The Lingering Trauma Of Mob Violence

FOR ME, FURY has a face. In 1999, I sat in a refugee camp with Kosovar families. They had been driven from their homes ahead of attacking Serb crowds aroused to violence by the cruel and charismatic oratory of then-president Slobodan Milosevic.

Thirty-year-old Hajrija thrust forward this question: “How can I live with this pain that our neighbors who we shared our bread with, who my husband shoveled snow from her walk even before he cleared our own ... asked aloud, in our yard while I was hanging my laundry, how she was going to kill me and my children? She was trying to decide between mortar or sniper. How can I go back and live with this person?” Hajrija was incandescent with fury.

On Jan. 6 this year, I saw the other side of Hajrija’s story—the spectacle of an attacking crowd. Several thousand gathered in front of the White House under the sway of another cruel and charismatic president. Like all such leaders, he deceived the crowd by saying their sacred rights had been stolen; that the enemy wants to “indoctrinate” their children; that if they did not act, the enemy would “illegally take over our country.” He loaded the crowd, aimed them at Congress—then gave the command.

In Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti’s psychological study of mob violence, he explains that when a man gives a death-laden command to a crowd, “the anxiety of command increases in him until it results in catastrophe. But before catastrophe overtakes him it will have engulfed innumerable others.”

In the videos of that crowd’s catastrophic attack on the U.S. Capitol, they howl to “hang Mike Pence” with scaffold and noose at the ready; a man’s voice sings a sinister tune to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, “Where are you, Nancy?” as a predator might lure a vulnerable child. The faces in the crowd hold a series of emotions: expectation, freedom, satisfaction, confusion, religious ecstasy.

We watched the crowd press in on its victims: Screams from an officer pinned in a door. The peculiarly American nightmare of Eugene Goodman’s aloneness with white men on his heels. Voices whispering into cell phones for help. Five people died. Two more died by suicide in the days following. More than 140 police officers were injured.

Then there’s all that the cameras don’t capture about the survivors. Nightmares and nausea, constant pacing and prolonged motionlessness, an inability to focus, exhaustion and insomnia, an unrelenting premonition of danger. In other words: their trauma.

Jean-Baptiste Talla, a Catholic Relief Services’ adviser who specializes in building social cohesion in divided communities, told me that following an event like the Jan. 6 attack, painful memory and the dangers of a single narrative keep people afraid of others. They have wounds to the soul and psyche.

In the social cohesion practices Talla leads around the world, he says they prefer to talk about “trauma awareness” rather than “trauma healing” because all community members are affected by violent attacks and need a community approach rather than individual psychological aid. The individual and community must be aware of how trauma is behaving as they work to overcome their fear, rebuild trust, restore channels of communication, and eventually learn to dream again together.

Fury, like that of Hajrija or survivors of the Capitol attack, can be tempered into courage and the will to survive. But without a practice to manage trauma, develop shared safety, and implement change, fury may simply burn a person or community to the ground.

In the absence of any satisfying conclusion to this unfolding story, I turn in hope to poet Amanda Gorman: “We ignite not in the light, but in lack thereof, / For it is in loss that we truly learn to love. / In this chaos, we will discover clarity. / In suffering, we must find solidarity.”