ArticleA teenage girl is looking at me with tears forming in her eyes. She is struggling to find the words to ask me a question. “I don’t know where to start,” she says.
I invite her to say the first thing on her mind. “Gaza,” she says quietly. Just one word, Gaza.
She can barely contain herself. Through her tears she tells me that the slaughter of people in Gaza, the starvation, the homelessness and suffering of children, triggers a reminder of what happened in Australia to her Aboriginal ancestors.
For this young woman – I will call her “Kate” – the war in Gaza has merged with Australian history to overpower her with hopelessness and despair. She descends into a very modern malaise. It is the suffering, the trauma, that speaks to her, not the people who are suffering, but the very act of suffering itself. It becomes clear to me that for her suffering is a life force.
How sad … Kate is programmed for bitterness.
Instead, Kate is consumed by politics and identity. History runs like poison through her blood. She sees her existence through victimhood and injustice. She is compelled to choose sides.
It strikes me that Kate sees no Israeli victims of Hamas’ actions on October 7. The people of Gaza too are as abstract for Kate as the ancestors she has never known. Gaza is less a human tragedy than a symbol of suffering.
In the war in Gaza she sees only her reflection. She stares into a rippled pond and sees just a distortion of herself.
What Kate cannot see is that we are all implicated in this world of murder. The victim today can be the perpetrator tomorrow.
Our only truly shared human language may be our tears. Israeli mothers and Palestinian mothers shed the same tears. But in the world that we have given Kate, the tears of strangers are nothing but water.
Kate’s misfortune was to be born into a world of hyper-identity. This is not identity that enriches the soul, but one that shrinks it. This identity is like the head of the Medusa: we stare at it, and we turn to stone. This identity asks not who we are but who we are not.
In this world of toxic identity, young people like Kate are programmed for bitterness.
Amartya Sen, the Nobel prize-winning economist and philosopher, called these “Solitarist identities” – identities that reduce us to one essential thing: Are you black or are you white? Are you Muslim or Hindu? Are you Catholic or Protestant? Israeli or Palestinian?
Solitarist identities, Sen says, “kill and kill with abandon”.
Truth becomes no longer a meeting ground, but a battleground. Our young, like Kate, are baptised in intergenerational trauma, bathed in collective memory.
Now, I am not against a reckoning with our history. I have made my own contribution there. But history is not a destination. There is no future in the past.
What troubles me is that history becomes a ground of resentment and that resentment becomes, in its own twisted way, life-affirming. Suffering becomes a source of power. I do not doubt that we carry deep inside the pain of our forebears. We drink it with mother’s milk. Scientific study into intergenerational epigenetic inheritance is beginning to show the effect of historical trauma on our very genes.
But surely the aim of life is to cleanse ourselves of pain. My faith tells me: Christ took that pain on his body. That is what he died for. I have no need to put him back on the cross of history.
I suppose this entire lecture is my attempt to reach Kate. Since that day when she sat before me crying, I have been troubled by how we have failed her and her generation. We have given them a world of high-tech, efficiency, 24-hour news, endless consumer choice, but no human touch. In a world of Uber Eats and Married at First Sight, human redundancy creeps ever closer.
As a society, as a species, we are so untethered, so disconnected, uprooted, so redundant, so without love, that bitterness, resentment, may be the most real human emotion left.
Bitterness is the naked flame on skin; its pain is the only way of reminding us we can still feel. Through our anger, our bitterness, we might still scream at the world. In our bitterness we can at least say: I am here! I matter! Listen to me!
Bitterness might be the last human cry before we are silenced by machines.
How sad. Young Kate does not hear the angels sing, but the tortured scream. We have given her efficiency but no soul. Identity but no love. History but no hope. She is programmed for bitterness.
I do not believe human life is bleak. Beauty abounds even in the darkness. In a lifetime of reporting, in times of war and natural disaster, I have met people of phenomenal faith and hope. I have seen my parents, Aboriginal people, carry the pain of our history on their bodies and their souls and never let it turn them to bitterness.
My parents are old now and their battles fought, some lost and others won. My father needs constant care. Each night before she goes to sleep, my mother enacts her little ritual of placing a spoonful of coffee into two cups and filling her jug with water. This is Mum’s promise that there will be a tomorrow.
That’s where we fight for the human soul: in the little things.
Dr Stan Grant – journalist, author, distinguished professor at Charles Sturt University – is a Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi/Dharawal man. This is an edited version of his oration when he delivered the Centre for Public Christianity’s Richard Johnson Lecture. This article was first published in The Sydney Morning Herald.