Soldier's Heart

Published July 31, 2013 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     I have been reading a new book by Parker J. Palmer, a Quaker author whose work has helped me grow repeatedly.  Healing the Heart of Democracy,  with the outrageous subtitle The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit (2012,) is helping me understand why I normally would not have picked up such a book had I not been run through the tumbler of small town politics for the last three years:  I think I've been suffering from a form of soldier's heart.

     Palmer opens with the words of Terry Tempest Williams, a Mormon author whose work I admire.  "The human heart is the first home of democracy," she says.  "It is where we embrace our questions.  Can we be equitable?  Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions?  And do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up - ever- trusting our fellow citizens to join us in our determined pursuit of a living democracy?"  The goal of this book is to offer suggestions on how we get to Yes.

     Palmer's main contention is that the majority of the American people are not apathetic about politics, but brokenhearted.  "When things we care about fall apart, heartbreak happens."  Sometimes heartbreak shatters.  Running through George Carlin's chronology of terms for the wartime shattering we now call PTSD, starting with "shell shock" in WWI to "battle fatigue" in WWII to "operational exhaustion" in the Korean War (noting the humanity getting stripped further away with each generation,) Palmer discovered the term "soldier's heart" from the Civil War on a modern-day veterans website (www.soldiersheart.net.) "The violence that results in soldier's heart shatters a person's sense of self and community, and war is not the only setting in which violence is done," Palmer claims.  The heartlessness we witness daily in the news, experience with government bureaucracies and corporations, and have witnessed over time as our economy has become the tool of the rich (to mention just a few) has also decommissioned hearts.

     And sometimes the heart is broken open by heartbreak. Using insights from Joshua Shenk's book Lincoln's Melancholy (2005) how our 16th President used the combined burdens of the deadly Civil War and his own suicidal depressions to reach for the country's holding together and healing, Palmer begins to scratch out the prescriptions for heart repair and relearning "habits (of the heart) that form the inward and invisible structure of democracy."

     I saw the reality of these things the week before our last city council meeting as I pounded the pavement getting signatures on letters asking Mayor Padilla to bring back a motion to reconsider their approval of the Dollar General II plan and ask for economic and traffic studies under CEQA.  Some mornings it seemed futile:  in the aftermath of Townsend's Follies, the number of people here with soldier's heart is still large.  But sometimes I saw the light go back on inside people, the valves healing, the muscle pumping once again. Eighteen signatures told the City "No, what you did is not right, and here's what we want:  fairness.  Good process.  Respect for our businesses and lives."

     Luckily, this kind of healing is contagious.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer and remedial community organizer who sometimes will sing for food.  Please leave a comment below.