It’s Taken a Toll
Well, this has been quite a week. Quite a season, really.
Tuesday’s election was a culmination of so many weeks of campaigning, so many facts and opinions and critiques and promises flung about, so many political headlines and commercials and debates. By the time I went to bed Tuesday night I was mostly just glad the campaigning was over, regardless of which candidate won.
Most of the next two days I felt very little – in relation to the election or anything else. I was on automatic pilot. Not present to myself or my surroundings or the people with whom I interacted in the ways I’d like to be. I voted for Kerry, and am troubled by most of what the Bush administration does and doesn’t stand for, but my response to Bush’s win was mostly intellectual. “What a time to be alive!” I reasoned to myself. “It’s in times of conflict, times of turmoil, times of national and international upheaval and crisis that humanity gets shaken awake from its slumber, and moves to care and act on its convictions. The interest and turnout in this election demonstrates exactly this. These next four years and the ongoing global consequences of them could very well make this country more awake than I’ve ever seen it in my lifetime.” For my part, my interactions with others were painted with this attitude.
Until last night.
Last evening I went to hear Amy Goodman, host of the radio show “Democracy Now,” lead a post election discussion. The drive there included a very angry woman yelling at me through her open window for what she thought was an attempt at cutting in her line to get a better parking place (not what I was doing; my lane was ending and I was respectfully trying to avoid driving into mud); she was willing to bash my car rather than let me in her lane (of course I backed off and waited for a more amiable space to open up).
By the time I reached the hall the room was so packed I had to stand with a couple hundred others in the lobby, shoulder to shoulder, listening without ever actually seeing Goodman or those she interviewed. Four fire marshals kept pushing the crowd away from the doors.
The presenters were articulate and well-prepared. The questions Goodman asked were incisive, witty and wise. And the entire time, a couple of folks in the lobby, disgruntled by the election’s outcome, hurled bitter, sarcastic comments toward no one in particular in response to nearly everything being said. When they weren’t talking, they were shaking their heads at their feet or sighing dramatically toward the ceiling. A couple of times I thought they might explode.
I stayed for an hour of panel discussion and a half hour of open-mic dialogue before leaving. I felt tired, and walked back to my car with that quiet intuition that a “last straw” had somehow found my back.
I wasn’t home two minutes before my husband made an innocent comment I took as a personal challenge, and I snapped back a mean retort before ending the conversation and walking to our bedroom, crawling under the covers and discovering I was heaving with tears.
I bawled at all the tension that’s been building in our country’s air throughout this election season. I bawled at all the hatred and frustration and helplessness people have been feeling in the midst of it – on both sides of the political spectrum – and at how these feelings have gotten displaced and transferred onto all kinds of relationships and interactions that have nothing inherently to do with politics. I bawled at how helpless I feel in the face of Iraq, in the face of real people there and here and across the planet, living constantly in fear and oppression. I bawled in my longing for gentleness to fill the air, and reconciliation, and having everything not be so constantly framed in terms of who is right and who is wrong, who is on God’s side and who isn’t, who is stupid and ignorant and racist and classist and who is enlightened and with-it and on a higher plane of existence than the masses. Or who is considerate, and who contemptibly tries to cut their way into line…
This election, and the events that have surrounded it (9/11, war in Iraq, struggling economy, corporate scandal, etc., etc., etc.), have taken quite a toll on people. Maybe more than we’ve been conscious of. Many of us are weary. Many of us are disillusioned. Many of us are raw from the sand-paper interactions that have taken place in physical life, and all across the blogosphere – re: politics and otherwise.
I’m not feeling hopeless. And I don’t plan on being stuck in weary fatigue. But I guess I’m wanting to suggest that it could be a really good and healthy thing for us to individually and collectively find ways to release all the weeks and weeks of tension that have built up inside and around us.
A good cry can do wonders, let me tell you. But maybe there are other kinds of rituals that could be done, ways of acknowledging and becoming conscious of how this season has affected us, how the constant bombardment of name-calling and accusations and polarizations have shaped our relationships, our interactions, our writings, our worldviews.
There is a time for courageous action, a time for hope-filled spin on events and developments we may not otherwise celebrate. But maybe there’s also a time for tears. A time for being still enough to listen to what’s going on inside. A time for intentionally detoxing from influences we haven’t been able to control.