Concept Garage

Since they are too terrible to utter aloud and to painful to reevaluate, ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Traumatic experiences however, refuse to be buried under the rags of consciousness and continue to resurface, unless they are properly remembered and truthfully told. Folk wisdom is filled with similar stories about Ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves unless their stories are told. The mind it seems can only be healed through the conscious and courageous pursuit of facing reality and reconciliation.

How are we then to face and transcend from our individual and collective trauma? How are we to gather our strength, to remember and reconstruct what has happened to our hopes and fears? Who did what to whom? When and how? And how does all this affect the life we are living today? Oh Boy! I know these questions are though, but they need to be answered if we are to reclaim sanity and unbiased trauma free judgment. It may be too much to ask for a political system full of ‘Ethnic laggards’ to address this systemic deadlock.

Obviously Trauma begets trauma, and this viscous cycle has been cascading in our culture for long. We have an unbelievable Ethnic government kidnapping, murdering and brutalizing the very people it is sworn to protect, but then again, our leaders 99% of them have been brutalized and tortured for their political opinion by the Derg regime and economically traumatized by abject poverty and material deprivation, by a stagnant medieval cattle driven economy. Ironically, as we speak, Inflation is 19.4% and food prices are up by 28% that’s even from government sources, full of deception and spin. What’s distressing to me is the fact that children are hungry, meaning in essence our future leaders are hungry, its just mind boggling trying to understand how this trauma will play itself out in the future. I suspect though it’s not going to be positive.

Through personal experience of trauma in the hands of the brutal, dictatorial and repressive EPRDF regime, a stagnant culture and economic poverty. I have learned through pain, the griping force behind our individual and cultural evolution, the powerful Traumatic experiences creeping around our political, economic and social system cascading from generation to generation through cultural and environmental conduits; further reinforced by contemporary irrational EPRDF ethnic ideology and environmental degradation. Fortunately, I have been able to battle with this issue for sometime now, dwelling inside western democracies, discharging my anger through scholarship and contemplation, who knows healing may be on the horizon.

Liberation, freedom and consciousness are all out there as potentials to be tapped; fear, denial and clinging to the murderous status quo in search of refuge, refuge from imagined political and or economic danger,  only drive systems to a point of no return. To my knowledge the Derge does not exist, so does the neftegna or even the interhamuye in contemporary Ethiopia. What exist are 80 million creative forces able and willing to engage in making their life better. What exist are numerous possibilities for change and development, for hope and reconciliation!

How are we as one cohesive system, as one nation, to surmount to our contemporary cultural challenge is the one question seemingly impossible, to address with less contention by all of our political parties. The CUD disintegrated in mid air mainly because it was in essence formed out of frustration, anger, indignation, rightfully so I might add. Like its opponent, EPRDF, although it was formed out of trauma, it never the less faltered in the face of a much stronger iron willed psychotic trauma mind camp EPRDF. As the Dutch saying goes “heroism is hanging on for a minute longer”

when computing systems reach a certain thresh hold, they come out of a loop through a break, perhaps the CUD break was the right political break at the wrong time or the wrong break at the right time, either way time is closing on us and we are exhausting the systemic resilience of 2000 years of cultural experience cementing our old, impoverished nation.