< PREVIOUS ] [ 1993 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Otto Mears, Pathfinder of the San Juan, once held heroic status because he established toll roads, railroads, grist mills, newspapers and similar accouterments of civilization in southwestern Colorado.
Such deeds are not esteemed in these revisionist times, for they lead to the irreparable loss of pristine wilderness. Mears was also among the few whites who could speak Ute. This allowed him to negotiate the Brunot Treaty of 1873, which pushed the Nuche out of their ancestral homeland on the Western Slope.
(When I lived there, though, we thought that this was one time Indians came out ahead on a land deal. The Utes got 25,000 pre-inflation gold dollars, and we got frostbite, mosquitoes, skiers and the Denver Water Board. We wondered how much we'd have to pay the Utes to take back the Western Slope.)
By the standards of the time, though, Mears lived a productive life before he died in 1931 at age 91. However, this seems impossible in light of what we now know about Childhood Trauma.
Born in Russia in 1840, Otto was orphaned at age 3 and soon sent to on relatives in New York. When he was 10, they forwarded him to an uncle in San Francisco, via the deadly Isthmus of Panama. The uncle never showed up -- Otto made his way by hawking newspapers along the Barbary Coast.
Orphaned, neglected, forced to cope with companions dying of typhus and malaria in Panama, abandoned, exposed to frequent murders and every vice in the tenderloin of a wicked port -- with such an overload of childhood trauma, it seems miraculous that Otto Mears didn't become a cannibal, or at least a serial killer.
No grief counselors, no trauma therapists, no child-advocate caseworkers, no truant officers, no nurturing, caring, supportive environment -- how did he ever manage to get dressed in the morning, let alone build a railroading empire and enjoy a happy marriage for 50 years?
Nor is Mears unique. We've all read biographies of people who succeeded despite abusive parents, war-torn childhoods, family death camps and other horrors that should have left permanent scars on the inner child and created a permanently dysfunctional personality.
Childhood Trauma is apparently another proof of Quillen's Law of Commercial Success: The way to prosper in America is to invent a disease and sell the cure.
A generation ago, there was no Childhood Trauma. It was just assumed that everybody got some rotten breaks, and you were supposed to get over them and go on.
Thanks to the recent invention of Childhood Trauma, though, you won't recover from something as banal as witnessing an auto accident unless there's an expensive therapist at hand within of this traumatizing incident, and even with prompt treatment, you may never fully recover.
Poor children go hungry. Children die daily from drive-by shootings. Family-value Republicans believe corporate profits are more important than enabling parents to spend time with their children. The potent Gray Lobby insures that we spend much more on geezer comfort than to build a future. Our drug industry fights against universal childhood immunization.
However, whenever a bus crashes or a madman sprays bullets on a playground, we always find the money to rush in a brigade of therapists and counselors to the survivors to treat their Childhood Trauma.
These priorities seem peculiar to me, but of course, I might well feel differently if I shared in the profits of the Therapy Industry.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1993 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >