After Trump And The Pandemic We Need To Deal With Our Post-Traumatic Stress
"It only recently dawned upon me that all of us -- you, I, and so many of the people we know also emerged from this dark ride with internal damage"
Editor’s note: I’m publishing this Members Only article for free today because I think it is one of Bob’s finest. In the wake of the Covid pandemic, almost everyone I know is suffering from some kind of stress disorder. A lot of people I know are unable to sleep properly, and many still have real trouble going out without a mask on. The tremendously difficult year we’ve all been through was greatly exacerbated by the derangement of the Trump administration and I think it is going to take a long time to recover from it all. Bob’s piece perfectly expresses the anxiety, anger and trauma we’ve all gone through. - Ben
After Four Years Of Chaos And Pain, We Need To Deal With Our Post-Traumatic Stress
by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC -- Over the weekend, I took my first steps toward re-acclimating to the new post-vaccination normal, the same process so many of us are dealing with after too many years of trauma. For the first time since February 2020, I sat inside a restaurant, ate food, and drank coffee without a mask, surrounded by other maskless people.
It was familiar, of course, but more than a little unnerving. Suffice to say, I was happy to be outside again afterward. But while inside, in those conditions, I had several flashbacks to recurring COVID nightmares in which I was in a public place without a mask, and once I realized it in the dream, it became a frantic scramble to find a mask to wear before I was infected. These are the sorts of dreams we have when we’re traumatized -- especially events that are completely out of our control.
And it occurred to me that I might have some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. In fact, I believe tens of millions of us do, too.
I’ve overcome a lot of terrible things in my relatively short lifetime: two devastating house fires, a bankruptcy, a house foreclosure, I’ve been hit by a car while bike riding, my best friend and podcast partner died unexpectedly... I know what trauma looks like and it really doesn’t get easier. It simply becomes more livable, even though the pain lingers and the scars form. The past four years, the Trump era, took a chunk out of me. While I’ve often discussed damage to our nation, it only recently dawned upon me that all of us -- you, I, and so many of the people we know also emerged from this dark ride with internal damage. Psychological hemorrhaging. Post-traumatic stress.
For more than a year, we trained ourselves to look upon other humans as exhaling poison. Even with masks, there were people walking around the grocery store or at work who were breathing toxins that, in the right quantity at the right time, could kill us or, short of that, leave us with myriad side-effects. Until recently, we had no sense of when it might end, no sense of what “normal” might look like when it does, and even less confidence that when the next emergency occurs we’ll be capable of handling it like responsible society-conscious grownups.
We awakened every day to news of the complete destabilization of American life, foisted upon us all by a maniacal fascist dictator whose unpredictability and incompetence made us feel as though we were perpetually about to fall over backwards in our chairs: the nauseating rush of adrenaline sparked by existential uncertainty. This kind of panicked imbalance takes a toll. We never knew when the other authoritarian shoe would drop, and whether we’d all survive. Even in the beginning, long before COVID, there were threats of nuclear “fire and fury” -- that alone was enough to haunt our dreams and flood us with unnatural quantities of cortisol, slowly shredding our bodies like shards of glass in our veins. That’s how it started.
Daily indignities, routine subversions of democracy, and hourly fits of madness erupting from the bully pulpit followed for too many years until the thing we feared the most dropped into our laps: an unprecedented global emergency at a time when our presidential leadership was completely ill-equipped to deal with it. Galactically worse than George W. Bush’s laziness in responding to Hurricane Katrina, we watched Trump awkwardly stumble his way through regional disasters in which he tossed paper towels at hurricane victims while referring to the deadly storms as “water dumps” -- always making it about himself and never the victims. We screamed at our computers as he repeatedly ranted about raking forests during the California wild-fires. Then, just when you thought he couldn’t get any more vindictive, he threatened to withhold federal aid to any state or territory where officials were mean to him. Consequently, there was never any expectation that he could handle a crisis of any size or scope, much less a global pandemic using the paint-by-numbers routine employed by previous administrations.
COVID-19 erupted in our lives like an invisible mushroom cloud. All at once, we had no choice but to watch in horror as a pandemic circulated the world, killing millions, while a professional con-artist badly bungled the response here, turning it into a daily TV show and leaving a catastrophic 600,000 Americans dead. 40,000 American children lost a parent to COVID.
We spent the past year disinfecting our groceries and fearing our neighbors. We lost friends and family-members to the disease, while the president encouraged his supporters to ignore safety protocols, indulging his disciples in order to grease the skids for re-election. Shipping or receiving important packages through the U.S. Postal Service became a roll of the dice. The threat of unmitigated foreign cyber-attacks loomed as a wild card in the presidential election. Would our fellow voters do the right thing and reject the perpetrator of so much terror? And would he leave office if he lost? Jesus, I can’t believe we escaped all that as intact as we did.
And then there was an armed invasion and occupation of Congress, ordered by Trump and carried out in part by his army of easily-deceived dupes, followed closely by a mass-disenfranchisement plot orchestrated by Trump’s henchmen in various state legislatures aimed at potentially returning the villains to power.
During it all, we not only had to navigate our own pain, but through social media we also absorbed the pain suffered by our e-friends. It’s worth considering that we’ve never really been exposed to such vast quantities of hurt before, given how COVID was the first global disaster recorded on social media. So, the damage was naturally compounded by our human empathy.
The human reaction to pain is often to forget it and move on. To bury it. But healing is mandatory before we do. We’ve each been damaged by all this and, no matter how functional we might feel, there’s zero chance that it’ll just vanish on its own. The only thing we can do to recover now is to face all of this and reconcile with it. Whether that means talking to a professional therapist or forming support groups, or campaigning for justice -- to make sure the men and women who did this to us are permanently marginalized -- we have no choice but to help ourselves and our society to heal.
While reconciling with the past, we can better recognize what not to do in the future. Fine-tuning our ability to spot the warning signs of despotism and the societal cancer it manifests is how we keep history from repeating itself.
Step one in this endeavor is recognizing that we’re not alone. You’re not alone.
None of us are.
Start there.
Read an excerpt from the latest for Banter Members:
Can Mark Zuckerberg Please F*ck Off?
It is one thing to live in this social media Panopticon, but it is another to be reminded of it by being forced to look at things like this on your newsfeed.
by Ben Cohen
Most people’s lives these days are controlled by Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple. These big tech companies track our movements, sell us products they think we’ll like, and anticipate behavior using incredibly sophisticated algorithms. In return we can order toilet paper with the click of a button, message friends around the world, search the web for any piece of information we want, and use our phones to buy our groceries.
Is it a fair trade? Almost certainly not, but when you have kids, a high stressed job or live far away from friends the benefits are oftentimes too seductive to pass up.
Of all the tech companies Facebook is by far and away the most evil. This isn’t hyperbole — the company is truly, truly awful on so many levels it almost defies description. From illegally “sharing” (read: selling) user data to other big tech companies to helping right wing/Russian disinformation groups spread fake news during the 2016 election, Facebook has almost singlehandedly brought Western civilization to its knees. The company destroyed thousands of legitimate independent news sites back in 2017/18 (take a look at what they did to The Daily Banter as an example), and is now responsible for ensuring far right websites get significantly more play on the network than liberal ones.
The problem is, Facebook also provides users with an excellent experience when they log on and continues to provide more ways of connecting with people than ever before…
This is an excerpt of today’s Members Only piece. Continue reading hereand get a 2 month free trial on a Banter Membership!: