It's the day before the presidential inauguration. The left-progressive sites and thinkers I follow brim today with advice for those of us dreading the next four years. Most of it boils down to "don't give in to despair" and "make a joyful practice part of your daily life."
The Guardian featured advice from various folk. Ece Temelkuran (a veteran of Erdogan's takeover in Turkey) urges vigilance: This time around, she writes,
you’ll notice that the new morality created in the White House trickles down to the people. The fundamental moral values you assumed were non-negotiable will be debated shamelessly. They will not right away cancel women’s rights, but they will begin to float questions about those rights. They will not destroy the rule of law tomorrow afternoon, but you’ll hear Trump’s pundits say how courts are slowing down the process of “making America great again”. Trump will not walk into the White House with military boots, but here and there, you’ll see more police violence on campuses and hear people saying, “Well, the protesters were crossing the line anyway.” The political debate will be turned into such a mess that you’ll forget that in the 21st century, fascism comes to power not with goose steps but through elaborate dance moves.
This echoes counsel from the last round in 2017: Keep insisting, This is not normal. One of the hard lessons I learned from the last four years relates to the fragility of moral shock and outrage. So many of us thought that January 6, 2021, signaled the End of Trump as a serious player in US politics. The white supremacist fascist undercurrents so many of us saw in his MAGA populism finally breached the surface, breaking windows, beating up security personnel, and claiming the rotunda for themselves. He can't come back from that, surely.
Oh, but he could. Oh, but he did. The Orwellian rewrite of Jan 6 and of Trump/MAGA demonstrates how weak even the hottest outrage is given time. Trump will be sworn in in the same rotunda that the Q-Anon Shaman occupied four years ago.
And I get that we have to balance This is not normal! with a serenity-prayer awareness of those things that are not in our control. I don't say we should accept this shift, but we at least must endure it, adapt to it.
Temelkuran again:
Meanwhile, in about one or two years, you will have shouted “No” so often and against so many things that you will be exhausted. Many will ask again, “So, where is hope?” However, you’ll realise that this time, it is not hope but something more essential that is lost: faith – in politics and your people. And that is the loss that will turn you into a neutral element, a zero in the political equation.
So, this is a friendly warning to stop the emotional spiralling in its early stages. Try to put self-sabotaging emotions in the freezer for four years. Your job is not to have quarrels with Trump supporters now or get pissed off with your side. If I may, your job is to replace your anger with attention. Trump surely will drive you crazy every day with new outlandish stuff, but that is only showmanship. The dangerous bit happens through the change in the institutions. Keep your eye on the institutions.
Loss of faith, she says, is somehow worse even than loss of hope. It reminds me of my psychotherapist sister's distinction between burnout (you're working to hard/doing too much) and demoralization (you no longer believe in the worth or goodness of the thing/institution you work for). Demoralization strikes harder, deeper, she says, because we can't self-care our way out of this loss of faith.
"Replace anger with attention." I think of my favorite quote from Dorothy Parker: "The cure for boredom is curiosity." Brady Whitton (pastor at First UMC in Baton Rouge) calls curiosity--focused, open attention--one of the few things that can get us out of the armadillo-ball defensive curl caused by fear, hate, anomie, and acedia.
Attention taxes energy reserves, though. I can't keep my sensors fully open all the time, not when a proven tactic of Trump, Inc. involves broadcasting polluted messaging. By design, the firehose of falsehoods where truth gets mixed up with nonsense chaff and toxicity, attempts to burn out our capacity for attention and curiosity. The defense here involves cultivating protective respite. We require joy-causing (non-useful! non-productive!) practices not as some kind of luxurious self care but as essential spiritual nutrition.
I'm gonna try to get some of that in today and tomorrow, letting myself think on better things (MLK's legacy, for instance) than the coming freeze.
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