trauma, response, trauma, is actually still happening. I think Alan Watts would say something along the lines of “all time is now” and I think we might consider that as we discuss our collective trauma. That shooting in front of my house, horrors in Israel, George Floyd’s timed murder – we look at these as distinct events and we measure how “common” they are, or commonality relative to other ways of dying, and we build them into our narrative differently than we do say “another Monday at work” and the corresponding “Sunday pre-work anxiety.” I propose we stop doing that and see instead that they are continuous threads that run through us, and we are asking the wrong damn questions about them.
On LinkedIn today, I saw a post about a potentially mythological science experiment or mythological results of a real experiment or a real experiment and real results, and it doesn’t matter which one is true because the conceptualization of this thing by someone who isn’t me and the reactions to it are all that are needed to see some bizarre and real things from the parable. Here’s the set-up:
In some recent modern decade or other, some scientists set up an experiment with rats.
They placed rats into tall beakers and filled the beakers with sufficient water such that the rats would have to swim to survive and they timed them to see how long they could go.
The rats treaded. On average, they went 15 minutes before giving up and resigning to their deaths.
Before they began to drown, though, the scientists removed them from the water and dried them off. They let them rest briefly and then returned them to the water and set the timer again.
The tale goes that they then swam for 60 hours.
The conclusion the scientists drew, and by extension the reader should draw, is that the rats now believed they would be rescued if they kept trying and so pushed their bodies past perceived limits.
Hope caused the exhausted rats to defy exhaustion and keep swimming.
Be hopeful, like these brave rats. There are dozens of responses and hundreds of likes on this LinkedIn post saying just that. Hope and faith are the themes of this meme and we should have them.
In discussing the drive-by shooting with my boxing coach, after discussing it via telephone with my 3000 miles away brother, I told this story about the rat experiment. When I got a third of the way through this basic premise about the experiment – “They placed rats into tall beakers and filled the beakers with sufficient water that the rats would have to swim to survive”—my coach made an incredible face.
I am not a talented enough writer to describe this face to you, nor, I think, are there any writers who can, at least not in English. We don’t have the verbal granularity required to describe the subtle movement of my coach’s eyebrows, somewhere between a Dwayne Johnson lift, a waggle, and a scowl. We don’t have the nuance to describe my coach’s frown or we’d be able to categorize that of the Mona Lisa. My coach boxed out of poverty, trauma, and pain and so when I say there was some sort of volcanic fire in their eyes that also flowed with the serene calm of someone who learned to turn internal fire into face punches for a living, I’m not really doing it any justice.
I don’t really think I have to, though. That face is timeless. You’ve seen it before. Maybe you saw it when your grandparent thought you were being very dumb. Or when your partner was taken aback by something said on a Zoom call only later to launch into a 5-hour tirade about it over a glass of cheap chardonnay. Or maybe you saw it when you lied to your kid about an animal’s behavior at the zoo for which you had no factual explanation and your kid, in their primal, infant wisdom, knew you were bullshitting them and could, wordless, communicate to you only in an ancient language of facial contortion. You’ve maybe made that face yourself, and you’ve maybe made it more often recently if you’ve been paying any attention.
I asked my coach what was up with that timeless face they made. My coach speaks their heart when they speak. “I don’t really know where the rest of this experiment is going but why the fuck would you put rats into beakers and drown them or even exhaust them? These are sentient creatures. What the fuck?”
I laughed because my coach headed me off at the pass, nullifying any point I was making. I told my coach the rest of the experiment and they just stood there shaking their heads while I gave my point anyway, preached to the choir:
Why do we keep telling this dumb narrative? In what literal hell is the moral of the study of that experiment that we should continue on with hope and blame or credit rat courage for rat results? How is the moral of that story not “kick in laboratory doors and liberate the rats,” or, at least, as my coach eloquently put it, “why the fuck would you put rats into beakers and drown them or even exhaust them?”
My coach went on to describe a very salient point, “we’ve built this whole thing. We made choices and this – this,” as they described while waving hands in semi circles—“this is what we came up with.” I made that timeless face. That understanding, what-the-actual-fuck and I’m with you, face.
That I saw this on LinkedIn is an almost amusing punchline. Here are hundreds of professionals of varying degrees of privilege all over the world pumping their virtual fists in the air. “Yea! All we need is hope! We’re gonna swim on!” and patting each other on the back because they’re “woke professionals in charge of their futures,” too oblivious to those who don’t seem to tread their way out, and I’m reading it with that face plastered on my dumbfounded skull. I cannot help but comment. I try not to be hostile so I say less than half of what I mean. What I say is:
“It’s mortifyingly sad that any portion of human experience in this advanced age can be accurately compared to this horrifying experiment. The moral I pulled from this story is pull as many rats out of the water as you can…”
What I wanted to scream from my rooftop, though, is: If we are, as you and the commenters agree, the rats in this tale, how are we not, eyes wide and infuriated, in open disgust over the experimental model that is “drowning us in fucking beakers and then demanding we find some sort of meaning in it,” meaning that is, fundamentally, about whether or not we have the spirit to endure torture, and endure it better when someone helps us endure it a little, and if I haven’t already said it: why the fuck are we drowning sentient beings in beakers, and I’ll say it again why the fuck are we thinking it tells us something about their hope or endurance instead of the general madness of the scientists who created the model?
We do this as a species to each other all the time.
Let me send this young man to country X to be forced to do the fairly inhuman thing of killing some stranger. Let me give him that trauma and then ask “are you strong enough to handle that for your country, son?” Let me bring him back after he’s given away his humanity to whatever desert or jungle we sent him to, and say “integrate back into normalcy. No big deal. You’re a man. You can do it” until he can’t do it (like anyone could), self-destructs and destroys relationships around him, maybe even gives a couple more people some good ol’ trauma, and winds up on a therapist’s doorstep so they can teach him about “shame” and how it’s his beliefs and his body that are doing this to him. Depending on political leans, the therapist may even intimate that his sacrifice was noble and “unfortunate” but there’s “hope” in CBT. Obviously, there is hope in CBT and both the vet and I should use that to pull ourselves out of the beaker.
Aren’t we missing the point in it though? Why the fuck did we have to send him to war in the first place? “Oh because enemies of the country” yada yada – extend the WE. If our enemies are also human/sentient, which presumably they are, then I ask it again Why did WE have to send ALL THE HIMS to war in the first place? Resources? The US throws out half its food every year, and we know burning oil is killing all of us so, no, I reject that easy answer. Why? Why are we not sending project managers and architects and engineers and craftsmen and medical professionals and baristas to link up with country X’s managers, architects, builders, baristas to figure out how WE can tear apart a broken world and put it back together in some way where we aren’t scientists drowning rats and the rats being drowned at the same time?
Can we be clear about our vet? It isn’t his shame or beliefs that invented the beaker or put him or the stranger into it. He, his beliefs, shame, hope, biochemistry are not the root cause of his drowning.
That’s just one example. My partner comes from a life of religious trauma; who knew that teaching your kids that, though they’ve newly arrived to life on earth they are guilty and disgusting, but really cant do anything about it except for pray to some external scientist for salvation, could terrify and fuck up a child who then becomes an anxious adult? There are intricacies to her life that are their own beaker moments but to the point today, when I got home, via text:
“Did you hear about Israel? I waited until now to tell you because I didn’t want to stress you out before your job interviews this morning. Oh you did? For some reason, it made me really mad. The incident that happened in Israel. It made me mad at those fucking people… they’re like zealots. In what world do 100,000 people gather in the midst of a pandemic and then trample each other to death?”
I couldn’t see her, but I could conclude that she was making that timeless face.
I told her that anger was the only rational reaction but I couldn’t say who to be angry at exactly. The people who were trampled are the same people doing the trampling in this episode of how trampling and being trampled works. Can we say that those trampled folks died for god? If we do and it’s his beaker, should I be mad at god? What are those of us immoral horrors who have turned their backs on god, and so can’t possibly have any morality, but are clearly morally outraged because it’s fucking immoral to trample your neighbor to death at a religious worship, supposed to be mad at if we don’t believe in your god or that it’s actually his beaker?
This is also only one more example, but I put to you this, that my life as a survivor of 1980s and 1990s crack-driven, poverty-driven inner city trauma is the story of a bunch of teenage rats in a beaker. Some of us had the “hope” of survival required to stand on the bodies of the rats that got trampled in the fray. I’m not sure we fully survived though.
I put to you that the disenfranchisement that Trumpers are yawping about from their soapboxes is a story of a bunch of rats in a beaker pissed off at the other rats in the beaker.
When a North Carolina cop says he “can’t wait for the race war to start” what he means is “let’s try and get all the black rats at the bottom of the beaker again because that sure will make treading easier.” He’s wrong; it’s a tall beaker.
When cops are terrified of their lives in the communities that they “serve”, have no legal requirement to protect anyone at all, while also terrifying the communities they’re in, we’ve got a rat fight on our hands and George Floyd drowned in the experiment. So has Derek Chauvin. (If empathy for the fates of either of those humans makes you angry, please stop it. Be broader. Extend your We.)
It seems to me that most, if not all, of our institutions have sprung up in response to the very real sadness and trauma of what it is to be a rat in this beaker. BLM exists because some dumbasses invented race because they wanted to make money which some dumbasses invented so they could hold court which some dumbasses invented because some dumbasses invented status and for some reason we internalize and believe in that dumbass invention anyway. Religion exists to its historical and current extent because it sucks to be a poor farmer who may be maimed at any point by armies with swords or guns, who is also struggling against climate and illness and the rest of mammalian hardship, and our “leadership” tells us we’re powerless to stop our “sinful natures” so we must always prepare for the stabbings, and the pandemics, and the droughts that are the results of two bites of one metaphoric fruit – the capacity to think.
I put to you that this part of the Abrahamic story is somewhat accurate – it’s our claim on knowledge that has created the parts of this horrible mess that aren’t normal droughts. But I also put to you that it’s not because we are sinful things so far out of control that we need hoodoo and cosmic scientists to fix us. What has damned us all to this ongoing hell is that we have claimed enough knowledge to design experiments, that the experiment we have designed for ourselves involves swimming to death in tall beakers, and we haven’t cut it out already.
My coach has it right – WE built this, over time and iteration, with limited information and all of our fallibility. At many mistakes, we felt pain and trauma and we responded to our pain with new systems, by lashing out, by the avoidance we PTSD sufferers are taught not to think will get us out of our messes. We see our plights and we still think our answer is to avoid others, draw up our battlelines, argue and struggle about the water temperature or sparklines of our beakers, fight and kill and die and steal for one lord or clan or idea or acquisition or another. We build monumentally amazing things of otherworldly scope, like the Internet, and we then use them to foment hatred, not for the fact that this dumbass beaker experiment is the thing we’ve built, not for the shit beaker itself or at least not enough, but at the other rats being drowned, whether our solutions for making the beakers nicer places to be are understood, and whether the color of the rats or whether they have penises has any bearing on their right to tread.
It’s my hope that this blog will be a place to rage together about the experiment we built over time. That we might start trying to figure out the correct questions to ask, one of which must be why the hell are we allowing this experiment to be the one we create? Maybe, if it works out, we can pull some rats out of the water. Mostly, I want to see you make that timeless face and ask its timeless question What The Fuck? with me and the other drowned rats.
The Drowned Rat Gospel Choir 