I’ve been a lifelong fan of Edgar Allan Poe. I bought books about him (and by him) from a young age, fascinated by a person who expressed himself so beautifully in the face of trauma. Of a different era, and mindset, was Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone. Another childhood hero of whom I made the assumption of some trauma. One thing interesting about both of these influential writers is that relatives have written about them claiming that they weren’t as haunted as they seemed. I wonder, however, if they write such things because we still, we are still stigmatizing trauma. We’re great victim-blamers. Perhaps it’s because we want to distance ourselves from the scary forces at play. We fear that unhappy master, whom, in Poe’s words, “Unmerciful disaster followed fast and followed faster.” We don’t want to attract such things to ourselves.
Reflecting on my father recently—I didn’t know him well at all—I was thinking about his experience in the Korean War. I don’t know what happened to him there and I never had the opportunity to ask him about it. But I do believe that, like Rod Serling, he may have been traumatized by combat. War leaves trauma in its wake. Few, I suspect, come out of such situations without deep scars that haunt them the remainder of their lives. And still we fight. I knew, already at a young age, that I could never be a soldier. This despite growing up with G. I. Joe. Some of us spend our lives trying not to harm others. Trauma follows on from that since the world has its share of unmerciful disasters.
There are those who claim Poe wasn’t the experiencer of doom and gloom about which he wrote so eloquently. He lost those close to him to disease. Even now there are many stigmatized diseases. That’s one of the reasons employers are insistent that conditions suffered by employees not be revealed. Our whole medical privacy mindset plays into the stigmatizing those who face illness. Tuberculosis was only one of many widespread diseases during Poe’s life, and it’s still widespread in parts of the world because companies like Johnson & Johnson and Danaher price gouge the well-understood cures to maximize profits. And we blame the victims. I return to Poe at intervals in my life. I also watch episodes of The Twilight Zone. And I think of my father. There is trauma in the world, and some of it, at least, is preventable. We must stop blaming the victims.