I can think of a number of shocking events from my own personal history. The 9/11 attacks when I was in college, the pastor of our church cheating on his wife, the huge fire that swept through our neighborhood, the election of Donald Trump (by Conservatives and Christians, despite being in so many ways antithetical to the stated values of both). I think all of those were very traumatic events in different ways. There were many views of the world that were shaken by them. They upset a lot of people. “How could this happen? How do I make sense of this?” were thoughts that were on a lot of minds. The 9/11 attacks changed the view of the world for a lot of people. More fell than just the twin towers, and that’s the whole idea of terrorism. It’s not the acts that really matter, it’s their symbolic import, the fall of the idea of safety, the realization that there is someone out there who truly wishes malevolent harm upon you and is capable of doing it.

As for Steve, he had been a friend, leader, teacher, and inspiration to so many young people. The realization that he could throw all that aside and turn his back on it, when it was his words and his life that had convinced so many of the value of following it, that cut right to the heart as a challenge to their whole investment in their way of being. The fall of an exemplar, an ideal, is another symbolic fall. It shakes the foundations of certainty and security and meaning, just as the 9/11 attacks did.

The third event, the fire, was one of those shocking events when you suddenly realize that the world itself is dangerous and your position in it isn’t as safe and secure as you thought. We build a world of human construction and rules and safety around us. And then suddenly a wind sweeps up and the whole thing just goes up in flames. That’s pretty scary. With no warning, the fire came over the Ridge and right down into our neighborhood, and suddenly nothing was guaranteed. That our home or any of our possessions would survive, that I and my family were safe, that our world and our environment and our neighborhood were pleasant and stable and couldn’t suddenly we destroyed and altered forever. My told me afterward that just looking out her window and seeing the burning hillsides standing there raised her levels of stress. They were a thorn in his mind, a reminder of insecurity, of terror. I remember how her hands were shaking when we were packing and driving away, the tension in her voice.

The last event I mentioned hasn’t been explored much as a traumatic event, but for so many it was. Different people dealt with it differently, found different strategies to integrate it. But for a lot of Christians and conservatives, it was a real crisis. They never imagined such a possibility or choice. And it was a very harsh betrayal for many. Many women, especially, couldn’t reconcile themselves to Trump. Their shift is part of what flipped control of the House. A lot of them simply couldn’t integrate the idea of Christians supporting and justifying Trump, when he was so obviously, to them, the opposite of what they saw Christian values as representing. It was a betrayal, rather like a partner having an illicit affair. They suddenly found someone they trusted and valued conjoined to someone and something they simply couldn’t countenance, and that shook their whole belief system, because they had placed trust and belief in that partner. Trump is the mistress of American evangelicalism. And as a treasured mistress he has a lot of pull and influence. And it’s caused an untold amount of divorce.

My own argument before Trump was elected was a warning about the practical consequences of making such an alliance. Rather than gaining power, I saw it as a loss. Political power was not so valuable as the power of consistency and integrity, and sacrificing one for the sake of the other wouldn’t be a net gain. It was better, I thought, to accept that things had gone wrong and accept defeat and its consequences than to throw ourselves behind Trump and try to win on those terms.

But the conservative and evangelical establishment disagreed and eventually, despite their many previous objections, made peace with the idea and got behind Trump. There was, at the time, some idea that he could be changed ot improved or restrained. That once he was in office the reality of it would better him and tame him. That being surrounded by the recommended experts provided by the Republican establishment, all those generals, would educate and even redeem him. I remember my own sister speculating that for the first time Trump would actually be surrounded by some good people, and maybe they would change him and make him better. I wonder what she thinks now.

Many people simply couldn’t get behind Trump, and it shook their whole commitment to and belief in their party and their faith. I know from listening to a friend how hard it was for some people to even know how to interpret events, it seemed like such a betrayal of principle to so many who simply couldn’t adjust their view of Trump to accept acceptance of him as anything other than a betrayal of principle. I think a lot of people suddenly saw the conservative party and evangelicals who defended Trump very similar to a cheating spouse trying to justify their actions. And it made a lot of them walk away. If not entirely, then at least spiritually. It sent them looking for new relationships, new trustworthy people. For some Christians, it drove them right out of evangelicalism and into more liberal versions of the faith, whose recognition of the problem Trump represented was taken as a sign of good faith and integrity for their viewpoint. And so they gained many converts.

I observed all these events, and I also observed their effects on the people around me. The signs of trauma were everywhere. And yet, here is the curious thing. I wasn’t surprised by any of them. In fact, I wasn’t sure what everyone was getting so upset about. Didn’t they know the world was like this? Didn’t they know this was a possibility? Was their belief and their orientation in the world dependent on these sorts of things not happening? In each case I was disappointed, but unsurprised. These weren’t the sort of things you hoped would happen, but we’re certainly the sort of things that could and did happen. My belief in the world as I saw it didn’t depend upon those things not happening, so when they did I just dealt with it.

I now realize that this was a pretty odd way to behave. Did it means I was a pretty cynical bastard? That I was unwilling to commit myself to or invest myself in anything, and so I just didn’t feel much when it fell? Maybe. Some part of that is probably true. But I don’t think it’s the full truth. I was a Christian who had his own ideas about things and own reasons for believing them long before I ran into Steve. He was just a person, and it was nice if he also recognized some of the same things as being true as me, but their value in no way depended on him and his approval. So if he changed his orientation, what did that have to do with me or with the things he had believed?

I see now that that’s actually an oddly inhuman approach to life and belief most peopoe connect to ideas and ideals through a vision, a narrative. And they often find their way of touching and understanding and loving that narrative through the lives of individual people, through exemplars. Rabbis. Teachers. Gurus. Heroes. It makes the ideal tangible to them. It gives them a way to comprehend and love and pursue their ideal and their truth. That’s just how people orient themselves in the world. They need narratives, they need exemplars. I think that’s why the world needed the old and the new testament. I think that’s why they are what they are. People need pictures, stories, heroes to follow.

The fire was, perhaps, the easiest to excuse. I was surprised to learn that in a crisis I become unusually focused. I didn’t know that would happen. Everything seemed to slow down and I got terribly calm and focused, but energized. I felt able to do anything. I was sure that we were going to get out of the neighborhood, and nothing would be able to stop me. Even if the fire went right across our path, we would get through it. Maybe I’m a bit of a pessimist, because often I find it harder to believe that things will go right by chance rather than that they could go wrong by chance. Having witnessed my dad get into a lot of scrapes, and having a number myself, I had learned the lesson “It could happen to you; it might go wrong” that people with more careful and prepared parents who had built a wall of security around them never had occasion to learn.

I’m not sure that there is much moral or intellectual wisdom in such a viewpoint. Possibly it’s merely based on experience. If you’re not used to always being secure and having a plan and assuming that if you do the right things everything will always go well and be safe, then you won’t be surprised if things go suddenly wonky. If you assume or know from experience that the world is a chaotic and dangerous place where we navigate through uncertainties and nothing is guaranteed (a hard pill to swallow for a conscientious person whose strategy in life is dependent on the world being a safe and consistent investment that will securely store what you put into it), you won’t be shocked when it reveals its chaos. And I wasnt shocked. I never saw the world as nice or tame, never saw myself as nice or tame. I had a more integrated sense of aggression and realized that it was there for a reason, because there was $#!? to deal with.

The 9/11 attacks were one of the ones that puzzled me most at the time. I think that one confused me more than any of the others when it actually happened. My brother in law called me up that morning to tell me about it. He invited me to come over, so I did. Just when I arrived we saw the second plane hit. I was surprised to see such things happening, but it had never occurred to me that they couldn’t happen, or that people would be so upset about them happening. Maybe I’m not very sensitive or empathetic. But then I wouldn’t say that my brother in law or a lot of other people I knew were especially either. It was a very shocking act, particularly in a symbolic manner. What it represented. An attack on America as such. But as a human disaster, it wasn’t outside the scope of history. Far worse things have happened all throughout history all across the world. Even measured merely by the amount of death and destruction it caused, if it has been a natural disaster, it wouldn’t have been especially notable.

It took me a while to figure out what was so upsetting to everyone. The idea that anyone could do something so deliberately malevolent wasn’t a surprise to me. The fact that it could happen to America, that being us didn’t protect us from this sort of thing ever happening, didn’t surprise me either. But it did seem to surprise a lot of people. I had assumed that things like this (maybe not exactly like this, but similar) were always a risk, and it was only active vigilance that prevented them from occurring. And no amount of vigilance could always be perfectly protective. Some time, some day, you would collide with history and have to fight your way through. But almost everyone I knew seemed extremely shocked.

The election of Trump was something that came along more slowly than all these other events, whose reality was discovered quite suddenly. Trump, by contrast, went through a gradual journey of working his way up through the primary and eventually the election. So there was plenty of time to anticipate and speculate about the possible effects of his election.

As I see it, there are two possible explanations for why I reacted so differently from the vast majority of people around me in these situations. First, it’s possible that I am unusually psychologically well adjusted and stable and/or I have an unusually accurate and balanced idea of the world in my mind. So when shocking events came along and disrupted and disintegrated other people’s conceptions of reality and value, mine had already integrated these as possibilities and features of the world as it is and humanity as it is and so was able to accept them into my understanding of the world and humanity without blowing it to pieces. My mental map was accurate enough to what actually might be encountered and how to navigate it that it didn’t collapse my map when those things were encountered. The integrity of my worldview wasn’t dependent on those things not being encountered.

The second possibility is that I’m an unusually skeptical and cynical and pathological person who is unable to recognize the significance of events or feel a proper amount of human distress about them. I lack empathy, I take a dark view of the world, and the distress, danger, and suffering of others and the corruption or destruction of things I care about doesn’t move me much, possibly because I’m insuffieicntly invested in them and don’t really care.

Both of these are equally plausible explanations. I can’t discount either out of hand. Pride, vanity, humility, cowardice, fear, and guilt might make me want to preclude one or the other possibility. Possibly, it’s a bit of both. I think I have the capacity for both and am often struggling to figure out which extreme I’m going to inhabit.