“The U.S. city with the most unpredictable weather is Rapid City, South Dakota.”
I always hear “Rapid City, South Dakota” in the incredulous tones of Cary Grant’s character in North by Northwest.
When calibrated for winter and early spring (or for precipitation in general), the Houston area deserves a higher unpredictability rating. During the five years I lived there, I quickly learned that while late spring to early fall heat and humidity were a given, there otherwise was no “average” weather, just a wild vacillation between extremes.
Tom Lehrer bragged about his erstwhile home in “Dixie”:
Won’t ya come back home to Alabammy Back to the arms of my dear ol’ Mammy, Her cookin’s lousy and her hands are clammy, But what the hell, it’s home.
Yep. I remember my wife (from Buffalo) looking at me when I was like “holy shit, we’re getting like two feet of snow this weekend!” a few years ago (2015, 20-odd inches officially and fifth-largest snowfall in Chicago history) and acting like “oh, that’s just another Wednesday in January for us. Wake me when we get real snow.” Not her words, but her attitude. I mean, fair enough – they got like 4 feet of lake effect yesterday or the day before.
I’ve been in rehab groups, where a bunch of drunks/druggies can easily go from lamenting the depth of their addiction (“I couldn’t imagine getting off drugs”) to bragging about how extreme their use got (“I could buy an 8 ball and need another one the next night. As soon as my dealer got in more, he’d call me because he knew I was up for it. I would deposit my check and immediately take $500 in cash and then not sleep for 3 days”)
I’ve heard the same amongst victims of abuse. Sometimes their recollections get lurid, almost like war stories. I’ve heard people talk about depraved conduct, from people who were just awful towards them, and there’s almost perceived some level of pride in having done it and survived. I don’t know if there’s some survivor instinct at play, but it does seem to be some way of responding to, or coping with, being victimized.
One common characteristic of PTSD is to vacillate from extreme avoidance of anything related to the trauma to obsession with the details. And a lot of people maybe didn’t get the validation from the right person so they seek it everywhere else. I’ve been through it and even occasionally still struggle with it. But it doesn’t make it any less annoying. And I think culturally it has become an unproductive, unhealthy norm. I think many people get stuck in that victimhood frame of mind and they aren’t presented with many alternatives. In a healthy paradigm, recognizing the horror of the abuse would be an early stage of recovery and you’d eventually get somewhere more accepting and not exactly downplaying, but integrating and contextualizing what happened. But I think a lot of people these days get stuck in the early stage.
I married into a rough family, (divorced that spouse a long time ago), whose members loved to tell tales of all the ass kicking and drunken brawls they enjoyed. One of the uncles was given the greatest respect for yanking a phone out of the wall of one of their more “high class” relatives (he was drunk, of course.) No one thought he was wrong, after all, those relatives had money and could get it repaired, plus the uncle was certain he sent them a “message”, that they weren’t too good for their roots.
Wow. That just goes to show how really terrible the Holocaust was. Even with this at work, and the general Jewish cultural tendency to “one-up” someone’s misery, Holocaust victims tended to be very close-lipped about everything.
Even among one another, without others present, they didn’t talk about it much (my cousins and I used to listen at the heating vents). They called it the “Death times,” or the “Great murders,” or the Yiddish equivalent. And rarely talked about it; mainly to say that something was “before” or “after.”
I think it can also be influenced by cultural expectations as well. Not too long ago, people in the US never talked about their abuse, they just accepted/perceived it as normal, or in the very least felt that talking about it was worse than disrupting the familial status quo. I think in recent times – and I’m reaching here, but perhaps due to a couple of landmark psychological books on the subject, such as the controversial book The Courage to Heal, it pushed the idea of abuse, particularly the abuse of girls, into the forefront of the public consciousness. Which isn’t to say that it’s handled well when it happens… we still have issues as a society with minimizing abuse when it occurs, shaming victims, etc. But at the same time, there are many more people talking openly about childhood abuse (and everything else) than we have ever had before.
But yes, the Holocaust was really, really awful. I don’t know what cultural expectations Jewish people have around sharing trauma in general, or how that informs it, but it’s hard for me to imagine a worse trauma than what survivors endured.
I met a survivor who related every last horrific detail of his ordeal with the addendum that his faith requires him to “bear witness” to what occurred.
I can’t say what other people should do, but I am grateful some people have thought to put down their experiences of the Holocaust (or being children of survivors) such as Viktor Frankl, Elie Wiesel and Art Spiegelman, because I’ve gotten a lot out of learning how people process and come to terms with such trauma. I believe it’s made a positive impact for many people to see those examples.
One of the remarkable things about MAUS is the matter-of-fact way it is told.
That is what is remarkable generally about the Holocaust in conversation. People who can complain for hours about their gout, or the guy who cut them off in traffic, or go on like the coffee bar being out of Splenda is the worst thing in the world, talk about the Holocaust like they are reciting their ABCs.
I wonder if maybe the banter around how awful such-and-such a thing is, that is part of people socializing belongs to us, and if we talked about the Holocaust that way, we’d be “letting it in” to a place it doesn’t deserve to be. Does that make sense? And that’s just my surmise-- I was born in 1967. Old enough to know lots of survivors, but too young to have it touch my own life.
We once had a retired service dog-- wheelchair, so she was a very big dog-- a Giant Schnauzer. She was also very well-behaved, so in her retirement, we took her to some preschools and Kindergartens to teach kids about dog-safety, and that dogs can have jobs.
When we brought her to one place, a 2-yr-old walked up, pointed to her, and said very seriously to the other kids “NO RIDE!”
Yes, I do think it makes sense. And maybe a lot of the petty complaining is a kind of sublimated way to address the injustice they were dealt in the Holocaust. They may not be able to articulate that horror but it could lead to a pervasive sense that life is just not fair.
