Root Shock. Mindy Thompson Fullilove
is powerful.
Fig. 0.1. Carlos F. Peterson. “At Freedom Corner.” This drawing represents the slow collapse of Carlos Peterson’s community in the aftermath of urban renewal. It depicts the Church of St. Benedict the Moor, with the statue of the saint soaring above the sanctuary. Pittsburgh civil rights marches start at this corner, hence the name, Freedom Corner. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.
But milieu therapy is not an intervention that need be administered by licensed health care practitioners. In the psychiatric hospital, any member of the unit—staff or patient alike—can promote the common good. Similarly, each and every one of us has the power to improve the places we hold in common, whether we are concerned with the neighborhood, city, nation, or planet. A man in Berkeley, California, decided to stand by the road and wave at passersby. His death was mourned by the thousands of people who got a daily dose of friendliness from his white-gloved hand. We are each that man.
This book, then, tells a painful story, but it also offers hope. We have a century ahead of us: we have a treatment for root shock; we have the possibility of preventing further damage by nurturing the world’s neighborhoods instead of destroying them; we who care about community are many.
I present here the words of the people who lived upheaval: the uprooted, the planners, the advocates, and the historians. Read their words with care for them and for yourself. Read their words not as single individuals living through a bad time, but as a multitude all sharing their morsel of the same bad time. Read in that manner and I believe that you will get the true nature of root shock. Read in that manner, and I believe you will be able to embrace the truth, not as a fearful thing, but as a call to join the struggle for a better tomorrow.
Every once in a while, in a particular location and at a particular time, people spin the wheel of routine, and they make magic. One such location was Ebbets Field in the heart of Brooklyn, where, through World War I, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar struggles for equality in America, hardworking people enjoyed baseball. That small, unpredictable, and intimate ballpark was a gallery for characters to strut their stuff, and the characters in the stands took as much advantage of the opportunity as did the characters on the field. It was there that Jackie Robinson broke the color bar in Major League Baseball, and there that “Shorty’s Sym-Phony Band” tortured the opposition. Words like “raucous” and “zany” are invoked to help those of us who were never present imagine the intensity and the uniqueness of what went on.1
In 1957, Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Dodgers, moved them to Los Angeles. The horror of that act is undiminished in the voices of fans. “I felt like a jilted lover,” recalls a sixty-year-old physician of the catastrophe that darkened his young life. Forty-six years after the Dodgers played their last game there, it remains important to people to tell the story of Ebbets Field, and in particular, to try to take us into its magic. This is the real essence of “nostalgia,” an emotion that is in one second bitter, and in another sweet, as the rememberer vacillates between the joy of what was and the grief of the loss. Enduring sorrow and untempered anger are hallmarks of the stories related by fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers. “I never rooted for them again,” says my doctor friend, and he is not alone in the implacable anger that still seems the only reasonable response to that kind of pain.
Three years after the Dodgers left, Ebbets Field was destroyed, and apartment buildings were erected on the site. People have to get the address and specific directions to find the small plaque that is all that remains of the cathedral of baseball which once stood there. And so the team is gone, the fans dispersed, the stadium demolished. Of deeper importance for people who had lots of work and not much hope, a place of magic was ripped from their daily lives, leaving them dull and gray. The loss of Ebbets Field was a tragedy that could not be repaired: it changed Brooklyn forever.
But how could the loss of a baseball stadium undermine what would be the fourth-largest city of the United States (were Brooklyn independent of the rest of New York City)?
The answer to this conundrum lies in understanding that places—buildings, neighborhoods, cities, nations—are not simply bricks and mortar that provide us shelter. Because we dance in a ballroom, have a parade in a street, make love in a bedroom, and prepare a feast in a kitchen, each of these places becomes imbued with sounds, smells, noises, and feelings of those moments and how we lived them. When we enter an old classroom, the smell of chalk on the boards can bring back a swarm of memories of classmates and lessons, boredom and dreams. Walking toward a favorite bar awakens expectations of friends and drinks, good times, good food. The breeze on a certain hillside reminds us of a class trip, while the sun in the garden brings thoughts of Dad. Try to find the shortcut you used to take to your best friend’s house and it is your feet that will carry you there. The cues from place dive under conscious thought and awaken our sinews and bones, where days of our lives have been recorded.
Buildings and neighborhoods and nations are insinuated into us by life; we are not, as we like to think, independent of them. We are more like Siamese twins, conjoined to the locations of our daily life, such that our emotions flow through places, just as blood flows through two interdependent people.2 We can, indeed, separate from our places, but it is an operation that is best done with care. When a part is ripped away, as happened in Brooklyn when the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, root shock ensues.
What Is Root Shock?
Root shock is the traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem. It has important parallels to the physiological shock experienced by a person who, as a result of injury, suddenly loses massive amounts of fluids.3 Such a blow threatens the whole body’s ability to function. The nervous system attempts to compensate for the imbalance by cutting off circulation to the arms and legs. Suddenly the hands and feet will seem cold and damp, the face pale, and the brow sweaty. This is an emergency state that can preserve the brain, the heart, and the other essential organs for only a brief period of time. If the fluids are not restored, the person will die. Shock is the fight for survival after a life-threatening blow to the body’s internal balance.
Just as the body has a system to maintain its internal balance, so, too, the individual has a way to maintain the external balance between himself and the world. This way of moving in the environment maximizes the odds that he will survive predators, find food, maintain shelter from the harsh elements, and live in harmony with family and neighbors. This method for navigating the external environment is selected because, based on individual and collective trial-and-error experiences with the mazelike possibilities offered by the surrounding world, it seems to offer the greatest chances for survival. Using this analogy to mazes we can call the chosen pattern of movement “a way to run the maze of life,” or, more simply, a “mazeway.”4
When the mazeway, the external system of protection, is damaged, the person will go into root shock.5 Just as a burn victim requires immediate replacement of fluids, so, too, the victim of root shock requires the support and direction of emergency workers who can erect shelter, provide food, and ensure safety until the victim has stabilized and can begin to take over these functions again.
Imagine the victim of an earthquake, a hurricane, a flood, or a terrorist attack. He suffers from root shock as he looks at the twisted remains of the known universe, searching for the road to the supermarket, which used to be there, but is now a pile of rubble. Imagining such a person—and knowing that these tragedies can happen to any of us—we open our hearts and wallets to the Red Cross and other relief organizations that show up immediately to be the temporary mazeway, the transfusion of an environment to those who are naked to the elements.
The experience of root shock—like the