As an citizen of the US of A, this week has been pretty eventful. I am an adorer of people from all walks of life, but as I have military service aged children, am an enthusiastic early adopter of crypto, and am in possession of a healthy disdain for divisionist authoritarians, well, there was a direction that I hoped things would go.
But here's the thing, I work very hard and have trained very hard to not let my internal state be dictated by external events. The only thing within the locus of my control is what I think about what is occurring. Sometimes I think I may be a little chemically imbalanced due to my propensity for optimism, and more than a few people have expressed disbelief at my ability to see the good in others, but I do indeed believe that all have the capacity to behave with virtue, courage, gratitude, wisdom, and justice.
However, this week I saw something that made me ache a bit for a good chunk of my fellow country people, they ceded the only authority one has, the control over one's viewpoint, to an extrinsic event.
And holy meltdown the fit throwing was epic.
Honestly, all the Tik Toks of wailing, hair shaving, teeth gnashing, and expressions of desire and will for oppositional suicide made me truly wonder about a lot of things. In fact, when I was messaging back and forth with a good friend about the situation, I mused this:
They are dealing with the dissonance that results when you craft your own reality, prop it up with authoritarian power structures, and foment a mindset with an echo chamber media and tribal isolationism.
Can you imagine how gutted you would feel if you had been told something was true, it was reaffirmed by everyone around you because every effort made by someone to question anything that didn't reaffirm reality according to the mob was labeled as dangerous and shouted down? It would be pretty gut-wrenching.
And it's not just one group that does this, although the current faction is much more expressive with their fit-throwing. I remember about four years ago I went to a county political party caucus meeting with a friend to learn about how the whole process works. What I found disturbed me, people were so whipped into a torrent by what the other side was doing that they too behaved viscously towards anyone who questioned the majority party line, even if those queries were genuine, of sound logic, and rationally presented.
People have always and will continue to be divided over politics, I don't expect that to change. What concerns me and is an issue I am going to focus on as I work to become a mental health clinician, is the level of functional stability decline and overall lack of resiliency exhibited by a massive amount of the public in the face of perceived loss, setbacks, or in not getting one's way.
Watching teachers scream, cry, and scare children because of an election result, watching young and old people in states of absolute devastation and terror, watching people move over things that may or may not come to pass, watching people wish hate and death upon each other, these states of extreme display remind me a lot of the behavior I witnessed in the young developing children I have tended to who lacked healthy behavioral expectations and boundaries, the end result of too much acclaim and status and not enough reality and resiliency.
There's truly a massive amount of work to do, and I'm there for it. Because at the end of the day, I truly do care about all people, and I wholeheartedly believe in the dignity and self-worth of all, even the fit throwers, because we've all been there.
