Of course you’re depressed. You know
that the news is toxic to your spirit, and you admit you’re addicted to it.
Remember when we couldn’t wait to say
good riddance to 2016? We’d had it with that abusive spouse of an election
year. We were sick of the emotional rollercoaster. We needed an armistice, a
breather. We were desperate to rise from the political sewer to the shining
city on the hill.
Fat chance. This 2017 thing is even
worse. I know how you feel: beat up, battened down, fetal, furious. But just
remember, there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s not you—it’s him.
Of course you’re depressed. You know
that the news is toxic to your spirit, and you admit you’re addicted to it, but
really, with all these nonstop horribles, who wouldn’t be obsessed by political
disaster porn? Even though the news leaves you feeling not informed and
empowered, but helpless and fearful; even if your neocortex knows that Trump’s
game is to hijack your attention, and the media’s game is to monetize it;
still, your reptilian brain won’t permit you to peel your eyes from the screen,
won’t let you stop refreshing your feed, keeps you texting and posting and
tweeting and screaming, “Can you effing believe this?” Your news addiction
feels no less compulsive than, but is the reciprocal of an opioid addiction.
You’re hooked on pain.
It makes sense to be incensed. You’re
enraged by the cowardice of Republican legislators who’ve put protecting their
political skins above protecting the Constitution. You’re livid that Trump’s
pooh-poohing of “political correctness” has exempted racists, homophobes,
misogynists, anti-Semites and other haters from being shunned and shamed.
You’re infuriated by the toadies, fools, vipers and schmatta hucksters now wearing
staff passes to the West Wing. You’re angry there’s no accountability for
Trump’s blatant conflicts of interest, no punishment for stonewalling his tax
returns, no penalty for his bullying, laziness, lying, and ignorance.
No wonder you’re ambivalent. You have
empathy for voters whose struggle to make ends meet and whose loathing of
corruption helped put this president in office, but you find yourself rooting
that the real harm he’ll do them—robbing their health care, wrecking their
public schools, risking their retirement, rolling back their rights—will awaken
them to the colossal con they’ve enabled and will eventually rouse them to
resistance.
It’s perfectly normal that you’re
freaked out by how fragile American democracy is, how vulnerable the Enlightenment
machinery our Founders designed turns out to be. It’s unsettling that the power
of a free press to check political power has itself been checked by the
conquest of journalism by entertainment, the displacement of reason by ratings,
the substitution of internet anarchy and networked nihilism for the norms of
civil discourse. It’s chilling to concede that the separation of powers between
executive and legislative branches can be so completely sabotaged by one-party
rule. It’s galling to know that a switch from Trump to Clinton of only 38,873
of the 13,890,836 votes cast in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania—call it
the Kremlin margin, or the Comey gap—would have thrown the Electoral College to
Clinton. The whole master narrative of the 2016 election—Forgotten Americans
Give Trump a Mandate!—would never have drawn a breath had there been a
ridiculously tiny 0.28 percent flip. No wonder our so-called president keeps
peddling a cock-and-bull voter fraud story; he knows how puny his legitimacy
actually is.
True grit is truly exhausting. “I
can’t go on, I’ll go on,” Samuel Beckett said, but it’s awfully draining to be
whipsawed between despair and determination. One day you’re uplifted by
millions of marching women; the next, another state outlaws abortion. You’re
heartened to see so many town halls where the Indivisible movement, already
more potent than the Tea Party, is holding congressional feet to the fire, but
you’re powerless to prevent the most unfit Cabinet in our history from being
confirmed. When a senator says a Supreme Court nominee told him he was
“demoralized” by Trump’s attack on the judiciary, you let yourself be hopeful,
but when cable yakkers call that a ploy to create an aura of independence for
the judge, you feel spun like a chump.
The storm still gathering over Team
Trump’s footsie with Putin invites us to imagine a sudden end to the 45th
presidency. If evidence turns up that Trump swapped softer sanctions on Russia
for Putin's feeding his Clinton email hacks to Wikileaks, maybe Paul Ryan would
let the House vote to impeach him. Or maybe Trump’s megalomania will be so
undeniably sociopathic even to his own administration that the 25th Amendment
will be invoked to replace him. Maybe Trump’s misery in his job—White House
aides are leaking he wishes he’d never run—will culminate in a resignation. Or
maybe SNL, CNN and the dishonest New York Times will finally make his head
explode.
Then again, maybe it’s just same old
yoyo of hope and dread. You go up—okay, I go up—at the prospect that our national
nightmare will be over sooner rather than later. Then I go down at the thought
of President Pence. There’s a way out of that, though, and the prairie fire
sweeping congressional districts points the way: fight like hell, right now,
for a Democratic House or Democratic Senate, or both, in 2018. Implausible? No
one knows. But pushing to make it possible is a sure-fire prescription for
feeling better.
