from shell shock to the fentanyl crisis: the wars we never finished

I had a really interesting conversation recently about why people want to be alone.

My friend wants to be alone because he doesn't want anyone bothering him. Turn that down. Stop doing that. Why can't you hear me? The constant noise, the arguments, the demands. Sometimes he simply can't hear what someone is saying, and frustration takes over.

I want to be alone for a different reason.

Family can be hurtful. Sometimes you need distance from the people who are supposed to love you, because being around them costs you more than being alone.

Two people. The same desire for solitude. Entirely different reasons.

And that got us talking about childhood, trauma and the things people carry into adulthood.

I've known this friend for 30 years. When you know someone that long, you learn their history. You start looking back at their childhood, their parents, the things that happened to them, and the people they became.

His father went to war.

Think about that for a moment.

We used to call it shell shock. Eventually, we developed terms such as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. The words changed as we learned more about what war does to the human mind.

But what happened to the people who came home?

What happened to their marriages, their children, their drinking, their tempers and their ability to feel safe? What happened when a father who had experienced things no child should ever have to imagine returned home to raise a family?

Not every veteran became abusive or alcoholic, of course. Many raised loving families. But trauma can leave wounds that affect relationships, especially when people have no support, no language for what they're experiencing and no way to process what happened.

And children grow up inside those homes.

They learn what love looks like by watching the adults around them. They learn how people handle anger, how they deal with grief, whether it's safe to speak up and whether they should hide their feelings.

Sometimes the damage is obvious. Sometimes it takes decades to understand.

Then those children become parents themselves.

And the cycle can continue.

the children who inherit the consequences

Look at the young people struggling with addiction, homelessness and despair today.

We see the behaviour. We see the crisis. We see the person sleeping outside, the person using drugs, the person who seems angry, withdrawn or impossible to reach.

But what happened before we met them?

Did they grow up in a home filled with violence? Did a parent struggle with addiction? Did they experience abuse, neglect, poverty or the constant fear of losing their home?

Perhaps their mother was struggling to survive, trying to keep her children fed and housed with almost no support. Perhaps she was dealing with trauma of her own.

We don't know every person's story. We shouldn't pretend that we do.

But we should be asking the questions.

When we see a generation struggling, we need to look beyond the individual and examine the conditions in which people are growing up.

Poverty isn't a personal failure. Trauma isn't a character flaw. And a child shouldn't have to spend adulthood recovering from what the adults around them couldn't resolve.

the war that never really ended

We've spent generations fighting wars, bringing people home and then often leaving them to figure out the aftermath themselves.

We talk about supporting veterans, but what about the families living with the consequences of untreated trauma?

What about the children who grew up afraid of their fathers, or afraid for their mothers? What about the people who learned to numb themselves with alcohol because nobody taught them how to live with their pain?

And what about the children those children eventually raised?

The effects of trauma don't pass automatically from parent to child, and families can break these cycles. With support, safety and treatment, people can heal. But ignoring the wounds doesn't make them disappear.

Sometimes the consequences show up years later in a relationship that falls apart, a person who cannot trust anyone, a family that stops speaking to one another, or someone who would rather be alone than risk being hurt again.

today's fentanyl crisis

We call it a drug crisis. We call it an addiction crisis. We call it a homelessness crisis.

It is all of those things.

But we also need to look at the conditions that make people vulnerable in the first place.

The illegal drug supply has become extraordinarily dangerous. Fentanyl has made an already devastating problem deadlier. People are dying, families are grieving, and communities are struggling to respond.

There is no single explanation for addiction. Trauma doesn't explain every case, and not everyone who experiences trauma develops an addiction.

But when we know that childhood adversity, mental distress, poverty and disconnection can contribute to a person's vulnerability, why wouldn't we invest in preventing those harms?

Why wait until someone is in crisis?

Why not support families before they break apart? Give children safe homes, stable adults, food, education and somewhere to turn when life becomes unbearable. Make mental-health care accessible. Treat addiction as a health issue. Give people a chance to recover without abandoning them when recovery takes time.

And when someone is already in crisis, why should our response end with getting them out of sight?

we need to stop passing the damage along

I'm not suggesting that understanding someone's past excuses everything they do. People can be hurt and still hurt others. Accountability matters.

But accountability without understanding doesn't necessarily change anything.

If we want healthier families and safer communities, we need to look at what produces harm, not just punish the people in whom that harm eventually appears.

Perhaps we need to stop treating every new generation as though it arrived here without a history.

The wars of the past left casualties on battlefields. Some of their consequences followed people home. Some entered family homes, shaped childhoods and influenced the lives of children who never saw a battlefield.

Today's crises have their own causes and their own realities, but we cannot afford to ignore the human suffering that came before them.

We cannot undo every childhood. We cannot erase every trauma. We cannot save everyone.

But we can stop pretending that people become broken in a vacuum.

What if some of the crises we keep fighting are also the consequences of wounds we never properly treated?

What if preventing the next crisis means caring for people long before they reach the point where everyone else finally notices their pain?

Maybe it's time to stop asking only what's wrong with people.

Maybe we should start asking what happened to them, what support they were missing, and what we can do to make sure the next generation has a better chance.

Because the children growing up today deserve more than another generation of inherited pain.