Cleveland: A State of Mind, But Mainly, A State of Shame

Cleveland, Ohio is where I was born and raised. It's not a place that attracted a lot of Chinese immigrants, but most people are unaware of the fact that Cleveland was the sixth largest city in the US at the turn of the 20th century. The term "Sixth City" refers to that - Cleveland adopted the term in the same way Chicago adopted the term "Second City" (which is reflected in names like "Second City TV", etc.). Cleveland was actually briefly the fifth largest city but the term "Sixth City" is the one that stuck. Cleveland became a major industrial manufacturing center, and that attracted a lot of immigrants from central Europe as well as Ireland. In the 1920's the collection of department stores including Higbee's, The May Company,  Taylors', Baileys' etc. comprised one of the most fashionable shopping districts in the U.S. compared favorably to Fifth Avenue in NYC. By 1950, Cleveland reached its peak population of over 900,000 people, and it had become one of the most well regarded cities in the US. And it was in the 1950's when my family settled in Cleveland. Unfortunately by the end of the 1960's Cleveland had become a national punch line, the city where the Cuyahoga river had caught fire due to the amount of pollution in the river, and as a consequence, Cleveland was now routinely referred to nationally as: "The Mistake by the Lake (Erie)".

Most of the manufacturing industries took big hits and left the area. The "Steel Belt" became known as the "Rust Belt". Any chances Cleveland had of converting to service industries were decimated when Dennis Kucinich aka "The Boy Mayor" took office, and his populist tactics including major taxes hikes on the remaining businesses prompted those businesses to move out of the state. As a result, the median income was about $15k for decades and even in 2022, the median income is now only about $26k (US average: $53.4k). The point is that a city that was once extremely affluent and had a proud heritage has been reduced to a relatively pathetic condition.

This will seem like an abrupt change of topic, but there's a term in Korean culture known as han. The concept has proved difficult to grasp by those who grew up in a "western" culture. Wikipedia explains it thusly:

"The contemporary concept of han, that it is a national characteristic of the Korean people, is a modern phenomenon that originated during the Japanese occupation of Korea from Japanese colonial stereotypes and the characterization of Korean art and culture as "sorrowful" in Yanagi Sōetsu's theory of the "beauty of sorrow". The idea that han is a specifically Korean characteristic was adopted and popularized by Koreans in the 20th century."

I will define it as the symptoms that result from a community sense of shame, in some ways due to how Koreans were conditioned to believe that Korean culture was somehow inferior to Japanese culture while Korea was occupied by the Japanese. Having said that, any individual Korean's thoughts about han will not necessarily be prescriptive because everyone responds uniquely to their circumstances. 

The point I'm getting to is that it's my take that a lot of people living in NE Ohio suffer from their own version of han. Those who've lived in NE Ohio all their lives will probably scoff at the idea, but I lived almost half my life in NE Ohio, and when I first moved to California, it took a few years for a lot of the behaviors that I associate from growing up in NE Ohio to stop manifesting themselves, and I've had encountered a number of native NE Ohioans who felt something similar happen when they left NE Ohio. One person told me that he felt like the city had been cursed somehow, and that affected how Clevelanders acted. Despite having lived in southern California for over thirty years, I've remained loyal to the Cleveland baseball team, and I've followed them closely, which includes reading the Cleveland dot com website daily and participating actively in the comment section of many articles until the website disabled that feature for financial reasons. The point is that because now I was looking at it from the outside, I could see the patterns of thinking which I consider indicative of a basic sense of shame / inferiority. 

Sadly, I see no good way of broaching the topic with those who still live there, but I hope that others  who've left and no longer identify with the associations are now somehow happier, even if they can't make the connection as to why.  

One Day One Room

 is the title of an episode of the TV show House M.D. The main character is an intellectually brilliant yet emotionally damaged doctor who in this particular episode has a patient who has been raped and for some reason wants House to be her physician while House is acutely aware that he's ill equipped to help her deal with her trauma and tries to get her to see the hospital psychiatrist. The patient responds by taking an entire bottle of sedatives and House relents, but beyond the goal of getting her to talk about what happened to her, he's mainly curious about why the patient/victim insists on him. The patient/victim can't explain why she wants House and insists that they just talk, though eventually she tells House that she'll talk about what happened to her if he first shares about a bad event in his life. House can't understand why and continues to try and figure out why but he eventually reaches a place where he actually wants to know what she's feeling, at which point the patient lets House know that the reason she chose him was because it was apparent to her that he'd been hurt as well. After House then shares a truthful account of how he was treated by his father, the patient then tells House the details of what happened.

Ultimately, I found it remarkable that the episode essentially communicated the same premise as Henri Nouwen's book The Wounded Healer though Nouwen's book is geared towards those in spiritual counseling, it applies to all counseling; we all share a fundamental woundedness - and that commonality can make those who seek to heal others more effective by using their own woundedness as a source of strength & healing. It's Nouwen's contention that all who seek to heal/help should first recognize their own woundedness. 

I myself had thoughts about getting a PhD in marriage & family therapy about 20 years ago. A lot of therapists who also do a lot of social dancing were pretty excited when I proposed that my thesis which would involve the concepts of partner dancing to be used for diagnostic as well as therapeutic/educational purposes. Looking back, I can now see how ill equipped I would have been; the concepts will work, but I had not yet begun to come to a fuller and deeper understanding of my own woundedness. I find it ironic that my coming to grips with a lot of it only began after I lost my financial independence where I could have funded my education completely from my own resources.