The Dog
Childhood Trauma And Our Nation’s Government Sponsored Cruelty
Easter Sunday, 1961, I’m in my grandparent’s backyard in Northwoods, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis. I’m 2 ½ years old.
It’s about 1:30PM and we, my mother, father and I, have just returned from the noon “screaming baby” mass.
I’m wearing a nice little red and white outfit with a jaunty cap.
My life is about to be changed forever, and not in a good way.
Next door is the neighbor’s young cocker spaniel, Pepper, is out in the yard. The dog was the family pet of Ed and Marge T. I’m in the yard with my mother and two of Mr. and Mrs. T’s children, who were then six and eight.
(I’m going to use initials and first names, but it doesn’t really matter since everyone directly involved with the incident, except for me, my parents and the two of the T children, are dead. I’ll call what happened “the incident”.)
This description of what actually happened between me and the dog comes from my parents, the last remaining witnesses who were adults at the time.
Over the decades, I developed an entire mental mythology surrounding the incident. Most of it was wrong, a self-invented narrative.
To tell the true story, to strip it down to the actual facts, I asked my mother for her recollection. For me, the incident composes my earliest memories.
My mother says she was in the T family’s backyard (immediately next to my grandparents’ backyard) with me and the two T children. The dog came over to me, suddenly raised up, put its paws on my shoulders, knocked me to the ground on my back, and bit the left side of my face.
“The dog was not provoked in any way, and was always friendly. The attack happened so quickly,” my mother wrote when I asked her for an account of what she remembers about the indecent. “The dog would not release (me). Luckily the owner of the dog (Mr. T)… ran out and pulled the dog off.”
My father and grandfather rushed me to our long-time family doctor’s home office, which was a mile or so away. My father and grandfather held me down while the doctor, Dr. Moore, stitched the hole in my cheek shut and sewed up some other wounds without using anesthetics.
Dr. Moore also happened to have delivered me 2 ½ years earlier.
“I’m forever grateful he was there when we needed him,” my mother wrote of Dr. Moore.
Probably in shock and pain, I fell asleep. Stitched and bandaged, a couple of hours later I was awake, acting like nothing happened, and went about the business of being a toddler.
It’s little wonder the adults in my life though I might not remember a thing.
When I try to focus on just what I remembered for certain or the incident, it was this: fear, surprise, and what I would later recognize as a profound sense of betrayal.
Why did that seemingly nice brown dog hurt me?
I remember lifting my left arm (I’m left handed). I remember being pinned to the ground. I remember the doctor’s home office, painted institutional green. Laying on a big table. A pillow stained with a lot of stuff, probably iodine and blood. People there, probably the doctor and my parents.
What I don’t remember is physical pain.
Dr. Moore, our family physician, did a good job in my opinion.
The scars have faded somewhat in the past 65 years. They are still visible, just not like they were when I was younger. My left ear, which later underwent two rounds of plastic surgery, remains scarred and a bit distorted.
Ed T. was a very big, taciturn Scandinavian man (Norwegian, I think), who grew up on a big farm in Wisconsin. He was really smart, a mechanical engineer who was plant manager from the late 1950s until the early 1970s, of the factory in St. Louis that built Chevrolet Corvette sports cars.
Mr. T was an outdoor sportsman, aside from being an engineer and a farmer. He was a hunter. He knew about dogs.
Why did the what I apparently thought was a nice doggy attack me for no reason? This is the question that still echoes through my head 65 years later.
Decades later, I read about canine rage, also known as rage syndrome, and another issue known as idiopathic aggression, in certain types of dogs. While some contend this is rage syndrome is rare, I did learn that one the breeds specifically associated with it are spaniels. Over breeding during surges in popularity of cocker spaniels may have led to canine rage and other behavior problems.
There is controversy online about over breeding of cocker spaniels in the United States during the 1950s when the breed became popular because of an animated Disney film, Lady and the Tramp (1955), and the fact that both President Harry Truman and Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, owned cocker spaniels. Nixon used the dog as prop for a speech defensing himself against a financial scandal. Nixon’s speech became known as the “Checkers Speech” for the dog’s name.
I have no ill will to anyone involved. Not even the dog, Pepper. I don’t blame my parents. They protected me the best they could, and came to my aid. I don’t blame Mr. T. He saved me.
My parents were consoled by people telling them a child my age would never remember what happened. There would be no long term harm other than the physical scars. Even on the day of the incident, after being sewn up, I just went on being 2 ½, according to my mother.
This was wrong. Very wrong. But no one knew this, including me, until decades later with the help of therapy and my primary care doctor. When you’re a toddler, everything that happens is getting stored away in your rapidly developing brain.
I’ve been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I’ve spent time in therapy dealing with it. I learned my original childhood trauma can create multiple PTSD events. Because of my early childhood trauma from the mauling, my brain can turn almost any negative encounter into a PTSD event that can play over and over and over in my mind.
If someone or something comes at the left side of my face too quickly, from my peripheral vision and/or by surprise I’ll instinctively lash out and/or have a panic attack.
Despite what happened, or maybe because of it, I’m a dog person.
I have issues with big dogs, especially aggressive ones, but generally I love dogs. I have one, a poodle terrier mix rescue dog from Mexico, El Senior Macaroni de la Tijuana. He’s asleep on my office floor as I write this.*
I always wondered what happened to the dog that mauled me.
My grandmother told me Mr. T took it up to the farm in Wisconsin, and it got hit by a milk truck. I actually believed this until I was about 21, when I realized Mr. T took it to the farm and shot it. Which is, indeed, what happened.
How does my mauling by dog 65 years ago relate to the intentional cruelty being inflicted on children as part of our government’s fascist campaign against immigrants?
ICE Inflicting Mass Childhood Trauma
It’s this: these children are psychologically scarred for life. I know this from my own experience.
They will not get over what’s been done and is being done to them. They will have anxiety and fear burned on their brains. This is inflicitng intentional childhood trauma. Most will like carry PTSD for life. Look at 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos in the now famous photo. An adult is in the act of hurting him, using him to hurt his father and his family.
The child and his father would then be sent form Minnesota to a “detention center”, essentially a concentration camp, in Texas. They would be imprisoned for 12 days, creating further childhood trauma for Liam.
All of this is the sadistic brainchild primarily of one man: Stephen Miller.
Liam will never forget what happened. Scarred for life. Mauled by a sadistic program created by Stephen Miller to inflict pain on people he doesn’t like. Not for any real legal reasons, but because he can. Because he’s filled with hate.
This is a case where it takes a village of mean idiots to psychologically scar a child. Or many children.
Not that Miller doesn’t have plenty of enablers and other morally corrupt and sociopathic people willing to carry out his racist orders, like Christi Noem, Pam Bondi and Greg Bovino and their successors.
These people, like many members of the MAGA Reich, are mentally ill. Cruel and sadistic at their cores. Most likely, someone did something bad to them, inflicting cruelty and pain at young age that robbed them or empathy and/or their souls.
Or maybe they were bad seeds from birth. Natural born psychopaths and sociopaths.
And then there’s the legion of ICE agents, mostly men, who are willing to use a five year old like Liam as bait to inflict cruelty and psychological terror on his family for what amounts to the offense of wanting to come to the United States for a better life.
Few of the people caught up in this racist purge and are being held in indoor concentration camps are not criminals. Many are children.
One result of Miller’s program of ethnic cleansing will be a massive debris field of human suffering and psychological damage.
The trauma infected on these children will come back to haunt America and the world. For example, trauma inflicted on children who have been forced become child soldiers is already taking its toll in some places in the world. The suffering of children in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces is hard to comprehend.
Because these children who have been kidnapped and imprisoned by our government are the children of immigrants from many nations, many levels and aspects of society, I think this strain sadism will have widespread consequences. It won’t just be an issue for the lowest classes, but the middle and even upper classes.
Some children will grow up every fearful, anxious, depressed. Some will have a life-long hatred of authority. For some it may lead to criminality.
Some of these children will want revenge.
There’s a huge difference between the incident that caused my childhood trauma and what is happening to children being abused by ICE and our psychopathic government: what happened to me wasn’t on purpose. It just happened. It wasn’t intentional cruelty that circumvents what used to pass for the rule of law.
Stephen Miller and his ilk have created harm that will last generations. Unfortunately, America will reap this hideous whirlwind.
*In the future, I’ll write a companion piece about the dogs who saved me.
read it and weep - someday soon this will be history i so hope, this now-casual and constant cruelty of this administration bent on destroying our great nation for what -- for what, for profit, for kicks? - im not even sure they remember anymore