Alternate Title: The Trauma of Watching Trump News
Content Warning: I talk about finding being the first responder to a death and to an incident of sexual assault.
Prologue: For awhile now, keeping up with the news has been exhausting. Lately, it’s become more. I know the illusion of being in the present might make me overreact, but I thought it’d be nice to share reactions, appropriate, proportional, or otherwise, with each other. This is my story. As a Canadian watching the news unfold in America. And trying to make sense of it.
One day at work, I found a resident “unconscious and unresponsive.” I had to force open the door because he had fallen at the doorway on the other side. It took a moment for me to take everything in and after that, I froze. Almost as hard as forcing the door to move, I had to force myself to move. Right foot. Left foot. Hand. Phone. 911. The lady on the other end of dispatch talked me through the CPR training that I was not confident in after the 8hr certification.
We were close and he was the last person anyone was worried would die the way he did. And my mental sort of split a bit. My body was clearly agitated. I couldn’t type up the incident report properly because my hands were shaking but I definitely wasn’t conscious of all that. And then a few days later while I was doing my laundry, I realized we had very similar detergents. I didn’t even know I had smelled his clothes while in his room. For some reason my laundry was the thing to just hit me.
I struggled with that for a bit. It was weird because on one had I was sad to know that he had died and on the other I was angry that I was the one that was there. That might be too me-centred. Maybe it was wrong of me to think that way. I’m just trying to describe the situation. For me to be able to process whatever it was that was going on, I had to relearn or reaccept that life sucks and then you die. Like why did I expect bad things not to happen?
And then there was this other time where I got coerced into sex. It’s honestly the weirdest of things that haunt you. Like she had made reference to my gender as if identifying as a man meant I couldn’t say no. And, again, for some reason, the impact of the event was tied to my very confused, and probably still confused, conception of masculinity.
I am sharing parts of these moments because (1) they are intensely private and I hope I’m not giving up anyone else’s story and (2) because I wanted to express, like Orwell, that I’m not making a “frivolous statement” when I say that seeing the not-isolated incidents of the Capitol terrorists crying at the airports was traumatic for me.
When I saw the first one, it was kind of funny. Just statistically speaking, one of those dumbnuts would be so delusional as to think they could go back to their life as usual after threatening the lives of their elected officials and attacking the election itself.
But the more I saw, the more angry or frightened or disappointed or tense or anxious I got.
To be honest, the election of Trump was a shocker. But I could make sense of it. Troll voters. Apathetic or unconcerned opposition voters. The societal and economic conditions. A backlash to the first wave of BLM protests and eight years of a Black president. The insidious amplification of anti-immigration and xenophobic rhetoric post Arab-Winter. The gaming of the incentive structures of social media sites that value controversy as “engagement.” The business interests that inevitably buddy up with fascists. The racialized religion that provides a cover to rationalize one’s behaviour to self. The echo chambers we’ve built after leaving the collective scheduling of the Channel Two TV guide. I don’t know. Regardless of the reasons or their relative weight—regardless of what I knew back then—I knew that capable historians, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and the like probably would be able to make sense of what happened. Make sense enough even to be able to teach in a high school social science class.
That’s a big part of why I’ve been posting so much recently. This season of JonRa’s politically charged posts has been motivated mostly by me trying to make sense of things—or, at least, describe what’s happening so I can understand what I feel about it. Before, that wasn’t a major priority. I could make sense of and, in some sense, accept that racism was alive and well. Even fascism, I guess. Those too tend to go hand-in-hand.
But the airport crying? Like these are mass delusions. They can’t tell reality from fiction. And I don’t want to get into an epistemological black hole. Theories of knowledge be damned. Just how can someone, a person like me, think that after an act or terrorism or revolution, whichever way they want to define it, how could they then think they could just re-enter society? Are these identities kept separate from each other that much? Is terrorism/revolution a weekend hobby?
Some of these people were always crackpot theorists, but most of them were normal people 4-5 years ago. There was and is no litmus test for future delusion. How can one presidency induce this much psychosis?
I know citing Orwell about politics, especially in the last four years, is cliché, but he was wrong. History, as in the archiving of events, didn’t stop in 1936. I know that was more of a rhetorical line against the pseudo-History of totalitarian states where “those who control the present control the past and those that control the past control the future.” He wasn’t trying to predict life in 2021 and there was no way that he could have foreseen the rate of technological progress or its effect on how we perceive and archive the present.
It’s just, like History ending is the opposite of our problems. Right now, we have multiple Histories being written. We don’t have one history with multiple analyses like Orwell’s understanding of pre-1936 or the singular analysis of a history under constant revision in his 1984. We have multiple analyses of multiple histories that seem to run parallel. Not competing or interacting in any way.
Even if you reach out to the other stream, there’s not much you can do in terms of reconciliation. How can you come to an agreement, even one of disagreement, if you have no foundation to discuss upon? The only hope is to convert or to be converted.
There was this one reporter covering the QAnon hijacking of the #SavetheChildren hashtag. She had connected with some of the organizers. When the project was winding down, she broke that journalistic neutrality and told him that odds are she’ll have to close all her social media accounts after she publishes her report because of the threats and harassment that always follows. She asked if he could not do that.
The organizer was civil. He said, “of course.” Then right after he added, “I don’t think you’re a pedophile, but your boss is.”
Normally, this sort of positive intergroup contact breaks down that us. vs. them dynamic. But now it seems that even if there are more exceptions than the rule, they would rather continue to make exceptions.
Prophecy after prophecy has failed. Lie after lie has been exposed. And Trump supporters have been met with disappointment after Great Disappointment from the wall to “rounding the corner” on covid. Have they really invested that much into Trump? I get that people’s hopes have been put on him and communities have formed around that, but we’ve seen communities and their members shift away after failed predictions.
At the very least, voting is secret. You could wear your MAGA hat and vote blue and no one would know. Yet over 74 million people still voted for Trump. He has genuine supporters. Sure, the ones willing to “Storm the Capitol” might be a minority. I don’t know. But it seems like there is a non-trivial number of people that have internalized the delusions.
The thing is, I don’t think you could function under that worldview. To be able to live your day-to-day while holding onto even a fraction of Trump’s claims would be so destabilizing. Allies today are enemies tomorrow. The deep state is always after you. Antifa thugs are just around the corner. Like to be able to function, they must have compartmentalized those delusions so completely that I doubt that even they could reach across the competing histories in their own lives.
I’m kind of ashamed to admit. I was really scared about deepfakes and voco and that kind of stuff. But Fox and OAN and the Trump media network didn’t use and didn’t need to use them. World-building has been around a long time. I don’t know if it’s ever been used like this.
Maybe the parallel historicizing needed someone like Trump to get elected to cement itself in society. But now it doesn’t matter who’s on top. After Biden’s election, the alt-history kicked into high gear. You don’t need to control the present to control the past anymore. And I don’t know what that means for the future.
I should end it there. It has a nice final-sentence vibe. But to say “I’m scared about the future” is so vague it’s disingenuous. Why the future scares me today is because my faith in community has been shaken.
I grew up feeling bad a lot of the time. I still feel bad a lot of the time. And I put my hope in finding a community where I can belong while being myself. It’s slowly become this organizing principle in my thoughts, my political leanings, my understanding of economics. I gravitated to research or literature that talked about the value of community on the micro, meso, and macro scaled. I even found some that supported the view that if I can just find a community, maybe I can make that part of me that feels bad go away. But my faith in the power of community has been shaken. Like we can’t seem to face each other as people who are just as vulnerable as us and that we are as much a threat to them as they are to us. Or maybe, even scarier, is that we can and it just doesn’t help.
Additional Readings
Orwell, Looking Back on the Spanish War
Orwell, 1984
On the Media, With #SaveTheChildren Rallies, QAnon Sneaks Into The Offline World
The Great Disappointment [leading to the Seventh Day Adventists]
Festinger, Riecken, Schachter, When Prophecy Fails
Hidden Brain, A Conspiracy of Silence
Hidden Brain, The Secret Life of Secrets
Allport, Intergroup Contact Theory
And like Levinas type thinkers.
Wake Up Sheeple! 