Category: Sometimes I Flirt with Politics

I’ve heard time and again from angry conservative trolls on the Internet that they had to live for eight long years under the tyranny of an Obama reign, so, apparently, Trump is our karma for them not liking our nation’s first African American president.  Say what you will about Obama’s really, really not good education policy or his love of Wall Street or his occasional foreign policy missteps, he represented this country with a grace and dignity that will shine brightly long after he is gone.

In his place, straight out of some modern day mashup of Game of Thrones and Goodfellas (the Russia edition) and The Real Housewives of Queens, we now have a President Trump.  It’s still hard to wrap my snowflake head around that truth.  Typing the word President next to the name Trump hurts my fingertips a bit. But, alas, here we are, it is our collective reality that cannot be ignored.

Why?  Because Trump is a man that demands our full attention.  It is essential to him, like air and KFC.  Anyone who has been in a relationship with someone who has narcissistic tendencies knows that they can live no other way.  Jeb Bush called it last year when he said if Trump were elected he would be the “chaos president.”  Check and check.

So if you’re not a fan of reality television and you find yourself just a wee bit distressed with day-to-day life under our chaos president, you might recognize yourself in my earlier post, “Do You Have Political PTSD?”  The next questions that spring to mind are plentiful — What do I do?  How do I manage my PTSD?  Will this ever end?  When will the GOP wake up?  How can I choose hope when I feel hopeless?  And my personal favorite, What in the Sam Hill is happening in America?, followed closely by, Have we lost our damn minds?

I don’t have all the answers, and if you’ve followed me for any amount of time, it is clear that I am struggling with balancing the politics myself (grateful to any of you still reading me, as I know I am a bit heavy on the politics these days), but I try and will keep trying.  Here are a few tips from your favorite blogger who knows more than she would like about PTSD:

• Set Boundaries.  For the love of all that is holy, step away from the news every once in a while.  Turn that Twitter off.  The snide and anger is palpable over there and really toxic.  Don’t engage in every political post on Facebook.  Try not to jump down the rabbit hole from article to article, each one leaving you feeling more doomed than the one before.  Boundaries.  Moderation.
• Find Your People.  Seek people out who you know and trust whose values mirror your own.  Even if you don’t talk politics, just laugh and hang and provide moral support.  People you love who mirror in their lives what is important in your own life is important when you feel beaten up.
• Do Something.  It’s too easy these days to become overwhelmed by the enormity of it all.  And when you’re overwhelmed, apathy can begin to feel like a release.  Sometimes feeling numb is better than feeling bereft and doomed.  I feel best when I have marched in a protest or tried to contribute something towards people made more vulnerable under a Trump presidency.  This spring my husband and I trained in a program to help new refugees relocating to Chicago.  We may never be called upon, given the uncertainty of our national policy, but we are ready just in case.  Also, call you elected officials.  And keep calling them.
• Teach Your Kids.  Kindness and compassion, always in all ways. Tolerance.  Acceptance.  Curiosity.  Engagement.  Protest with them.  Show them what civil disobedience looks like and why it exists.
• Consult Mother Nature.  I almost always feel better after being outside.  Sunshine.  Green.  Water.  A good hike.  A scenic drive.  Go to the beach.  Feel the breeze.  Sit on your front stoop for a few minutes after the sun goes down and watch the fireflies. Remind yourself that Mother Nature is precious and needs our protection before we burst into fiery flames or wash away in the ever growing oceans or end up like the dinosaurs.  Too much?  Sorry.  I clearly need a walk.
• Acknowledge Your Grief.  Most everyone I know who rejects a Trump presidency loves someone close to them who voted for the man.  There is a real disconnect that is harming families and relationships.  Hell, before he was tossed, we learned that even Scaramucci’s wife filed for divorce partially based on their political differences.  Knowing that someone you love supports Trump and his agenda can be a bitter pill to swallow.  Tread lightly.  Manage what you can.  Feel the loss.  Try and find any common ground, if possible.  If it’s not possible now, take a break.
• Trust Your Gut.  Seek out reputable news sources.  You know the drill.  Some may call the mainstream media fake news, but I’ll take solid reporting and accountability over talking head pundits any day.  I prefer print over television.  Beware of falling into the biased traps both ends of the political spectrum are guilty of generating, and for the sake of your fellow political PTSD sufferers, do not share that crap on social media.  Sift through and find the gold, like this take by Republican Senator Jeff Flake.
• Patience, Grasshopper.  There seems to be a bit of mass hysteria amongst many of my liberal friends who seem to think they will wake up one day and Trump will have disappeared and our great national nightmare will be over.  And every morning when they wake up and Trump is still president, they are angrier than the day before.  Nope.  It doesn’t work like that.  Every day we don’t hear a peep from Robert Mueller is a day that he is busy at work, painstakingly investigating and connecting the dots.  This is a good thing.  Change your expectations.  Be grateful for the process.
• Practice Patriotism.  What does patriotism mean to you?  What does it look like?  The GOP does not get to own the red, white, and blue. Liberals are just as capable of national pride and it doesn’t have to involve wrapping yourself in the flag.  It might mean reading some history.  Volunteering for a local campaign.  Thanking a veteran.  Donating to Planned Parenthood.  Marching in a protest.  If you are proud to be an American, don’t take it for granted.  Our democracy and way of living is much more vulnerable than we realized, which demands our action.
• Go To the Joy.  Find it.  It’s out there.  Seek it out even when it is hiding.  Remind yourself that the world is still a beautiful place.  You are worthy of joy and light.  You need it, most especially on those days you feel the most cynical.  Keep trying.

Mankind’s history is full of struggles and moral forks in the road.  On September 11, 2001 I found peace and solace sitting in a memorial service surrounded by older adults who had lived through Pearl Harbor.  Last week, in the midst of one of the hardest weeks of Trump’s presidency, I found inspiration and humility in going to a museum exhibit around the civil rights photography of Maria Varela.  None of this is normal.  Resist as best you can, to the best of your abilities.  But at the center of it all, do not neglect the toll it is taking on you.

Last week was bad.  Like really, really, colossally bad.  A humdinger, doozy of a week.  One day I stayed in my pajamas and had my nose glued to Internet news reports. Most nights I had trouble sleeping.  My tolerance for other people was limited, at best. It’s not healthy, which I can readily admit, but I feel at a loss to stop it.

I think I have political PTSD.  Scratch that.  My informed and educated opinion is that I have political PTSD.

I first learned about PTSD as a grad student when I was assigned to the PTSD Clinic at a local VA hospital for my year long clinical rotation.  I was a young, earnest, enthusiastic clinician in my mid-20s tasked to work with Viet Nam veterans coping with PTSD in their mid-40s.  Trauma, anxiety, substance abuse, depression, guilt, anger issues — these were the parting gifts of war time combat.

In retrospect, I had no business being there, but I tried hard and therapists have to learn.  Thank goodness for supervision.  I was responsible for a number of individual clients and a support group.  The vets kept coming back, week after week, and I kept trying and learning and, yes, sometimes failing.

My second dance with PTSD came after the death of my daughter when my son was a young toddler.  Every ache and pain he communicated filled me with terror.  Like the time he was limping and we couldn’t explain it.  We went straight to the ER where, because of his family history and symptom presentation, they gave him a full work up, including x-rays.  It ended with a doctor telling us to buy him better shoes.  I literally walked out of that hospital with a prescription to shop at Nordstrom’s.  No joke.

Or that other time my boy woke up complaining of headaches three days in a row (a common sign of pediatric brain tumors) and our daughter’s oncologist, who kindly took my call, offered to provide him an MRI, if it would bring comfort and confirmation that he was healthy.  He said it best, “You can’t erase what you know.”

So, last week, when the walls felt like they were closing in on me and my patience and tolerance for people was relatively absent and the only thing I really wanted to do was take to my bed, I knew what I was feeling.  The helplessness and hopelessness and lack of control.  The fear and anxiety and anger and irritability.  PTSD.

Living through this political chaos where bad things out of our control are happening at breakneck speed has triggered those things inside me that felt similarly when we were guiding our daughter through her cancer treatment, in those days when we learned her disease was terminal.  This is how PTSD works.

Call me crazy, or a snowflake, or a libtard, or weak, or whatever comes to mind, in the end, I will wear all those labels as a badge of honor.  At my core, I am engaged by politics and social justice, even when, in a political climate like the one we currently find ourselves in, it can be consuming and self-destructive.

Truth is, I have a hard time relating to folks who don’t seem to care or are not interested in what is happening in our country right now.  I see photos of donuts (why did people keep posting photos of donuts last week?!) or summer fun on the Facebook and I think to myself, “How do they do it?”

And, to be clear, it’s not so much that I was envious, that I wanted to be easy and breezy myself, but I wanted these folks to wake the hell up, put down their romance novels, and pay attention to what was happening in our nation’s capital for a moment or two.  An old friend said to me last week, “I worry about you.”  My immediate response was, “I worry about all of us.”

Ugh.  It can be hard to be so engaged.  There is a real cost to it, but I don’t know how to exist in the world in any other way.

What helps me, when my political equilibrium is off, is to step away for a bit. Now, mind you, it’s easier for me to say and do that this week given the votes of Senators Murkowski, Collins, and McCain.  And, yes, I stayed awake late into the night to see how that particular cliffhanger would end. But, not to disappoint, the GOP is already chattering about how to revive a repeal and replace bill jeopardizing the ACA.  It’s like the worst zombie that will not die in a bad horror film.

Having access to the Internet via a device we hold in the palm of our hands and carry with us everywhere is not so healthy for those of us who tend to lean in to politics.  The updates and breaking news coming out of the White House these days is staggering.  A friend of mine jokes that every time he showers another bombshell drops.  It’s funny because it’s true.

Make no mistake, this is not normal.  This is not how our nation is supposed to operate and this is not how our nation has ever operated in the past. There is no precedent here.  Not to be flip, but this is not your grandparent’s political scandal we’re dealing with here.  Nope, not even close.  If you, too, are feeling overwhelmed and hopeless, it means you are paying attention.

My personal mantra, the one that helped me cope with the death of my daughter, is “choose hope.”  I cling to hope like a sailor lost at sea.  I hope for an America that stops operating in chaos.  I hope that our allies around the globe will have patience as we sort this mess out.  I hope that democracy is a verb, capable of bending and stretching and popping up should it collapse.  I hope that at our core we are better than this.

So, yes, I am experiencing political PTSD.  It’s no joke and it’s unhealthy and it makes being a mother and wife and sister and friend and writer harder.  Misery loves company, so raise you hand if you, too, are experiencing political PTSD.  For those of us who are, it helps to talk about it.  Be aware of the symptoms.  Know that they are real and legitimate.  You are not alone.

Tomorrow I will write about how to better manage your political PTSD.  

I’m not a fan of this administration, which is news to no one who knows me or reads what I write.  That extends to the newly named White House Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  Full disclosure, to me, she comes across as cold, mean, irritable, obtuse, and condescending, happily carrying the water for her boss.  But my personal impressions are neither here nor there.  They’re just that — mine, and inconsequential to what others think.

That said, I cringed yesterday morning as I watched a clip of her new boss, Anthony Scaramucci, who was just named as Communications Director for the administration.  His job is to keep folks focused on the message.  As in singular.  Message, not messages.  There has been more than a bit of mixed messaging (not to mention those leaks!) coming from the White House in past months. Scaramucci is the guy charged to keep it tight moving forward.

Word on the street is that Huckabee Sanders, her old boss Sean Spicer, and chief of staff Reince Preibus were adamantly opposed to the hire. Spicer resigned immediately after the news was announced.  Other rumors speculate that Scaramucci is being groomed to take over for Preibus.  But again, that is word on the street information, purely speculative.

Anyway.

At the tail end of a thirty minute interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Scaramucci was asked whether or not cameras would be allowed back into the briefings, as has been the custom, and as was allowed on Friday during his first official press briefing as Communications Director.  This is how Scaramucci responded:

.@Scaramucci to WH press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders: “I’d like to continue to use the hair and make up person” https://t.co/wiXGTpKYBq

— CNN (@CNN) July 23, 2017

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Oh no he didn’t.  Oh, yes, he did.

I’ve watched this clip a few times and each time I come away with the same impression of watching a man on national television using the platform to slam his employee, a woman, for her hair and makeup.  He is employing snark to humiliate his female subordinate. Publicly.  Without shame.  Cue the Internet outrage.

Scaramucci tweeted out his explanation in response to said Internet outrage:

For the record, I was referring to my hair and make up and the fact that I like the make up artist. I need all the help I can get! #humor

— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) July 23, 2017

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For someone who was just named Communications Director for the White House, America’s home, if you need a tweet to clarify your comments, well, you’re not quite meeting your performance expectations, now, are you?  And the assertion that he was employing humor suggests that if you find yourself outraged, you are clearly humorless, which is a common justification used by those trying to bully and intimidate others.

If you ask me, and no one did, but here I am offering my two cents anyway, this was a power move from a man who knew his employee had lobbied against him.  This is a man putting a woman in her place, using a tool as old as time, discrediting her appearance. It’s on page eleven of the Trump Management Manual.  Scaramucci has learned from the master.

Full disclosure, I am too tired to be outraged about this.  I am growing immune to the paper cuts of incivility that flourish in this Trump White House.  Open hostility towards women, people of color, liberals, Democrats, the poor, the disabled, the elderly, well, that’s just business as usual these days, in this America I hardly recognize, where our President tells us again and again how great we are.