This is by way of pointing to the unidentified, every day traumas that we routinely experience as an integral aspect of the culture in which we live. I was once asked what I thought the most common unidentified trauma in American society was. I didn't have a ready answer, but the questioner suggested that it was medical trauma. You know, those routine and not-so-routine medical and dental procedures that we've all experienced throughout our lives. Those assaults to the body-mind that we're not supposed to be bothered by. (The one that comes immediately to my mind as one of the most disturbing medical traumas that I've experienced in the last few years is a prostate biopsy. When I asked the urologist who would perform the procedure if it would be painful, he said no, it wouldn't be any worse than a rubber band snapped on your wrist. Why then was I unable to sit up on the table when the chipper nurse assistant said "You can get up now"?. My reply was "No, I can't").
Having a tooth pulled or a cavity filled. Any surgery. Pokings and proddings of one kind or another. "Screenings" of various kinds. Of course, there are any number of other, non-medical every day traumas that we live with. I might suggest that even the very pace of life in the modern industrialized/digitized/cyberized world is itself traumatic. Have you ever stopped to think about the effects on your body-mind-spirit of driving your box of metal on the high speed freeways? We simply assume that this is somehow "healthy". But what kinds of psychic, mental, physical, emotional and spiritual adaptations are required in order to be able to do this regularly? And is it possible that at least some of these adaptations can be understood as traumatic? I would say yes.
This doesn't get close to the nature of intimate family relations, for example, which, given our cultural values and priorities, tend strongly, in my opinion, toward being abusive, neglectful, injurious, and, yes, traumatic. Yet we take this all for granted. We assume that our cultural mores are healthy. After all, isn't this the land of the free and the home of the brave? Isn't America (for example; the kinds of things I'm talking about seem to be at least somewhat universal) the best country on the planet? Isn't it the land of opportunity; the destination of the planet's disenfranchised, poverty stricken, sick, rejected and oppressed? And as the entire world has become Americanized, as our culture has become the model of desirability for the rest of the world ("The American way of life MUST be preserved!", we were told by our illustrious Secretary of Defense upon the impending invasion of Iraq), as the levels of industrial and consumer waste and environmental destruction have grown exponentially around the world, as the levels of air, water, and atmospheric pollution have risen to planet-obliterating proportions, are we still willing to assume that our "norms" are healthy?
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