Election PTSD and Aversion to Hope

Have you been feeling a grasping, cold anxiety over the last several weeks? Has it been getting worse and worse, even as the polls and 538 show the likelihood of a Biden win climbing ever upward? Are you afraid to hope?

Yeah, me too. You’re not alone. You’ve just developed a post-traumatic reaction to an election that went very, very wrong.

It’s only natural. It’s a simple physiological reflex, meant to protect you: just like that time that you had a quesarita left over from yesterday and then threw up, never again to be able to face another quesarito, your body is remembering and trying to keep you from experiencing that same agony again. You felt hope once. Glorious. genuine hope: hope that we were about to elect our first woman president. It was so close that we could practically hear the first State of the Union already.

That went… poorly.

There have been countless other moments of hope since then that also went horribly wrong: hope that the Senate would be honorable. Hope that the Mueller Report would change everything. Hope, again and again, that the right thing might happen, that justice, norms, the rule of law, simple human decency would in the end prevail. And it kept not happening. And not happening. Things just kept getting horribly, unimaginably worse.

And now here we are. Another election. And that rising sense that maybe it will finally be OK turns to terror, because we all know what happened the last time we felt that way, and if it turns out the same way as it did last time, that’s the end of American democracy, the end of voting rights and minority rights, maybe even the end of our biosphere. We’ve lost so much already. So much that we’d always taken for granted that is now in peril.

It still might turn out OK. It might be wonderful! Good things can still happen in the world. But we have to make them happen.

Vote. Vote. Vote.

And don’t let your guard down after that. Because all the bad things aren’t going to magically go away, even if we win the election. It’s a beginning, not an end.

We have our work cut out for us, now and on November 3 and on January 22 and for the rest of our lives. But you can’t create what you don’t dare to imagine. Hope is the first step. Be brave.