I was on my back, giving it the twenty-minutes it needs every so often since my 2015 accident. This time, though, I was hoping to slip into a brief nap to help recover from a couple of nights of poor and minimal sleep… sorry, I can’t help empathizing with those who are suffering. Instead, I found myself plunging into despair (Loss of hope.) I haven’t been that close to depression since the mid 1970s when the despair was more personal. At that time my 2:00 am moment clicked in and I started the turn-around-conviction that somehow I’d do something to make it better, and I did.
This time two relatively minor straws almost broke the back of my determination. On top of one loss of freedom after the other in the country – women’s rights, physicians rights, gender rights, asylum-seekers rights, health rights, housing rights, food rights, climate rights, even professor’s rights or the right not to be killed by gunshot, were two deliberate insults: the removal of Harvey Milk’s name from the ship that had been christened in his honor and the removal of the bust of Martin Luther King that had been in the oval office. But the major one that almost did me in? – the Supreme Court clearing the way to remove immigrants to countries other than their own origin where a language foreign to them might be the norm. Losing language communication is equivalent to solitary confinement, pretty close to a death sentence.
I solved my own problem by getting back to editing my manuscript, How Could These Lovely People Have Let It Happen? A Psychologist’s Intimate Journal. Really. It helped. By the time I had spent a couple of hours at the computer, walked the halls of the Waters of Excelsior and enjoyed an evening meal with friends, my symptoms were alleviated.
But what hasn’t been helping – and so I’ve stopped it – is contributing to the political party of my choice. (Guess which one.) I don’t see my minimal money being spent to help spread caring and justice. Why can’t they just tell the human stories of people being afflicted by current policies? I do understand it won’t happen with most news media telling them, for various reasons of fear and ownership control. But why can’t some of the party money buy ads just to tell the story of women suffering and dying because of legal controls over medical practices, or of families imprisoned, or of those living with the disaster of violent weather issue? Personally, I don’t know a single person who doesn’t care in one way or the other for the welfare of others. That’s where the truth lies, not in data and graphs and generalized hypotheses.
Oh well. Bottom line I guess we all have to take care of ourselves …
monagustafsonaffinito 