9/11, 25 Years Later

Yeah, I want to talk about that literacy gap here for a second because there's a couple different components to it.

I mean, one is that just like ignorance is problematic because it leads you to draw the wrong conclusions.

It leads you to have misunderstandings.

But, you know, ignorance is also problematic.

Literacy gaps are problematic because in the post 9-11 moment, people were traumatized.

And the word trauma is overused today, so I hesitate to use it, but I want to be specific about what I mean by that.

Trauma is when we have an experience that changes the way that we think in ways that we can't control.

That's what trauma is.

I'm not a psychologist, but that's what I understand it to be.

And when a society goes through a collective moment of trauma, then you have people who are not really able to control the way that they think.

And when someone comes and is ignorant or has a literacy gap and doesn't know, like when someone walks up to the synagogue after the October shooting in 2018 at the Tree of Life synagogue and says, you know, we wanted to come to your church, Rabbi.

And I'm like, well, first of all, it's not a church.

It's called a synagogue, right? You know, I have to do the literacy thing.

It creates a sense of mistrust, right? It creates a sense of...

Thank you, Becca.

Reverend Messman, my partner in the chat, she's telling me the definition of trauma is pain plus confusion.

And pain plus confusion.

And I...

And I can't even find the rest of it.

So pain plus confusion is what therapists say trauma is.

Thank you.

So when we're traumatized and we're having this confusion and someone comes and says something to us that's illiterate, it can re-trigger the original trauma.

It can cause us to feel that much more alienated.

And overcoming that sense of alienation is... becomes a very, very hard – the project gets even harder.

So Nina started this off by talking about e pluribus unum.