Birmingham Peace Garden Again, Trauma, Wounds, Apologies, & the Function of Memory

I have been a couple of times since the work was done to make the church ruins safe, but neither was really conducive to photo-taking. Suffice to say that the actual remains of St Thomas's church are no longer fenced off, & some strapping stuff has been put around the top, presumably to stop bits falling off.

St Thomas's church, Bath Row, had its foundation stone laid by the Bishop of Worcester in 1829, & was what was known as a commissioners' church:

'The Church Building Act of 1818 granted money and established the Church Building Commission to build churches in the cities of the Industrial Revolution. These churches became known variously as Commissioners' churches, Waterloo churches or Million Act churches.' (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Commissioners)

It was bombed to ruins (apart from the tower) in 1940, the grounds then being turned into a public space, & ultimately into a peace garden in the 1990s. What is left of the church building is well & truly scarred within an inch of its life. My point here is that real peace cannot be achieved without some kind of acknowledgement of the wrong that has been done. I have written repeatedly about my strong reservations about 'forgiving & forgetting': mark my words, when you look carefully at a conflict you will frequently find the protagonist urging the object of the confict to forgive & forget.

I do not use the v-word, as is used on one of the plaques in the church: I will often not even allow that word to pass my lips. It is also, to my mind, one of the more twisted psychological mechanisms - by perpetually being the vistimised or oppressed one you eternally invite victimisation & push the other into the role of aggressor. This is one of the more manipulative ways to manoeuvre other people into actually being 'bad'.

None of this actually helps - nor does ignoring a wrong or creating some mechanism whereby we can 'move on' - the fad for apologising, from governments to popes, is one of the more dangerous ones in the modern world. This is *exactly* the approach that let's people get away with the same injuries to others over years, decades, centuries. Similarly it carries the danger of manoeuvring the target of a wrong into thinking there is something wrong with them because they don't feel able to just let it go. The kind of things that often get apologised for - wars, negligence, clerical sexual abuse - are the kind of things that we can reasonably expect to leave far-reaching scars that may never 'heal' in any substantial way.

You will of course raise the completely legitimate point that I'm not really proposing a final answer to this. I don't have one. Certainly in my own mind *nothing* is too bad to happen to the person who psychologically abused me. I will also not entertain the idea that something bad happening to the perpetrators of abuse will not actually help, because retribution would feel damn good, & I refuse to get into the mindset where I 'shouldn't' entertain that idea. What *should* happen is that the harm is acknowledged & not negated, the person is effectively prevented from being in positions of power (& believe you me, the powers that be *know* about this person & when his downfall comes you will read about it here), & receive these things as the consequences of his actions. Perhaps this is what I would be proposing on a greater scale - obviously it would require neutral intervention & what have you.

To me, at this length of time, World War II is a bit of an abstraction. Perhaps it takes at least fifty or sixty years for a trauma of that sort to begin to fade & become history. Of course we then come up against the mindset that refuses to learn from history. Perhaps it's a witch thing - because we notice stuff, we notice patterns of behaviour, even while trying to avoid our own tendencies towards repetitive nonproductive behaviour. I suppose this is another reason not to sweep previous trauma under the carpet - if it is still there hopefully people will notice it & not repeat our forefathers' regrettable actions.

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