I immediately resonated with a phrase in Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize-winning novel Prophet Song: “Grievance is grief wrapped in hope” — a grievance being a complaint about unfair treatment. As I pondered this phrase’s truth, my mind turned to former president Donald Trump’s recent mocking imitation of President Biden’s lifelong struggle with stuttering. I intuitively knew such mockery was connected somehow to Lynch’s haunting phrase. Here’s how.
First, I need to reveal my own disability. In my late 50s, I began losing my vision due to a genetic disorder called retinitis pigmentosa (RP). RP was killing photoreceptors in the periphery of my retina. Gradually my visual field narrowed until I became legally blind. To the degree I see anything, I look at the world through a straw, which is called pencil vision. And I continue inevitably to lose even this central vision. As a result, when I hear a political leader with as much influence as Trump mock someone who stutters, or a reporter with a spastic motor disability, or someone’s (i.e., Hunter Biden’s) addictions, I fear being next in line for denigration. It is as though no one with a disability is worthy of respect. This is dangerous for many of us, including those with severe mental illness, or even common problems such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, or ADHD, among others.
The connection between mocking disabilities and grievance being grief wrapped in hope is illustrated by a dynamic often seen in the reaction many families have to an addicted family member. The grief of watching a loved one slide into addiction is often displaced by grievance. Families begin resenting the person, seeing them as morally weak rather than ill. These are not the usual reactions to a family member who develops Alzheimer’s disease or has a stroke. In this case, there is primarily grief and far less grievance. Grief comes when we acknowledge and accept loss while grievance holds on to the belief someone, or something, is to blame and the right help, or protest, can reverse the loss.
Families often respond to an addicted member with the false hope that protesting, nudging, controlling, pleasing, begging, punishing, yelling, or some other undiscovered strategy will get the person to no longer have an addiction. While a family’s advice and influence can sometimes reverse a problem drinker’s or drug user’s slide toward addiction, the line between problematic use and addiction lies within the brain’s genetically determined susceptibility to addiction. Physical changes in the brain induced by alcohol and other drugs alter how a person’s mind works. Once the brain is altered by addiction, family efforts are often powerless to change how their addicted member’s mind is working. It is here that the family’s hope they can get the person to no longer act and think with addiction gets them to keep trying, keep trying, and never confront their powerlessness to control another’s mind. Unrealistic false hope wraps around grief and turns it into bitterness, anger, and grievance toward the person with addiction. Families with an addicted member will never return to a simpler time when addiction was not a part of who they were. The only realistic hope lies in the future, when recovery permits them to develop a different life, one in which addiction is acknowledged and integrated into a healthier reality.
Understanding how false hope turns grief into grievance in families with addiction paves the way for seeing how many people’s grievances for which Trump is an effective avatar stem from the false hope that America can return to an earlier, simpler time. Perhaps a time in which dynamics related to gender, marriage, immigration, and jobs were different. J.D. Vance describes the loss that some people feel of this earlier time in Hillbilly Elegy. A simpler time, before the inevitable future of new technologies, globalism, climate change, and more disrupted life for some people. A lot has been lost for these folks as old ways faded into the past, burnished by nostalgia’s tendency to amplify positive memories while dimming the negative. Instead of simply grieving for that which is no more, some politicians such as Vance preach the gospel of false hope that American can return to some people's version of a simpler time, that we can recover past realities. This false hope wraps around people’s grief and turns it into grievances that blame others for robbing them of an idealized past. But, like families facing an addicted member, the only realistic hope lies in the future, not in the past. We have to move through the changes facing us, just as people 30, 60, and 100 years ago had to face the changes confronting them, to find a healthier way to live in a world always morphing into an unknown future. Grieving losses enables progress into a healthy future. Grievances block healthy grief and look backward, away from the sometimes onrushing future where we must inevitably live.
Mocking others, especially those with undesired challenges, is a twisted form of grievance. Rather than empathize with the other’s grief at having to face the challenges of disability, mockery tries to sweep them away as unworthy of empathy. People with these challenges are in the way, impediments to a greater country. Denigrating them is part of a life of grievance. Rather than embrace all of one’s neighbors as worthwhile citizens, grievance stigmatizes them, then moves on uncaringly, to everyone’s detriment.
Familiarity with the dynamics pervading addictive disease offers a window into human behavior on a broader scale.
Mocking Disabilities Creates Stigma
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19.03.2024
I immediately resonated with a phrase in Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize-winning novel Prophet Song: “Grievance is grief wrapped in hope” — a grievance being a complaint about unfair treatment. As I pondered this phrase’s truth, my mind turned to former president Donald Trump’s recent mocking imitation of President Biden’s lifelong struggle with stuttering. I intuitively knew such mockery was connected somehow to Lynch’s haunting phrase. Here’s how.
First, I need to reveal my own disability. In my late 50s, I began losing my vision due to a genetic disorder called retinitis pigmentosa (RP). RP was killing photoreceptors in the periphery of my retina. Gradually my visual field narrowed until I became legally blind. To the degree I see anything, I look at the world through a straw, which is called pencil vision. And I continue inevitably to lose even this central vision. As a result, when I hear a political leader with as much influence as Trump mock someone who stutters, or a reporter with a spastic motor disability, or someone’s (i.e., Hunter Biden’s) addictions, I fear being next in line for denigration. It is as though no one with a disability is worthy of respect. This is dangerous for many of us, including those with severe mental illness, or even common problems such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, or........
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