The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma And Finding A Way To Heal (2021) by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D. Read this book. It is very important in understanding modern America and the problems we face. There is a great deal of our collective history discussed, mostly aimed at enlightening the modern reader of the failures created after the Civil War. Mary Trump is a psychologist, and using her particular insight via her lengthy training, she writes a review of the last 170 years with an eye as to how the failures of our government in the 1860s and onward lead to the great divide in America. If you doubt this, ask yourself why almost all military bases are named after Confederate generals. That is only a small concession President Jackson made to his fellow Southerners. The “Restoration” was a joke, the equality of Blacks in America a falsehood, and the treatment of every citizen is unjust due to the actions of our country’s leadership for the past 16 decades.
The trauma caused by inaction, actions that were unjust or, basically, unlawful, and the resultant “Trauma” in America is exposed here in a clinical manner. This book is short, not sweet at all, but totally to the point. It gives you a lot to think about. I found there were few ways given as to how to heal these great, staggering wrongs. I think it starts with the individual looking beyond devotion to political parties and into what is right and just. So if you truly want to make America great, start by being a good neighbor and doing the best for those around you, not just your own kind. ( )

Dr. Trump appears to have larger concerns than her own generational trauma, and I am happy she has brought her own vision to the American dilemmas of the twenty-first century. Her idea that the strain of Protestatism called Calvinism aided the idea of racial inequality, is quite in keeping with more directly historical work on that topic. The book is competent prose, and obviously well meant. ( )

The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal.
by Mary L. Trump
Martins Press. 2021.
5 stars.

I enjoyed this book and Mary Trumps no- nonsense approach to what could be a national mental health crisis- although it is troubling. Our past has a way of following us and making a shadow that is not easily escaped. Mary Trump shares her own very personal feelings of hopelessness and helplessness while battling PTSD. Many people experience these feelings. Undiagnosed, untreated and misunderstood, many go untreated because they don't realize there is help, a way out. Discussing her own trauma and relating it to the recent events the USA continues to endure; how they contribute to feelings of hopelessness and helplessness.
When we face straight-on, the truth of our nations history, and we, as a nation of human beings can admit to and take responsibility for the racial and serial trauma inherently caused; we will be much closer to a day of reckoning. We can all begin to heal. Its our responsibility, as human beings, to find a way to have the courage to love. ( )

This book is about three things: PTSD and healing from it, as the subtitle indicates; Donald Trump, no surprise; and African-American, and to a lesser extent, Native American oppression by Euro-Americans

While saying that, as a nation, we have PTSD is an interesting way to put it, but I don't think that this is terribly useful. I generally agree with what she says that we need to do, the question is how. Political theorists tend to be much better at pointing out problems that telling us how to fix them. There is a famous cartoon by Sydney Harris showing two mathematicians at a black board. The beginning calculations are followed by the words: "And then a miracle occurs." The second mathematician is saying, "I think that you need to be more explicit, here in step two." Trump acknowledges that not everyone agrees with a Liberal/Progressive agenda, the main problem is to change their minds, or at least make them think and feel the compromise is desirable. Saying that we need this, this is right, is not sufficient, other people need to be convinced, at least that they have enough of a stake to compromise. That's the miracle part. Call your opponents a basket of deplorables or something more profane if you like, but they are still on the voting rolls. They can't just be dismissed. I think that for the most part, there is little here that hasn't been said many times. There isn't much new about Donald Trump, either.

The best part and largest part is the history, except for one thing that I will discuss starting in the next paragraph. It is a crisp and forceful capsule of the history of oppression in the United States. Can people who need to read this be convinced to pick up the book, and will they be persuaded by her presentation? It was a useful reminder of the great work we have before us, in any case.

Trump makes a number of extraordinary statements on the subject of American Protestantism: "Given that white supremacy seemingly runs through every strand of fabric from which this country is woven, it's understandable that one might imagine that it is a uniquely American phenomenon. It was brought to the Northeast coast, however, along with their stringent brand of Reformation Protestantism known as Calvinism." That is not true, either literally or as a general concept. I think that native inhabitants of any of the colonies created during the European expansion, got quite a a bit of white supremacy. The conquered of any empire was probably inundated with
claims of superiority from the conquerors. "We-Are-Supreme," or "We-Are-the-Best" is a pretty common idea throughout human history, especially for classes of people who are in a commanding position. The Inca claimed that they were directed by the gods to
create an empire that would bring civilizations to their neighbors, some of whom were civilized before they were. The Chinese saw themselves as the Middle Kingdom, where things were done correctly and all outsiders were barbarians - something that certainly wasn't unique to them. Even if groups that are not in a position of power may see their religion as the only valid way of approaching the divine, and are amazed that this isn't obvious to everyone else.

Trump also writes as if all American Protestantism stems from the Puritans, which were not a single group with identical beliefs. I'm not an authority on the history of religion, but some scholars have argued that Protestantism cannot be viewed monolithically. There was one strand represented by Luther and Calvin (not that they entirely agreed with one another), there was the Church of England, which was somewhat closer to Catholicism, and there were the Anabaptists, who were different from the other two, and include Mennonites and the Amish. The Puritans were chiefly in New England, although their influences stretched further; New York was originally a Dutch colony with such sects as Dutch Reformed, with the Anglicans being added when England took it over; Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn and other Quakers; Maryland was founded as a refuge for Catholics; further south was more likely to be Church of England; the Scots-Irish brought Presbyterianism, another Calvin-Luther strand. The Scots-Irish tended to live on what was then the frontiers, and since the Presbyterians were not ableto supply them with enough trained clergy, they often took up Methodism (originally a lay movement growing out of the Anglican church) and the Baptists, another form of Calvin-Luther thought. I will also note, in view of Trumps comments on the Puritan understanding of the value of good works and outward signs of inward grace, that both Calvin and Luther believed that God freely
offered salvation by faith, but that in order to accept it, the person must repent their old way of life, and being filled with grace, will manifest this by good works.

The next extraordinary statement is: "While the Reformation in general represented a turning away from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and all the advances in science, intellectual exploration, and art they represented [...]" That's a statement that needs to be confirmed by evidence. She supports this by pointing out that John Calvin (1509-1564) denounced the heliocentric model of the solar system. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was tried by for heresy for espousing heliocentrism, which had been denounced in 1615 by the Roman Inquisition on the same grounds that Calvin denounced it, so what is Trump's point? I do not mean here to denigrate the achievements of other religions, merely to question Trump's assertions about Protestantism. Protestants also believed that everyone should read the Bible, and therefore encouraged literacy, which was very high among the New England Puritans. Anne Oakley, who wrote The Feminism of American Culture, considered the Puritans to be a high point in American intellectualism. Nine colleges were chartered in the American colonial era: three were by Puritans, including the first, now Harvard, three were Church of England, one was Dutch Reformed, one Presbyterian, and one Baptist. Despite the history of anti-intellectualism that Trump posits as a consequence of the USA's Puritan
heritage, just before the Civil War, the Morales Act provided for the creation of land-grant universities throughout the country. Other religions would of course add their own schools as their numbers increased. Further, some descendents of the Puritans, the Transcendentalists, primarily New Englanders, were among the first to accept the idea of studying the Bible as a piece of literature, open to interpretation. Liberal Protestants were the first to make peace with scientific advances such as geology and the ancient age of the earth, and evolution, even though the Fundamentalists are still denying it.

As for the turning away from the Enlightenment, 17th and 18th century, luminaries who were Protestant, or in predominantly Protestant countries included Immanuel Kant, James Hutton, Francis Hutcheson, Mary Wollstonecraft, James Watt, Isaac Newton, David Hume, Adam Smith, Leonhard Euler, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, William Robertson, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, William Cullen, James Anderson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Alexander von Humboldt, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Johann Struensee, Carl Linaeus. I am not forgetting other Enlightment figures, only challenging Trump's assertion that Protestants turned away from it. As for the Renaissance, the classics continued to be important in college and university studies, classical ideas continued to inform architecture and art. The main change in the use of art is that some Protestants did not like to have lavish decoration and images in their churches; most did not considered such things to be ungodly in general. Monuments across the United States demonstrate the classical influence. ( )

The new book of Donald Trump`s niece talk mainly not about her uncle but how can his election victory and presidency only a symptom of the ongoing and inbuilt racism coded into the American history and society. ( )