The last 4 years have been like living in a house with an alcoholic parent. If you are fortunate enough not to have had that experience, I’ll tell you what it’s like: you listen for the sound of your alcoholic dad coming home, or you come home from school and listen for the sound of your alcoholic mom, wondering just what insanity is about to unfold. Your internal radar antennae are up, scanning for clues, anything to help you predict whatever chaos is coming. But it’s never what you expect. Ever. You think it will be a bad day, and it turns out pretty quiet. You breathe a sigh of relief because you think the coast is clear, and then the screaming and fighting starts up. After a while, numbness and outrage fatigue sets in.
The trauma isn’t that you have an alcoholic parent; it’s that you never know what outrage is coming next. Sound familiar?
Today is the evening of the last day of the Trump presidency. I should be anticipating the Biden/Harris inauguration tomorrow. I should be looking forward eagerly to some semblance of normality returning to Washington, along with some much-needed focus on the very real problems we currently must solve.
Instead, I am mourning and fretting.
I am mourning the dead. Today the 400,000th american died of Covid-19. 400,000. More than the number of US soldiers who died in WWI, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. Almost as many as died in WWII. More than the population of the county I live in.
I am mourning the lost opportunities to avert the catastrophies that are coming because of climate change, the loss of our right to hold ourselves out to the world as a beacon of hope and a bastion of democracy. Mourning that, just 2 weeks ago, a mob of terrorists and fools stormed the Capitol, flew the confederate battle flag in halls where it had never flown before.
I am fretting over the fact that Washington DC looks more like an occupied zone than the capital of the longest running experiment in representative government that’s ever been tried.
But most of all, I’m mourning the fact that I’m not celebrating. I’ve spent the day fretting about whatever last act of outrage Trump and his few remaining staff have planned. Who will be pardoned at the last minute, what insults will be flung, what snubs will be added to the long list? What facts will be supplanted with conspiracy theories?
What damage will he do on his way out the door?
Chances are that, by the time you read this, we will have begun to recover, and I will be back to my usually optimistic frame of mind. Whatever the last outrage will be, it will be done. It will be terribly tempting to try to forget, and pretend it was an abberation.
But never forget this: what we have experienced cannot be un-lived. The sense of trauma and fear will lessen with time. But we cannot afford to pretend that the last 4 years didn’t happen, or that the ugly underbelly of hate didn’t get exposed. We cannot forget, and we must not – because we have a lot of work to do. Are you ready?
Dr Les Kertay
Photo by Carol Guzy, for NPR, from https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2021/01/18/957949529/photos-the-nations-capital-quiet-and-guarded-before-inauguration
