CULTURE SHIFT
the film is a visit that Fritzi Horstman, founder of the Compassion Prison Project, makes to a maximum-security facility in California. She has dozens of inmates form a large circle and, standing in the center of it, asks the men, “If a parent or other adult in the household often pushed, grabbed, slapped, or threw something at you, step inside the circle.” Almost every one of them does. “If you often felt that no one in your family loved you, step inside the circle.” Again, almost everyone moves forward. Roughly 64% of American prisoners have experienced six or more Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, which health professionals count on a 10-point scale that quantifies a person’s trauma and, with it, their likelihood of developing ailments ranging from cancer to an addiction to opioids. Once Horstman’s circle of prisoners is much tighter than when the exercise began, it becomes apparent that these young men—musclebound, tattooed, and maintaining hard stares—are victims of childhood trauma. Instead of offering help, our system confined them to cages, severing their connections to friends, family, and society as a whole. The Wisdom of Trauma urges its audiences to ask why, collectively, we respond to trauma the way that we do in schools, hospitals, and the criminal justice system. “Childhood trauma is key,” an unnamed inmate says. “Because once you understand that, you know you were a child, and you didn’t have help. And if it’s about love, then why are we locking you up?” y Travis Lupick is a journalist and the author of Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction (2018) and Light Up the Night: America’s Overdose Crisis and the Drug Users Fighting for Survival (January 2022). Twitter: @tlupick
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Reverberations as a Generation Takes a Knee Alex Gallo-Brown
I SWEAR I CAN’T HELP IT. During baseball season, almost every night at 7 p.m. (and 1 p.m. on Sundays and sometimes Wednesdays or Thursdays; earlier if they’re playing East), I follow the Seattle Mariners baseball team, a franchise that has not reached the playoffs in exactly 20 years, the longest drought of any team in professional sports. Still, I always think this might be the year they’ll finally make it. It’s an odd thing for me, being a baseball fan. Almost nothing about the sport (or really professional sports as a whole) aligns with my politics, values, or ideals. The winner-takes-all economics. (This is especially egregious in baseball, where stars can make tens of millions of dollars per season, while other players in the lower levels labor near or below the poverty line.) The alignment with military and law enforcement. (Just yesterday, I watched a Marine decked out in full combat gear throw out the first pitch, joining the parade of national security professionals celebrated during games.) The toxic masculinity. (During a recent game, my wife told me the first thing she wonders when looking at these players is how they treat women. It’s true that seemingly every year at least a few are suspended for domestic or gender-based violence.) And, of course, the racism. (In baseball, specifically, the number of African American players has declined over the decades, and it isn’t lost on me that this new iteration of Mariners, with the most Black players in the league, is still disproportionately populated by AllAmerican-looking White boys.) And yet I can’t help it. In a recent poem for The Believer magazine, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet
Ada Limón clarified something important for me about the enduring appeal of athletics, perhaps especially to someone like me, who hates myself a little every time I bring up the MLB app on my phone. “I’ve even high-fived and clinked/ my almost-empty drink with a stranger/ because it felt good to go through something/together,” Limón writes, “even though we haven’t been through/anything but the drama of a game, its players.” The poem’s closing lines depict her father and stepfather, two men entirely at odds except for their shared affinity for sports: “and from the backseat I swear they looked/like they were on the same team, united/against a common enemy, had been fighting,/all this time, on the same side.” For those of us who live in a society where different factions can’t even agree on basic facts, let alone what to do about health care, labor conditions, racial disparities, or the environment, there is something comforting about the simple drama of The Game, the knowledge that the person sitting next to you is wondering the exact same thing you are, namely whether or not this will be the year that the Mariners make the playoffs. Sports’ ubiquity within American culture and near-uniqueness as sites of
