Hope and Moral Repair

[The following is an excerpt from Dr. Julie Ponesse’s book, Our Last Innocent Moment.]

We’ve got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other’s only hope. 

—James Baldwin, A Rap on Race

Let’s begin with a story I received from a friend, who I’ll call “Beth.” I asked how she is feeling now that we have emerged from the intensity of the COVID crisis. This is what she wrote. She called her story “Mourning.”

In fall of 2021, I issued an invitation to a friend to set up a play date between our seven-year-old daughters. We were family friends. Our children had grown up together, and hers was a perspective that I respected and appreciated. At the time, my family had recently recovered from Covid and I was hoping to reconnect. The reply I got was this: “We are choosing not to see the children of parents who have chosen not to be vaccinated. Maybe I will feel differently later.”

I know now and knew then that it was an extraordinary moment of fear and endeavour to at least understand her decision at that time, but the fact remains, my children were overtly “othered” and excluded by someone I knew and valued. That was an unprecedented and pivotal moment for me and one I am still processing. Of course, this came at a time when my children were also excluded from sports and restaurants and birthday parties and family events—all of which were painfully unjust and, if I’m honest, I have still not come to terms with. But, of all the things that transpired at that time, the one that kept me up at night is that message from my friend. 

Unfortunately, mine is not an extraordinary story and not the worst of the ‘othering’ and excluding that ran rampant at that time. There are those that lost jobs, intimate relationships, businesses, endured financial hardship, faced coercion and injury, and those whose reputations were scourged. The ugly list goes on and on. 

The loss of any of these things, never mind several of them, has myself and others still in a state of evolving mourning, and, in our ways, we have moved on, but some of it still lingers. The most poignant and lasting mourning seems to be that of our faith in the goodness of human nature. 

When the World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, our lives changed in an instant. Apart from anything it did to our bodies, our economy, or our ways of creating and enforcing social policy, we started to organize ourselves into adversaries on one side or the other of a high-stakes civil war. We quickly learned how to identify the enemy, and we complied and virtue-signalled our way into the social positions we thought would best protect us.

We were hurt by being lied to, of course, and by being silenced and shut out. But the far deeper wounds are the ones done to our capacities as moral beings — our ability to see and empathize with each other, to think critically about how to treat each other, to act with confidence, courage, and integrity, and to approach the future and each other with hope. It became clear, as each day passed, how toughening ourselves for this war created a kind of moral scar tissue in the way courser, less sensitive skin replaces normal skin after physical injury. 

Here, I want to focus on how moral injury — a specific kind of trauma that arises when people face situations that deeply violate their conscience or threaten their core moral values — became the invisible epidemic of the COVID era, how we became each others’ victims, and how we might begin to repair these injuries.

What Is Moral Injury?

Back to Beth for a minute. 

Beth’s story is remarkable but not, unfortunately, at all uncommon. In fact, it is barely distinguishable from those contained in thousands of emails I have received from people, near and far, with messages of loss, desperation, support, even hope. But its ubiquitousness doesn’t humanize it. It’s a story of exclusion and abandonment. And it’s a story of how all these things changed her to her core. 

Beth has been devoted to the freedom cause from the start, working with a prominent Canadian medical freedom organization for almost three years. We live provinces apart and have never met but I would say we have become close. She is a mother who had to navigate her children’s experiences through the school system, a writer who tries to organize, in words, the harrowing journey we are on, and a friend who knows the wounds of betrayal.

Beth’s story made me think about how the challenges of the last three years have shaped us as moral beings. Believing we were treated with lower priority because of our vaccine status, being told that our choices are unacceptable, and generally being hated, ignored, and abandoned don’t just impact us psychologically; they wound us, morally. Think of what it does to your ability to stand up for yourself when you are repeatedly shut down, or your ability to empathize when you realize that your loved ones would be quite happy to move on without you. What reasons do you have to speak again, to trust, or to have faith in humanity? What reasons could you have?

I noticed some significant interior juggling going on in myself over the last three years. Losing professional relationships I had built over 20 years, being shamed by people I deeply respected, and feeling a growing lack of kinship with fellow citizens who felt more like strangers than neighbours all ‘left a mark.’ 

These days, though no less committed to my beliefs, I feel morally weary. I find it harder than I did to be trusting and tolerant. I have, more than once, walked out of a store because the shopkeeper invaded my privacy a little too much. I have lost the patience to draw clear but reasonable boundaries. My moral resources have been worn down or at least marshalled for other, more important tasks, and when I feel them being called upon for something trivial, I resent it and retreat. My default response these days is to recoil to a safe space. If tolerance is a virtue, then in some ways I have become less virtuous. In other ways, I am much braver but that has created a certain hardening as well. When I joined the organization I work for now, I told the founder that I was entering into it in a state of distrust not because of anything he did that warranted it but simply because that has become my moral reflex.  

Ethicists refer to these ways of being harmed as “moral injury.” The term emerged in the context of studying soldiers returning from war who bore the deep psychological scars of conflict, often called “the war after the war.” But it came to be used more broadly to capture the moral effects of other traumatic events including rape, torture, and genocide. Though the idea is not new — Plato discussed the harmful effects of acting unjustly on the soul in the 5th c. BC — it was first officially defined by clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay in 1994 as the moral effects of a “betrayal of ‘what’s right’.” Moral injury is a wound to our conscience or moral compass when we witness, perpetrate, or fail to prevent acts that transgress our moral values. It is a “a deep soul wound” that erodes our character and our relationship to the greater moral community.

Moral injury is not just egregious harm; it is the way in which a person is harmed that matters. It’s not just being unseen but the way being unseen converts to feelings of shame, self-doubt, and cynicism, and how these create new topographies of character, transforming who we are as moral beings and our ability to do what is right in the future. 

One of the reasons moral injuries are so personal is that they denigrate the moral standing of the victim while simultaneously elevating the moral standing of the perpetrator. We don’t just suffer but we have to witness the elevation of the person who hurt us because they hurt us. When Beth’s friend shamed her, her friend not only excluded her from a social activity; she did it (consciously or not) to demonstrate her moral superiority, her solidarity with the pure and inviolate. 

Think of all the ways we have denigrated each other over the last three years, how in big and little ways we diminished each other in order to aggrandize ourselves: by failing to listen, by shunning and shaming, by blaming and casting out, by calling a loved one “crazy,” “fringe” or “conspiratorial.”

At the end of her story, Beth elaborates on the hurt she felt that is a sign of her moral injury: 

It wasn’t the loss of a job, it was that our colleagues turned their backs. It wasn’t my son being excluded from soccer, it was my sister insisting it was justified, and the familiar face who demanded medical information at the door of the local sports centre. It wasn’t a lone politician calling names, it was our institutions and neighbours parroting the same, dehumanizing segments of the population. And, quite frankly, it was the people that support and continue to support those who would strip us of our humanity in divisive rhetoric. It was Christmas, weddings, family members, classmates, and communities. The things closest to our humanity. These things are still raw, the things we mourn to this day–the knowledge that when the cards were down, our institutions, our colleagues, and our friends would abandon reason and principle and the heart of human connection and cast us aside directly.

“We are choosing not to see the children of parents who have chosen not to be vaccinated…” wrote Beth of her friend’s justification for canceling their playdate. 

“choosing not to see…” 

This short, seemingly harmless justification is a token of the type of cancellation that became the norm over the last three years. Even the strongest bonds going into 2020 — those of long-time colleagues, dearest friends, parents and children — were dexterously severed with the unquestionable, seemingly innocuous justification that we were simply “keeping people safe.”

What Did We Expect?

To understand why we are so able to cause these deep moral wounds, it is helpful first to understand that morality is, at its core, relational, whether you are dealing with the relationship you have with another person, with society generally, or even just with yourself. As ethicist Margaret Urban Walker explains, “Morality is the study of us as beings capable of entering into, sustaining, damaging, and repairing such relations.” 

It is also helpful to understand the normative expectations we have that make relationships possible in the first place. Normative expectations are, broadly speaking, expectations about what people will do combined with expectations about what they should do. When we place trust in our doctor, for example, we have a predictive expectation that he has the skills to protect us (to the degree that is possible) and the normative expectation that he should do so. Betraying this trust by failing to disclose information about a treatment’s possible harm would breach this expectation. We have a similar expectation that things we share in confidence with friends will not be traded for any amount of social currency, and that we will treat each other with respect through our differences. 

What makes relationships possible is that we set the right expectations, and that we trust ourselves and others to honour them. These expectations set the parameters for acceptable behaviour, and keep us responsive and responsible to each other. It is precisely these expectations that the COVID narrative demanded we breach.

Much has been written about the harm compliant health care workers did during COVID and also about the psychological costs of doing what one believes to be harmful. I don’t think it would be an overstatement to say that, in Canada today, nearly every health care professional who is still employed breached their obligations to patients and colleagues because of what the COVID response required of them. To put it in simple, albeit horrifying, terms, if your doctor still has his or her license, then you are likely being treated by someone who has egregiously broken the Hippocratic Oath and every major modern bioethics and professional code of practice.

I often think of the doctors and nurses who were ironically and cruelly asked to spend their days doing the very things that drew them to their profession in the first place. And I think of the costs to dissenting physicians like Dr. Patrick Phillips and Dr. Crystal Luchkiw: shaming, the loss of income and professional relationships, the inability to practice, etc. The week I am writing this chapter, Dr. Mark Trozzi is set to have his disciplinary hearing with the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons, and is quite likely to lose his licence to practice medicine. But, as unjust as these costs are, they pale in comparison to the loss of integrity that comes from doing what you believe to be wrong. Drs Phillip and Luchkiw and Trozzi can, at the very least, lie their heads on their pillows at night knowing that they did only what their consciences would allow.

It’s helpful to remember that being pressured to do what we know to be wrong and being prevented from doing what we know to be right morally injures not just the victim but the perpetrator as well. Betraying a loved one doesn’t just hurt her; it also means the loss, to you, of the person you were in the relationship with, and it can turn you into a morally callous person, more generally.

Interestingly, we don’t always know what our normative expectations of others are until they are violated. We may not have realized how important it is to be able to trust a doctor until that trust was broken, or how much we expected our friends to be loyal until they betrayed us. A key part of the COVID narrative is that friendship, marriage, sisterhood no longer matter if your loved one’s behaviour is ‘unacceptable.’ And if it is, then dissolving these relationships is morally justified, even heroic.

Creativity and Openness

One of the deepest moral injuries we experienced over the last three years was to our capacities for creativity and openness. To illustrate this point, consider this story a close friend relayed to me about a discussion she had with her husband over trying to decide what book to listen to on a road trip. She writes:

I suggested a book on musical creativity — and pre-pandemic he may have wanted to hear more than one. But, post-pandemic he’s not up for the challenges the book might inspire. He wants easy listening, comedy, simple ideas. He said that he is recognizing in himself that the pandemic stifled his ability for openness to novel thoughts and creativity.

You might think that the loss of creativity and openness, though regrettable, have little to do with who we are as moral beings. But they are surprisingly relevant. Creativity makes possible “moral imagination,” helping us to creatively imagine the full range of options while making moral decisions and to think about what affects our actions might have on other people. It also helps us to imagine what a more just world looks like and to envision how we might bring it about. And it helps us to be empathetic. To imagine is to form a mental image of what doesn’t exist. It is to believe, to picture, to dream. It is both idea and ideal. As the poet Percy Shelley wrote, “The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.”

I suspect that my own loss of tolerance and patience has a loss of creativity and openness at its core. Creativity takes energy and openness takes a certain amount of optimism. In some ways, it’s easier just to defect from the moral work relationships require than it is to figure out how to remain open in a hostile environment. I recently went on a little writing trip to an area with a small island surrounded by rocky shoals and inhabited only by a few residents and a sheep farm. I imagined, for a moment, migrating there, the isolation and the unnavigable shoals protecting me from the intrusions of the world.

It is understandable that I would want to just give up on people these days. It feels safer, less burdensome somehow. But giving up isn’t really an option because it makes us lose out not only on the value relationships bring to our lives but on our ability to be fit for them. It is to give up on our own humanity. As James Baldwin said in his conversation on race with Margaret Mead, “We’ve got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other’s only hope.” 

Double Trauma

One of the things that struck me most about the last few years, as a former ethics professor, is just how different ethics is in practice from teaching it in the classroom or reading about it in an academic journal. It is so much messier, and so much more dependent on emotions and various pressures related to survival than I ever realized. 

Every speech I’ve given over the last few years, the moment when the tears well up is when I start thinking about our children. Children who are 6 years old now who lost an unfathomable half of their lives due to COVID, children who were born into a world of masks and mandates, children who lost out on the opportunity to experience normal social interactions. It will no doubt be a very long time before we know what the true costs of those losses will be. It has been said that children are resilient but, of course, innocence is only so buoyant. We will never know what these childhoods would have been like, or what their futures could have been, or how our world will change on account of these things, if the last three years had been different. And it haunts me to think of the power adults have over their lives when we are so lost ourselves.

What makes all of this injury so much worse is that it largely goes unseen (or unacknowledged). On Monday, April 24, 2023, Prime Minister Trudeau told a crowded room of University of Ottawa students that he never forced anyone to get vaccinated. In that moment, four years of moral injury was compounded. Not only did we suffer the moral harms of a society divided and the personal injury done to those who were vaccinated under coercion or even against their will (in the case of some children, elderly and mentally infirm), but now we must undergo the harm of one of the perpetrators denying that it ever happened, which creates a “double trauma.” While we are still processing and grieving the harms of the last three years, now we must process and grieve their denial.

For some, that processing involves self-doubt. Did I just imagine what happened over the last four years? Was my job really at risk? Was travel really restricted? Are the shots really harming people or am I being unduly suspicious? Going forward, can I trust myself? Or should I trust authorities more?   

This is what gaslighting does. It is wholly destabilizing, undercutting our belief in our own abilities to see a situation for what it is. Gaslighters confuse their victims into submission or into questioning their own sanity, or both. Victims of the COVID-19 narrative are not only victims of state-sanctioned physical and psychological abuse; they are also victims of the denial that any of it ever happened.

Moral Repair

At the end of her email to me, Beth elaborated on the residual feelings that linger for her after being closed out by her friend: 

Many months after the failed plans with my friend and her daughter, I ran into them at a park. We had fallen out of contact but made pleasant conversation while the girls played. I felt guarded in a way that I have never experienced, but we were able to connect over common interests and small talk. During the course of our conversation, she disclosed that she had recently come back from a holiday by plane and gotten Covid. I remarked something about always getting sick on the plane, to which she replied, “No, we were already sick when we got on the plane.” I knew then that that relationship could not be spared. That she would knowingly expose a plane load of people to the same illness for which she discriminated against my children was more cognitive dissonance than I could bear.

And the reality was that what she had done to my family and the things that had happened to us were completely invisible to her. 

Invisible. Still in this moment, perhaps especially in this moment, so many feel invisible. When the world finally kept turning, there were colleagues who never returned, apologies that were never uttered, disinvites that were long forgotten. There were revisionist accounts that “it was only privileges” that were suspended and occasionally flat-out denial of the discriminations that transpired. 

But most of all nothing. No acknowledgement, no amends, no promises that it would never happen again.

And for those still nursing deep wounds, a feeling of being completely invisible. 

COVID reminded us that the repertoire of ways we are able to hurt each other is vast and varied, from the horrors of a child dead from vaccine injury to the petty ways we virtue-signal our disgust at fellow shoppers to severing playdates with unacceptable offspring. COVID turned us into seasoned destroyers of others’ education, reputation, relationships and even self-worth. 

Where can we possibly go from there? What salve is there for these injuries to our souls?

The process of moving from a situation where harm has occurred — the moral injury — to a situation where some degree of stability in moral relations is regained is typically called “moral repair.” It’s a process of restoring trust and hope in relationships and in oneself. If we have violated the normative expectations that keep us responsive and responsible to each other, then how can we repair the damage? How can we make amends?

On a personal level, I don’t know if repair is possible with some of the relationships in my life. When my story broke in the Fall of 2021, far worse than losing my job or being shamed by the media was the shame that came from colleagues (e.g. “Shame on Julie Ponesse”) and even friends. When a pattern of respect and discussion and genuine inquiry is dismissed in a moment with the label “grifter,” or even “murderer,” is repair possible? Should you even want it? And when such distrust settles in, is it possible ever to be open again? I often wonder, how have I let fear and shaming and apathy change me, and how will the new person I am face and endure challenges (and triumphs) in the future?

There are two important things to keep in mind as we search for ways to repair our injuries. One is that, as research shows, wrongdoers rarely apologize for moral harms; in fact, apology is the exception to regular patterns of human conduct, not the rule. So morally repairing ourselves is, as a matter of fact, unlikely to begin with an apology by those who have injured us.

The other is that some injuries are so deep they may simply be “beyond repair.” Some victims of physical abuse can never hear a piece of music without thinking of their abuser. COVID may have revealed that the clash of values between partners makes their relationship unrepairable. And it has wiped from the face of the earth souls that will never walk it again. Their departure created breaks in family chains and social circles, voids where there ought to have been marriages and births and college graduations and big and little life projects and joys and sorrows. Some of the effects of our moral injuries are so deeply entrenched that they will simply be beyond repair.

Hoping for Hope 

On October 4, 1998, thousands in the Montreal area turned out for the unveiling of a monument called “Reparations,” the first structure to the Armenian Genocide to be erected in a public place in Canada. While most post-genocidal emotions sit firmly on the negative side of the register — shame, terror, despair, rage, vengefulness, cynicism — the monument’s creator, Arto Tchakmakdjian, said, somewhat surprisingly, that the meaning of the statue is hope. 

There is a lot of talk these days of rebuilding trust and of the importance of hope as a way forward after what we’ve been through. And for good reason. If relationships are largely about the confidence we have that those we trust are trustworthy, then we need to remain optimistic that they are deserving of that trust, and that our world will allow our expectations about the future to be played out. 

Walker, who has written extensively about repair in the aftermath of mass trauma, describes hope as “a desire that some perceived good come to realization; a belief that it is at least (even if barely) possible; and an alert openness to, absorption in, or an active pursuit of, the desired possibility.” Hope, she says, is essential for moral repair. 

Hope is a fascinating and paradoxical emotion. First and foremost, it requires induction, the belief that the future will roughly resemble the past. From the late Old English hopa, hope is a kind of “confidence in the future.” In order to hope, we need to believe that the future will in certain basic ways resemble the past; otherwise, it’s too hard to make sense of things. But hope also requires an element of uncertainty; if we are certain about what will happen, then we expect it, we don’t hope for it. Hope puts us in the precarious position of putting a great deal of emotional stock in something that is at least partly beyond our control. 

But this raises for us a variety of crippling questions:

• How can you maintain hope and trust in a world that continues to disappoint?
• How can you have confidence in others to meet expectations when they have so frequently defected from them? 
• How can you achieve unity with those you disagree with so profoundly? 
• How do you move on in a world in which you can no longer take it for granted that our core institutions are fundamentally trustworthy? 
• How can you try for moral repair when most deny that moral injury has occurred? 
• How can you start to heal when you aren’t sure the harm is over? 

As much as I want to feel hope in this moment, I don’t feel ready for it. Maybe I’m still too fragile. Maybe we all are. 

Whenever the government releases a new statement, my reflex thought is “Hmm, probably not.” And it doesn’t feel good to be that distrusting. I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and yet it feels safer to do so when the bathwater has proven itself so putrid. 

Hope feels like too much for right now. It feels disingenuous, presumptuous, or even cruel, like it’s interfering with a mourning process we should be left alone to have.

“Sitting in the L” 

When you have been hurt, it is natural to want to start bandaging your wounds right away, to “buck up” and move forward. When asked “How are you?,” how often do you say “okay” when the truth is that you are barely holding it together?

The scale of the COVID harms is so unfathomable that we find ourselves in an awkward middle ground between processing what has happened and figuring out what to do next. We are straddling the past and the future, mourning the loss of what could have been with the reality of what is now possible in the future. In the meantime, we are left with the messy feelings of loss seeping through the bandages we try in vain to wrap around our wounds. So, what can we do?

The 2nd century Roman emperor and Stoic Marcus Aurelius advised not to work too hard to distract ourselves from difficult feelings. The Stoics understood well that trying to cheat ourselves out of emotions like grief is a fool’s errand. Buying a new Stanley water cup, doom-scrolling, taking a vacation, or remaining within the boundaries of ‘proper’ conversation will drive them away for a while but they won’t fix what’s really broken in us. 

Instead of pushing ourselves to move on inauthentically, clinical psychologist Tara Brach suggests taking a “sacred pause” — suspending activity and tuning into our emotions — even in the midst of a fit of anger or sorrow. Psychotherapists and addiction recovery specialists call it “feeling the feelings” or “sitting in the L (loss).” Though our fast-paced world is largely intolerant of anything that causes us to slow and reflect, the idea is that, by suspending activity for a while, we can start to process what’s happened to us and move forward with greater clarity.

Telling Our Stories

Though it’s a bit trite to say, two undeniable truths are that we can’t control what others do and we can’t change the past. We can wish things were different, we can imagine that others have better intentions than they do, but we can’t ultimately control either. Sometimes we need to take up our own gauntlet and forge ahead in the absence of apology from those who harmed us. And sometimes we need to create hope for ourselves in a world that offers little reason for it.

The poet Maya Angelou, who lost the ability to speak for five years after being raped as a child, writes about how she cured herself of the cynicism it caused. Angelou says there is nothing quite so tragic as cynicism “because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.” But Angelou says she didn’t collapse under the weight of her cynicism. In those five years, she read and memorized every book she could get from the “white school library:” Shakespeare, Poe, Balzac, Kipling, Cullen and Dunbar. By reading the stories of others, she says she was able to create her own courage; she drew enough from the disappointments and triumphs of others to triumph herself. 

Recovery by reading the stories of others? It’s amazing how much moral power can exist in such a simple act. 

I remember vividly Highwire host Del Bigtree reading aloud an eloquent letter to the unvaccinated: “If Covid were a battlefield, it would still be warm with the bodies of the unvaccinated.” True, I remember thinking, but lying there alongside them would be the bodies of anyone who dared to question, who refused to outsource their thinking, who kept trudging through the darkness without a lantern to light the way.

Moral endurance is a big problem these days. Those who have been speaking out are growing tired, and we don’t even know what round of the fight we are in. Freedom fighters today are weary of endless Zoom calls and Substack articles rehearsing the mistakes of the last few years. Aren’t we just overstuffing the echo chamber? Will any of it really matter? With the injury of time, even the most devout can fall away, and what once seemed to be the noblest of goals can start to lose vividness in the haze of unrelenting attacks and competition for our attention.

I find myself thinking a lot these days about how history will remember us, how it will remember the doctors who allowed themselves to be controlled by the state, the public servants who ‘passed the buck,’ and those of us who keep ringing the bell of freedom even when it doesn’t resound. Will vindication ever come? Will balance ever be restored to the social order? Will the wounds of the last few years ever heal?

I don’t have satisfying answers to any of these questions. And I’m sorry for that. But one thing I do know is that the war we are fighting won’t be fought across the aisles of our parliaments, in our newspapers or in the boardrooms of Big Pharma. It will be fought between estranged sisters, between friends uninvited from Christmas gatherings, and between distanced spouses trying to see something vaguely familiar in the person sitting across from them at dinner. It will be fought as we struggle to protect our children and give our parents dignity in their last days. It will be fought in our souls. This is a war between the people, over whose lives matter, over what we are and can be, and over what sacrifices we expect each other to make.

Trish Wood, who moderated the Citizens’ Hearing at which Kelly-Sue Oberle testified, wrote that a week later she still felt shaken by the magnitude of what she heard: the stories of silenced doctors who tried to advocate for their patients, the stories of men and women whose lives were forever changed by vaccine injury and, most tragically, the stories of those like Dan Hartman whose teenage son died following mRNA vaccination. Trish wrote about the importance of telling these stories, of taking account. “Bearing witness,” she wrote, “is our power against the COVID cartel catastrophe.” 

Trish’s words are reminiscent of those of Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, at a time when the world was so broken and so eager for a new beginning, Wiesel saw it as his responsibility to speak for those who had been silenced. He wrote, “I believe firmly and profoundly that whoever listens to a witness becomes a witness, so those who hear us, those who read us must continue to bear witness for us. Until now, they’re doing it with us. At a certain point in time, they will do it for all of us.”

The lesson from Wood and Wiesel is that telling our stories is important, not just to set the record straight. It is a balm to our wounds. It’s hard to know what to do with the residue of chaotic and intense emotions post-trauma. One thing that trauma and moral injury and tragic flaws all have in common is that naming them gives you power over them. You cannot heal what you cannot name. Once you name your trauma, you might find the courage to share your experiences with others, or it might be in the sharing of your experiences that you are able to name it. Adam, in the creation story, makes this point salient; he named the animals and then he had dominion over them. 

The stories told at the Citizens’ Hearing (2022), the Public Order Emergency Commission (2022), and the National Citizens Inquiry (2023) help not just to rebalance the public record; they also reify suffering into language. These stories — “trauma narratives,” as Susan Brison calls them — help to create moral spaces for solidarity and connection and, ultimately, help to remake the self. They convert the experience of injury and isolation into a community of speakers and listeners helping us to feel, at the very least, that we are not uniquely victimized. And there is moral repair even in that.

This is probably why the Freedom Convoy was so successful. People were finally able to share their stories with a group of like-minded people who weren’t going to judge them for telling their stories out loud. That’s powerful. It’s like finally releasing toxins from your body, like a great purge of darkness. 

“Somebody, after all, had to make a start.”

On February 22, 1943, a 21 year-old German student named Sophie Scholl was convicted of high treason and condemned to death for distributing leaflets decrying Nazi crimes. She was executed by guillotine at 5 pm on the same day. 

During her trial, Sophie was recorded as saying: “Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare express themselves as we did.” 

Sophie’s words were a prelude to an era of repair that, in some sense, we are still living. I believe that the broken parts of us that made the atrocities of Nazi Germany both possible and deniable are still broken today. 

History offers countless examples — leprosy stigma, Jim Crow laws, and the Holocaust, to name only a few — of a compliant and demoralized people slowly dehumanized by the obsession to distance ourselves from each other. Yet we can’t seem to come to terms with the fact that we are living out yet again the moral weaknesses to which we have always been vulnerable.

Those who are doing the hard work of trying to bring attention to the unspeakable harms of the last four years might only be able to take the first few steps towards the repair we so badly need. And that repair will undoubtedly look different for each of us. For some, it will be a matter of fine-tuning a relatively efficient system. For others, it will look like retreat and recovery, and for others still it might require wholesale reinvention. Some will have to work to generate courage out of timidity, while others will need to reign in a frustrated and incendiary spirit. 

And we shouldn’t expect that any of this will happen quickly or easily. I think it will be a long time before the choir of humanity sings our praises, if it ever does.

It is all too easy, when in the middle of a crisis, to give up because it seems that we are failing, because it’s hard to see the big picture from your small little vantage point. But to fix what ails us, we don’t have to fix everything in one moment or one action…nor could we if we tried.

We only need to make a start.