Questions crowded in: "How could this happen?" "Whose fault was it?" "Where do we go from there?" In my emotionally distraught state, no answers surfaced, just more questions and deeper unease.
At some point, it occurred to me that, for all my agitation, I had no name for what I was feeling. I long ago learned that identifying a feeling is the first step to coming to grips with it. Of course, I knew that my intense suffering was a reaction to Trump's unexpected and appalling victory. But what exactly was that reaction? Anger, disappointment, betrayal, despair? None of these labels seemed to get at the profoundly wounding nature of my distress. Quite suddenly, in the way the mind works sometimes, I had the word I was looking for — "desolation."
[...]
In an access of empathy that surprised and shook me, I realized that only now, having experienced such profound desolation over the state of the country, could I appreciate that this same feeling had motivated millions of other Americans to vote for Trump. What after all was the essence of his campaign? The slogan "Make America Great Again." Along with my friends I had mocked it as either empty rhetoric or a dog-whistle appeal to the out-and-out racists and misogynists among his supporters. But what if it had another appeal entirely?
[...]
Now that I was awash in the same feelings I could understand what had prompted so many people — not the hard-core racists and misogynists and xenophobes but the others who spelled the difference in the election — to ignore everything that would otherwise have caused them to reject Trump. And without in the least sharing their attitudes and tastes, I could understand the emotion that in the end decided them.
Read the full article at WhoWhatWhy.
Comment: If only more people would take this approach. You can't heal what you don't understand. The fact is, many people are feeling desolate after the election, just as many were feeling so before it - some for the past 15 years, some for longer. Many are worried that Trump will take the U.S. down the road to totalitarianism. What they don't realize is that, even if this were the case (and there's no guarantee at this point that it is, but the fear is at least understandable), the causes and processes leading up to it have been long in the making, and it is a bipartisan problem.
If a totalitarian system comes to the United States, the American people will have been 30 years too late in stopping it, because all the factors that contribute to the rise of a pathocracy are already here: the social injustice, the economic disparity, a privileged elite class who rules unelected, mass surveillance, militarized police, the embrace of terrorism as a geopolitical tool, predatory foreign policy, arbitrary detention, censored media, secret prisons, COINTELPRO, etc.
So if this election has you feeling a sense of desolation, perhaps it is best to ask, "Have I been deceiving myself for the past x number of years?"