Early Morning Thoughts on the Election
I fell asleep with a pit in my stomach. It was early yet at the time, relatively speaking, but there were some telltale signs out of Georgia that this election was going to go the way it inevitably landed. All the ground Biden managed to gain post-pandemic had been lost. I was cautiously optimistic that it wasn't a barometer for the rest of the country at the time, but I still couldn't shake the feeling that it was all about to go sideways.
I woke up to it all going sideways. I wish I could say I was surprised. But I'm not.
I wish I could be someone who tells you about the silver lining in all this, about the light at the end of the tunnel, about how, maybe, it's not so bad. But that would all feel disingenuous at best and outright maliciously false at worst. No, I won't do that.
What I will say, though, is that I have found an odd sort of peace with this outcome. At first I thought it was because it's finally "over," for whatever that means. But of course it isn't. We're all so very tired and now we have to gear up for, at minimum, another four years of this bullshit. It's far from over, and we all know it. No, I think the peace comes from understanding and acceptance. This is the nation I live in. These are my neighbors. There isn't an undercurrent of good and justice silently writhing beneath our collective moral conscience, far from it. We are a land of anger and vengeance, of hate and fear, of conspiracy and falsehood. This is who we are. Not all of us, sure. Certainly not me. But enough of us. Perhaps even most of us. As a nation, this is who we are.
There's a somewhat common experience, or at least an experience I had, when you struggle for a long time with a mental health issue and you finally go to a psychologist who diagnoses you straight away with depression, or ADHD, or autism, or whatever else. At first you reject it, because your gut instinct is to rebel against being an "other" or "abnormal." But later, as it sinks in and you start to understand it, you start to see how it explains so much so perfectly, you begin to accept and understand it. Despite the fact that it's never fun to be diagnosed with a mental health disorder, it is, in it's own way, freeing. You understand what the true source of the problem is now. As such, you can start taking steps to ease, treat, or heal.
Trumpism is our nations undiagnosed mental health disorder. It is the cancer that rots the gut of us all. I know that sounds silly as a realization. After all, we've all known what Trump and his ilk have been doing for a long, long time. But then depressed people often know they're depressed long before really accepting and understanding it. We look for different sources of the problem. We look for anything that can suggest the issue is outside us pushing in. We want to blame Trump himself, the system that permits him to exist, and those lackeys who profit off him. And sure, all that plays a significant part in creating the rot, but it's only when we look inward that we find the true underlying cause. We feed ourselves carcinogens and then are surprised when we wake tumorous.
So this is who we are, America. Not just our imperialistic, self-perpetuating government but us, the people. This is what we want, apparently. We're the dog who caught the car of fascism. I'm at peace with that. Not because it's good. Not because I like it. Not because I'm not going to fight it. Simply because I know where the problem is. There is no cutting the head off this snake. We need a national chemotherapy. In a way the next four years may very well be a form of that. It may be a poison so intense that we have no choice but to reckon with it.
Either we will heal, or we will die.