Ooof. The electoral apocalypse, a week later

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So, I’ve been missing from the blogosphere for a long time. Sometime, I may try to pull my thoughts together to explain why. But not today, one week after Hillary Clinton gave her concession speech. A week and a day after Donald Trump became the official president elect. Today, I have to talk about that event, because it pretty much dominates what I’m thinking and feeling as I go through these days. I don’t presume that I have anything novel and newsworthy to say here. Lots of people who are lots smarter and more informed than I have already written volumes. But I’m hoping that writing about this experience will clarify it for me … and maybe speak to someone else as well. Maybe I’ll throw in some pictures, just to break up the ocean of text. Visual notes from a sunnier summer.

OK, how to begin describing the plunge in hope and mood that started last Tuesday evening – an experience I know I shared with many – and my efforts to crawl back to the surface? Background: I worked a lot on the Dem campaign because I knew I had to do something. Otherwise, if Hillary lost, I’d feel awful, knowing I hadn’t done whatever I could. So I started in early September, registering voters. Then in November, I moved on to canvassing, going door to door and encouraging people to vote … preferably to vote Democratic. Let me just mention that this activity is my second-least-favorite pastime in the world, surpassed in its awfulness only by phone banking. I’ve done lots of both over the years, and I hate it. But out I went, into local neighborhoods, clipboard in hand, knocking on doors and checking folks off my list. Each time I got out of my car, I’d take a deep breath and tell myself, “Just do this, Janis. Just do it.” Then I’d put on my friendly face and start knocking on strangers’ doors. I was glad I was doing it.

Then election day, at last. I worked all day, coming and going from the campaign office with a new list every few hours. The mood there was so up-beat, so casually confident, I caught the easy optimism, and left there late in the day, looking forward to going home and cheering as the results came in. You all know what happened next.

I went to bed late, slept poorly, and awoke feeling like I had a sandbag on my chest. I recognized the raw feeling that comes when you realize that a terrible thing happened yesterday, and it’s still there. It wasn’t a dream. I spent hours buried in news stories, hoping for a glimmer of hope, disbelieving what I read. Some moments, I felt angry – at Trump’s very existence, at the people who voted for him, at the media, at the Democratic party, at Hillary … looking for someone to blame. Sometimes, I felt deeply fearful, a bit for myself, but mostly for the very vulnerable people that Trump so actively, egregiously targeted during the campaign. Mostly, I felt depressed. Heavy of heart, unable to move from my computer chair, not interested in … anything. I was hugely relieved when my partner quietly said to me, “It’s not depression. It’s grief.”

            

Grief, I thought. I might be able to manage grief. Struggle through it rather than sink beneath it. I know some ways to keep grief from becoming full-fledged depression. Like getting active, physically and in other constructive ways. The first thing I did was go for a long walk. And on that walk, I began to sketch some thoughts for surviving the coming days of this to-my-core sadness and for getting active as it lifted.

My first thoughts focused, not surprisingly, on this question of grief. I asked myself what I was grieving for, what had I lost? Well, for starters, the possibility of a continuation of relatively progressive politics in this country. The possibility of shifting the Supreme Court toward a more positive stance over the next several decades. The chance to see a woman as president, which would be a remarkable experience, given that I personally remember being unable to get a credit card or a bank account in my own name. But more: I had lost my country. Or, more accurately, my fantasy / beliefs / assumptions about my country. I knew that there were lots of folks who disagree with me on many levels. But  I did not know that there were so many of us who could endorse this man, whose unself-conscious bigotry, ignorance, and meanness you all know too well. And now, I realized that I had just lost that imagined country.

(By the way, none of this was as rational and linear as my description. I cried as I walked, felt simultaneously too alone and very glad for time alone, simultaneously strong and off balance, generally disoriented. And I noticed that I wasn’t noticing my walk – which is unusual for me.)

                   

The walk helped, but that heavy, hopeless feeling was still there. I had to figure out what I could actually do about this state of affairs – my own internal state, and the state of the nation (heck, the world!)  I’m really lucky here, because I know there's a ton of psychological thought and research on how to survive these miserable moments, much of it done by my partner. Years of osmosis have paid off, so I had lots of these ideas at my mental fingertips. For those who aren’t quite that lucky, she just wrote a column for Out Boulder, so you too can have access to this wisdom. If you read it, you’ll spot the influence of these ideas in virtually every step of my own process.

So, following my Wednesday morning walk, I knew that my first step had to be learning  to understand the people who had voted for Trump – not just as bigots, but as people with real needs that they imagined Trump’s presidency could meet. I knew this would be a stretch for me. I was feeling far too fragile to start reading hateful diatribes against Hillary or “big government,” too angry to hear how inspiring Trump is or how he’s the perfect person to save his “fans” from The Machine. But I really did want to understand his supporters, what their lives are like. I needed to do this to interrupt my tendency to demonize and stereotype them. That path gave him too much power over my well-being,  and me too little.

My partner and I began a concerted effort to locate and read information about Trump voters. This turned out not to be too hard, once I got outside the “echo chamber” of people as demoralized and outraged as I. I soon located  a series of articles that addressed just this aim (you can find some of them here, here, here, and here). 

Gradually, I/we began to see and talk about these people in a new light. Not just as white men (mostly) who resented the progress of women and people of color over recent decades, who were suffering from “privilege deprivation.” But as people who have been … are being … genuinely ignored, dismissed, trivialized, discounted, and taken for granted by governmental systems that purport to support them. People who feel isolated from urban centers of power and privilege, and who want their governments, local and national, to “see” them and reflect them. Some folks have described the loss of dignity that people in this situation might well feel. In this vein, I was so struck by a comment made by Arthur Brooks in an exchange with Gail Collins (both of the NY Times): “A few years ago,” Brooks reflected, “I was having lunch with [the president of a progressive think tank]. I asked her to given me a simplest explanation for why some people who never prospered over the past few years nonetheless loved President Obama so much. She said, ‘He gives them dignity.’ I thought that was very profound, and I think that’s a big part of what’s going on today as well with Trump,” he finished. Maybe that was what Trump's supporters heard beneath his hyperbole: a promise of simple dignity.

I could  say much more, but I’ll let this sketch suffice for now. If you’re interested, you’ll find more discussion at the bottom of this blog entry, or you can read more about it in the articles linked above.  

So, with a tenuous handle on my fear, rage, and disbelief, the next step was to manage my sadness and sense of powerlessness. I needed to get myself active. The physical part was pretty simple I happily slid into my now-regular pattern of daily activity. Beyond that, I needed to be politically and socially active. Buoyed by the hope of coming out of this a better human being, I imagined great leaps into activism, sailing forth on a wave of indignation and inspiration. But I knew I’d have to start slowly. Really slowly, as it turned out. Those first days, I managed to write checks to some orgs that I really respect. I considered where I might volunteer down the road. I pondered a lot and read some. I talked to myself and with friends. But actually acting, as opposed to considering acting, was harder.

My first tiny step came while I was walking home from the gym on Friday, three days after the election, I encountered a pile of dog poop left by a pooch whose human hadn’t bothered to pick it up. I added a detour to my walk to fetch a plastic bag, returned to the scene of the drop, picked up the offending pile, and carried it to the nearest trash can. A small act, but it seemed important. I felt like I had made a gesture toward the universe, saying I can make a difference, a change for the better in my world.

The next day, I passed a woman on the bike path whose dog was keeping a careful eye on me as I approached from the rear. I greeted them both and then said, “It’s nice to have someone watching your back right now. The world is more dangerous for a lot of people since the election.” I realized I had just made a mini-ally statement, calling to her attention the reality that for some people, the potential for real danger is greater this week than last. Another tiny step toward showing up.

Then on Monday, my partner and I met with some other folks to help plan an upcoming event related to the election’s outcome, and I agreed to help organize an event in January – although the last time I organized an event, I swore I’d never do it again. More steps. Today, I went to Denver for a rally in support of immigrant families. Small steps. But slowly, I feel more present to life as I go through my days,

This is not to say that it's been a steady path forward. During the past week, I've had moments of progress and enthusiasm, and moments of descent back into deep sorrow. I’ve felt empowered (picking up poop), and I’ve had tears come to my eyes for no apparent reason (stretching in an aerobics class). In the low times, I’ve tried to call up the advice offered in the aforementioned Out Boulder article: to pause and think of what I value, what’s important in my life. It helps me get away from the obsessive focus on what’s wrong and back to what I want to create from this. In those moments of reflection, I’ve realized that writing this blog has been something I’ve valued, for a whole host of reasons. As of today, I’m planning to resume blogging, as time permits. I’ll be good for me, I know. It always was. I’ll try to catch up with some blog-worthy stories from the past year – or at minimum, some pictures. I’ve passed up on so many opportunities. Anyway, here I am, writing a blog. Whether or not anyone reads it, writing this particular post has helped me pull together a week’s worth of struggling to dig out from the sticky post-election morass I sank into Tuesday night. It’s another step.

…

Now it’s Thursday morning, and Nicholas Kristof, a NYT op-ed writer whom I love, has weighed in with a column that summarizes beautifully much of what I hope to take from this week (I told my partner he’s channeling her work). For an added boost in your own process, read it here.

...

Now it's Friday morning, a week after the dog poop incident. There's snow on the ground, and a sunny day ahead. I'll be taking a long walk with a friend's dog, a fun companion for me. And I'll be telling her all about it, sorting it out some more. And waiting to see what happens next, where I need to show up.

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Post  Script:

If you’re interested, here’s more about what I’ve come to understand about the people who voted for Trump.

Many of the people who voted for Trump – especially those in rural areas and the Midwestern “rust belt” (who have historically been reliable supporters of Dem candidates) – are people who work dawn to dusk at back-breaking labor, playing by the supposed rules, who are still unable to make ends meet. Their parents did the same work and were able to get ahead, leaving more to their kids than they had – but now those kids find themselves stuck, with no hope for getting ahead.

They see highly educated people who live in big cities with tons of resources and opportunities – schools, museums, culture, support services, government offices – who are far wealthier than they are, although those urbanites don’t appear to work anywhere near as hard. They see the seats of power located, always, in these cities, readily accessible to city dwellers as sources of information, services, and high-paying jobs. They read about people of color and other minority populations, mostly clustered in cities – unfamiliar to folks living in rural areas, and therefore easily stereotyped and misunderstood, even vilified. They hear about government programs like affirmative action, that (in their understanding – but how would they know otherwise?) – assure jobs for these folks who look nothing like the people they know, whether or not they’re deserving. They see officials of all stripes who never ask them about their lives. Who never visit their homes, never work beside them, never talk to them. Politicians who drop by during the campaign, visit the state fair and eat a corndog, maybe have coffee with locals at the diner, and call that “connecting” with their rural constituencies.

Add to this the implicit biases we all learn just by growing up in this culture and absorbing its mores: racism, sexism, and abelism; xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia; homo-, bi-, and transphobia. We all learned them. But some of us have had opportunities to unlearn them, or at least to temper them. Those opportunities are available almost entirely in cities; anti-racism intensives would be hard to find in rural mid-America. So those of us who have had those learning opportunities condemn those who have not, labeling them bigots – when what really separates us from them is our (often unrecognized) privilege.

Why wouldn’t these people believe that the deck is stacked against them? Why wouldn’t they think that city dwellers – even “foreigners” in the cities – have a better shot at the American dream than they have? Why wouldn’t they believe that they system has left them behind and left them out?

All it takes, then, is for someone to tell them just that: the system is rigged against you. Of course, they shout, Yes! Finally, someone has seen us! Has recognized our distress!

To fire up the enthusiasm even more, that person need only violate all the norms of “polite” (or “politically correct”) conversation – ill-defined norms that are foreign to their lives – by saying the things that they dare not say, have been condemned for saying. We’ve created, in the words of political scientist Katherine Cramer, a politics of resentment. And resentment is a mighty motivator.

In a sense, this isn’t even about Trump himself. It could have been anyone who poked the right tender spots, who saw the distress and resentment of these people and named it, pulled for it, capitalized on it. Who made them feel visible, important, central – and named the system that had previously left them feeling the opposite: their own government. The added energy evoked by allowing them – in fact, encouraging them – to think, to say, and to do the things that are forbidden by “polite” society energized a movement that made them feel powerful, like they could change the system.

It just required someone who seemed not beholden to the system (at least in the usual ways), someone who was willing to thumb his nose, flip the bird at the system. Someone to tell these abandoned Americans that they, like he, are the real Americans.

Deal sealed. No need for millions of demons. Just ordinary people, rendered invisible by the powers that be, plus a rank narcissist willing to use their distress for his own aggrandizement.

Oops. I guess I’m not totally done villianizing yet. Like I said, it’s a slow process …

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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