Raised by the Walking Wounded by Jim Kenaston

Every generation is raised by survivors, the walking wounded of the generation that came before. The Americans who survived the Civil War lost over 600,000 soldiers in battle or to disease, with untold numbers who were maimed and left to raise the next generation. 

We wonder whether the conflicts of the time could have been resolved in better ways, and where hearts might have been changed. But hearts were not changed, and children were taught to subvert the wishes of the war’s victors. The resulting Jim Crow laws treated people of color as second-class citizens for 100 years.

The generation that survived World War I was wounded as well. Traumatized by the war itself, and were also badly hit by the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918. Russians of that generation experienced the trauma of revolution. Africans and Asians were traumatized by colonialism’s continued reach, while the black minority of the American south continued to suffer under oppressive Jim Crow laws. Their generation of walking wounded, people with deep psychological scars, raised the generation that fought the battles of World War II and the Korean War.

In America we think of that next generation as our “greatest generation.” They had survived the Great Depression, only to offer themselves as a sacrifice for our political freedoms. In raising their children, “the Baby Boomers,” their hope was to protect us from the horrors they had known. White “Boomers” were thus generally privileged, though we, too, would experience times of vexation and trauma. We lived through the fears of the Cold War and the societal convulsions of the war in Vietnam. 

Black and White Americans fought the battles of the Civil Rights movement, against each other in many cases at first, though increasingly together against intransigent whites in power. Most jarring to many of us, however, were the JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinations. 

These were Boomers’ public traumas. Beyond that, many Boomers experienced the personal tragedy of being raised in a broken home, a common result of the sexual revolution. Wounded ourselves, we increasingly repeated this cycle, and to the hurt of our own children.

Last month marked the twentieth anniversary of September 11, 2001. We can now see a generation of children raised by the walking wounded of that tragic day. How well have we taught this generation to cope with the traumas of our present time? Not well at all.

Building upon the sexual revolution, we have taught them to think of each other as sexual objects, and to define their own personhood in terms of sexual appetites.  

We have saddled them with debt that no one could possibly pay, debt that will seriously hamper their ability to address the full range of other challenges we will bequeath to them.

We have cultivated crippling dependence among many, teaching total avoidance of risk and complete, lifelong dependence on government as the greatest of hopes they should aspire to.

Our greatest disservice to them and to ourselves, however, has been in teaching ourselves to forsake the values of past generations. We have made partisan politics into each person’s religion of choice. With no transcendent values to guide us, we are left only with assertions of power and personal will. We have become more tribal. We have even enshrined each individual as a “tribe” of one.

Can we repent of this path we have forged? What redemptive models can we turn to? Can those who overcame the horrors of the past guide us again?

Over the past century we have seen heroic examples of wounded souls overcoming unspeakable trauma. The 1994 Rwandan genocide added an exclamation point to a century of atrocities. Sadly, the best of our generation turned a blind eye to the killing of more than 800,000 Rwandans within 100 days, a horror that left untold others physically and psychologically maimed. How has a generation of Rwanda’s walking wounded raised their next generation of citizens?

The genocide’s survivors have raised a generation roughly contemporary with American teens and young adults of today.

Countless stories of forgiveness and redemption that have grown out of the tragic events of 1994. One such account is found in Will Ferguson’s book, Road Trip Rwanda: A Journey into the New Heart of Africa. Ferguson tells the story of Jean-Claude Munyezamu and his life journey as a genocide survivor. Here are two snapshots from the book:

“[Jean-Claude] had once asked me to help him update his resume, and I’d counted no fewer than nine different volunteer organizations he was involved with, everything from homeless shelters to youth-at-risk outreach programs to soccer camps for underprivileged children…

“Jean-Claude looked at me... and he said, ‘It kind of haunts you, being alive. You always ask yourself why. Why me, why did I make it out, when so many others did not? Was this luck? Only that? I was a nineteen-year-old kid. It didn’t matter if I lived or not. I didn’t have children then, or a wife, or anybody who depended on me. There were people who were doctors… who were teachers, who had families, who had something to contribute. And they all died. Why them and not me?’

“...He stood a moment at the threshold [of the gate] and then said, ‘I guess I feel I owe something, that I need to give back somehow. Otherwise, what was the point of it?... ‘I think about that,’ he said. ‘I think about it all the time.’” 

Survivors who were close to the events of September 11, 2001 may share these sentiments, as may a generation of Afghan refugees to America, once they are properly vetted and settled into their new communities. 

As for the children of those who had victimized others, Ferguson leaves us with this:

“I looked at the children crowding in around us, and I turned to Jean-Claude. ‘You know, a lot of these kids [are] the children of murderers.’

 

“He nodded. ‘That’s true. Many of the parents killed people in the genocide. But their children did not.’

 

“It’s a fine line, isn’t it, between honoring the past and reaching out for a better future, between fixating and forgiving. It would be so easy to succumb to bitterness. Or to rush forward into selective amnesia, to pretend none of it ever happened, to wish the past away... 

Rwanda has experienced unusual forgiveness, and therefore unusual healing. Among its reforms was to discard first and second-class citizenship. Whether previously of the Hutu, Tutsi or Twa tribes, all are Rwandans now. Not surprisingly, Rwanda refuses to issue COVID-19 passports. They are all Rwandans, whether vaccinated or not. There are no second-class citizens.

Rwandans also work at community-building. On the last Saturday morning of each month, every able-bodied citizen between the ages of 18 and 65 is required to participate in some form of community service. Americans might consider basing similar efforts within local communities. Rwanda is about a fourth the size of Ohio. Perhaps local initiatives would help us return to our country’s founding principle of limiting centralized power.

As we find our way through our current difficulties and traumas, perhaps we can apply positive lessons from this and the other good examples we find among us, both within recent memory and among those who have learned how to overcome. We owe it to the next generation to provide redemptive models, and to live as positive examples ourselves, offering them a basis for solid hope for their future.

[Articles by others here.]