The other day I saw a post somewhere on Lemmy, it seems to have been taken down or at least I’m unable to find it again, by some dickwad asking, pretty clearly it bad faith, why people felt like they needed the day off from work or school after the election. It was full of him bitching about basically people being too soft if they couldn’t handle their feelings being hurt and that sort of garbage. This was basically going to be my reply to that.
I work in 911 dispatch, that should tell you that I’m the kind of person who can handle stress well, i’ve dealt with some crazy shit both at work and in my personal life, I don’t think anyone is going to claim I’m someone who’s easily rattled.
And still, despite all of the things I’ve seen, done, heard, and been a part of, I have never felt as physically sick from stress as I did watching the election results coming in Tuesday night.
I was at work, and in the midst of it as it was becoming clear that Trump was going to win, right around 2AM, I got one of those really insane calls, the kind of thing that makes the evening news and that they make true crime TV shows out of, that normally leaves even a hardened tough guy like me a little bit shaken-up, and all I felt was relief because something finally came along to wrench my mind from the election.
I woke up the next day still feeling sick to my stomach. My wife woke up in tears. I spent the day feeling like I was lost in a fog, and by the next day the fog lifted giving way to a simmering rage that I’m not sure will ever go away entirely. Luckily Wednesday and Thursday were my scheduled days off this week, I genuinely don’t think I could have worked Wednesday night feeling like I felt.
I’m an old boy scout, I took the scout motto of “be prepared” to heart, I believe that most people don’t really rise to the occasion but instead they fall to their level of training, and all the other sayings and such about preparedness and self-reliance and all of that, and I’ve prepared myself so that I am rarely at a complete loss of what to say or do in any given situation, I have plenty of training and life experience to fall back on.
No one ever trains you how to watch democracy die.
Or how to handle something like ¾ of your country turning their back on your most deeply-held values either by actively voting against them or by not even caring enough to bother showing up to vote.
And nothing prepares you to look around you in a 911 dispatch center, surrounded by people that people are supposed to be able to trust to stand for justice, safety, law, order, security, fairness, equity, compassion, basic human decency, who are supposed to stand up for and provide assistance to vulnerable members of our community when they need it most, who like to pat themselves on the back for being the “calm voice in the night” or the “thin gold line”…
… And realizing that most of them either don’t care or are actively rooting for a man who stands for the exact opposite of all of those values.
For the first time I can remember I feel well and truly lost. I tend to be the guy people turn to when they have a problem because I know how to fix it or I at least know how to find someone who can. I don’t know how to fix this, and I certainly don’t have a guy for this. I’m gonna keep on soldiering on until I figure it out or I guess I’ll die trying, but I really don’t know what my path forward from here is going to be. And if I need some time to figure this shit out. I certainly won’t think less of anyone who needs the same.
And everyone deals with different kinds of stresses differently and more or less successfully than anyone else. Despite the crazy shit I’ve managed to deal with, there’s other more mundane situations that some people can handle just fine that I can’t hack. Put me in a regular office environment with reports, paperwork, deadlines and presentations, and I’d probably be burned out in a week. It’s like the old saying about trying to judge a fish by its ability to climb trees.
It’s ok to not be ok right now, honestly I think anyone who says they’re ok right now is either faking it or a psychopath. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, if you have it in you, try to check in on others to make sure they’re doing ok and getting what they need too. The only way we’re getting through this is together.
Can’t fix what ain’t broken or is fundamentally broken.
Currently, intelligence and the ability to reason seems to be an unintended side effect of evolution. At its core, the sense of self is in contradiction with the natural state of things, because it can and will go against the other at any point.
If we consider the natural state as a river flowing in a set direction, then free will can be considered as an object within that river which can divert its flow, obstruct it or even aspire to reverse it. However, swimming against the current is tiresome and rarely brings out the sought results. So, eventually, the obstruction gives way and is smoothed out into nothingness.
Sadly the natural state is currently seen as hurtling inescapably towards decay. Due to this, it’s easier to self-destruct, it’s easier to accelerate the flow and it’s easier to be horrible than to take responsibility for decency.
Honestly, we indeed are our worst enemies. But the natural state of the world itself ain’t that much of an inspiration either.
Not everyone wants to be a hero and seeing the ones we have being destroyed left and right, well, it’s kind of hard to want being one. So we fall. Because fuck it, we deserve to, don’t we?
If you look at it from this perspective, there’s no deserving anything, things just happen.
Intelligence evolved because it’s great for an individual to navigate their social circles. But we’re unable to apply it in larger groups. As states, nations, large inernational groups, we are utterly stupid.
Yet there are precedents where people were able to organize on international level in a meaningful and positive way. Let’s mention the end of freons or positive internet projects like Wikipedia.
We might be headed into darker times now and I feel a lot of panic. It’s important to remember that change for the better is possible and happens from time to time.