By Hal Brown, MSW (About author)
Preface
Looking back, consider the 2008 and 2012 elections when Barack Obama and Joe Biden faced off first against John McCain and Sarah Palin. Palin, in retrospect, looks professorial compared to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Four years later Obama and Biden ran against Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. In the aftermath of those elections there were no sore losers crying election fraud and neither McCain nor Romney tried to overturn the election and lead an insurrection. McCain and Romney now are viewed by Democrats and never-Trump Republicans as Republicans representing a Republican Party that no longer exists. McCain will be remembered for his final vote, his thumbs down, saving Obamacare. Romney is now the loudest voice among Republican Senators speaking out against Trump and those who excuse his behavior in the Senate.
Today
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were successfully sworn in on January 20th. We all had to endure the periods between when the election was unofficially called and January 6th when it was made official during which time Trump and his allies escalated their efforts to overturn the results. We had the January 6th insurrection which reminded us how emboldened the Trump forces had become. None of us rested easily between January 6th and Inauguration Day. In the days preceding the swearing in we watched the area around the United States Capitol become an army base which could just have easily been in a war zone.
It’s been just over a week and we’ve seen President Biden take major steps to undo the damage done by four years of Trump. We watched Jen Psaki and her amazingly refreshing press briefings. We saw Anthony Fauci unleashed. Everything seemed to be going so well at one level.
Unfortunately at another level at the same time we’ve watched Senate Republicans act as if nothing amiss happened and Trump merely stumbled and was still their all-powerful leader.
We saw the photo (on right) of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy at Trump’s tacky gilded Mar a Lago palace where he went to kiss Trump’s ring and discuss how the Republicans could take control or the House and Senate in the next election and who knows what else to do to derail President Biden’s agenda.
Trump might as well be the Terminator saying “I’m back.”
We have observed how close the country came to becoming a Trump dictatorship and breathed a sigh of relief each day as we saw, with a few temporary roadblocks attempted by the likes of Senator Josh Hawley, that the president moved forward undeterred. News junkies who were reading about Trump’s last ditch efforts to embed his flunkies of various boards in roles they were totally unqualified for were glad to see the attempts to get Corey Lewandoski and former Trump deputy campaign manager David Bossie on a Defense Department panel was thwarted.
Politics has been a mixed bag but on balance we all have come out as winners.
Why do many Democrats still feel like crap?
I’m defining “feeling like crap” as having any of the symptoms of stress listed on websites like Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, and WebMD.
Unfortunately, some of us still feel like crap. Maybe we feel a little better than we did one, two, or three months ago, but we may still be experiencing many or even most of the same crappy feelings we did before.
This may bring you down because you expected to feel much better once the Democrats took over.
You might ask me “so mister therapist what the hell is going on?”
Here’s the thing.
We’ve all were under stress for the entire Trump presidency. The horror show was playing every night on MSNBC. Then of course Covid came along and our day to day lives changed in ways none of us could have anticipated. Some people got sick with Covid, others had family or friends die from it. Some people had other bad things happen in their lives totally unrelated to Trump or Covid, and whatever inner resources they had to cope were depleted by the other stresses.
Getting over what we’ve all been isn’t analogous to being rescued from a sinking ship by the Coast Guard. In that instance we’d be wrapped in blankets, given a hot meal, and then, as the Brits, the Irish, and Rachel Maddow says, Bob’s your uncle.
It isn’t even like being liberated from a prisoner of war camp where we’ve been held in brutal captivity for years during a war where we weren’t certain who would win because, while our side won, there are still enemy snipers taking potshots at us as we are try to make it home to safety.
We feel like crap because we are the walking wounded. We are trying to make it safely home but aren’t there yet.
Healing will take more time for some of us than for others. Much will depend on when we can return to pre-pandemic life and on how successful the Democrats are in achieving their (and our) goals.
If you feel just great you may not have bothered to read this article. I am glad for you. You are one of the lucky people who is naturally or by training (and sometimes therapy) become more of an optimist than a pessimist (see “How to Train Your Brain to Be More Optimistic”)
If you are reading this I think it is reasonable to assume because you were interested in the title and you tend to be a pessimist. You may be wondering if there’s something wrong with you if you don't feel as good as you thought you would when President Biden and Vice President Harris were sworn in without incident albeit surrounded by razor wire fence and protected by 25,000 National Guard soldiers.
There’s nothing wrong with you.
You managed to survive four years of Trump and going on a year of the pandemic, and whatever other trauma life might have thrown your way.
Don’t beat yourself up over not being able to get your old self back as rapidly as you hoped you would. That may take some time. It is very possible you may come out the other end of this prolonged nightmare and discover a new sense of meaning in your life. Think about what you learned about yourself. To quote Benjamin Disraeli “there is no education like adversity” which is not a guarantee, not always easy to achieve, but something to aspire to achieve.
The Poll: Rate how you are feeling