The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

by Francisco Cantú

Individuals with low levels of MAOA, it seemed, were predisposed to violence, and researchers came to refer to them as carriers of a “warrior gene.” Since the occurrence of this deficiency is tied to a defect in the X chromosome, men—possessing only one X chromosome, while women possess two—are more prone to the defect, although women may carry it and pass it on to their sons. Subsequent studies revealed that about one-third of the world’s male population carry the warrior gene, the expression of which can be triggered by childhood exposure to trauma.

Dr. Fallon does not specify the environmental conditions that might lead to the activation of the warrior gene, nor does he suggest whether large-scale trauma, enacted over decades across an entire society, might trigger the ceaseless perpetuation of violence.

Halocaust and Israel??

In his book What Have We Done, veteran war reporter David Wood examines the pervasiveness of “moral injury” among soldiers who have returned from the battlefronts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Long confused with PTSD, moral injury is a more subtle wound, characterized not by flashbacks or a startle complex but by “sorrow, remorse, grief, shame, bitterness, and moral confusion” that manifest not in physical reactions but in emotional responses as subtle as dreams and doubts. “In its most simple and profound sense,” writes Wood, “moral injury is a jagged disconnect from our understanding of who we are and what we and others ought to do and ought not to do.”

her book Dolerse—the title is the Spanish verb meaning “to be in pain”—she attempts to construct and deconstruct the pervasiveness of pain in modern Mexican society. “Pain is a complex phenomenon which, in the first place, calls into question our most basic notions of what constitutes reality,” she writes. “Pain not only destroys, but produces reality.” The “social languages” of pain are, in fact, “political languages” as well, “languages in which bodies decipher their power relationships with other bodies.” Thus, at a political and social level, she argues, “the language of pain becomes a producer of meanings and legitimacy.”

Pain, of course, is intimately linked with fear. “Fear isolates,” writes Rivera Garza. “Fear teaches us to distrust. Fear makes us crazy.” If we follow the arc of her argument, we see that pain has the power to destroy and to produce its own reality, a reality in turn legitimized and given further meaning through the politics and policies that shape our society. This reality is quite often a reality of fear, a reality that makes us—individually and as a society—crazy, isolated, filled with distrust for our fellow human beings, the people who share our neighborhoods, our cities, our country, our borders, our intractably and intimately interwoven global community—the people with whom we share our very lives.