Self-Care In the Age of Trump

I sat down the last two nights to write about politics and simply couldn’t bring myself to make it happen. I don’t have a special, unique hot take on just how terrible Steve Bannon is. I don’t have any greater ability than anyone else to explain to the Bernie dead-enders and the Steinbots that their smug bullshit is no more helpful today than it was two weeks ago and now they just look like complete assholes who have shown their asses to the world as they celebrate being right at the expense of living in a country that isn’t about to be handed over to a demagogue backed by extremists. I also don’t have any greater ability to explain how the Democratic Party establishment is run by out of touch career politicos who are more interested in keeping their jobs than keeping their constituencies safe. We’re already falling into circular firing squads and competing to win the moment-by-moment fight for eyeballs on our Twitter feeds and this fight has yet to actually start.

This is going to be a long slog, folks. We just went through nearly two years of contentious bullshit on the campaign trail. Now we’ve got four years of…whatever comes next. We’re not even a week and a half into that whatever comes next and it’s all horrifying. Trump literally did not know he is responsible for hiring his own staff and appointing his own people.

Those people that he’s starting to put into place? A who’s who of awful. Steve Bannon shouldn’t be allowed to take a tour of the White House, let alone have a job in the West Wing. Reince Priebus gave a speech at the Republican National Convention that chilled my blood. He was the first person who actually made me think the Republicans are trying to be Nazis. The rest of the names belong to people like Ted Cruz, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Tim Mnuchin, and Kris Kobach. None of these names fill me with any emotion more enjoyable than dread.

We’re going to have to learn how to pace ourselves. We’re going to have to learn how to find a semblance of normal that includes being aware of the various outrages. We’re going to have to find a way to realize the fights that can be won, the fights that must be fought even if they’re already lost, and the fights that it’s best to avoid.

The one right now over trying to convince the Electoral College to ditch Trump isn’t worth it. The Electoral College system we have now is so corrupted from what the original intent was that we can’t expect it to step in. The Electoral College was supposed to protect the United States from factions but the factions now control the Electoral College. It is not made up of a council of learned men who want to keep the nation from giving in to the passion of the factions but occupied by the most passionate members of the factions themselves.

We have to uncouple our reactions from the 24-hour news cycle and avoid the temptation to turn everything into a rain of hot takes. Otherwise we die a million tiny deaths and not one will bring us positive change.

I grew up in a world of perpetual outrage called Evangelical Christianity. I was taught to be constantly mad at and afraid of everything. If we weren’t afraid of the liberals coming to take our precious religious liberty we were lecturing other denominations about how they were wrong about Christianity. It wasn’t until after I got out that I realized that it had made anger an emotional undercurrent of everything I ever did.

I don’t know what your carrying capacity for anger is. I won’t pretend to tell anyone they’re doing too much or not enough. I do know that constant, simmering anger won’t help in the long run.

There is no savior stepping in to stop all of this. This is a two-year fight to the midterms and a four-year fight to the next national election. After that, assuming enough is put back to right, we’ll have a long fight to rebuild whatever is about to get broken. There will be threats to our friends, neighbors, and loved ones that we will have to find the energy to fight. If we waste that energy now fighting the inevitable or eating our own there won’t be anything left.

This thing we face now is monumental. This fight will be long. If we burn ourselves out before it truly starts we won’t have anything left when it truly matters.