Where Do We Go From Here: Recovery for war-torn America

If you followed me yesterday, you would have seen that I had to talk a dear Twitter friend off the ledge. He was saying that the Tara Reade allegations, unless they were quickly disproven—preferably by a Ronan Farrow piece—disqualified Joe Biden and we'd have to move on, because losing wasn't an option. I, with an able assist from another Twitter friend, got him to decide to get the fuck off of Twitter for a few days. He recognized that he was stressed, paranoid, and depressed. That's half the battle. When he told me that, I replied that the first thing I thought was that he had reached the end of his rope.

His is not an isolated example. Many of us are suffering from various forms of post-traumatic stress disorder. And no, I'm not exaggerating. We're in the middle of a plague. Our supposed leaders are concerned only with their own electoral prospects—and allow me to make clear, by this I mean ONLY the GOP—and the past almost four years have been one day after another of emotional and psychological abuse. Even those we oppose, those who will, again, vote for the Orange Monster and his monstrous party, are suffering under the same abuse. They just won't admit it, and will sink further into pathology, harming us all.

Some of us are stronger. Some of us less so. But you're kidding yourself if you think you're not suffering from some degree of trauma. You are. You may be handling it better than others, but it's still there.

The past few days for me have been like Donald Trump's signature. I've been up, I've been down. And when I've been down, my only response was to shut down. I slept all of Saturday. I stayed offline all of Monday. My body and mind know when I can take no more, and they will not be gainsaid.

America has been fortunate that, in its history, few wars have been fought on its soil. None have been fought since 1861-1865, and even then that war was fought mostly on rebel territory. We have been a magnificently isolated continental island, sending armies and navies and air forces around the world, while remaining preternaturally untouched. The War on Terror began with an attack on our cities, and then fell back to the usual pattern of fighting "over there" so that we don't have to fight "over here".

But, as Malcolm X said after Kennedy's assassination—and was reprimanded for doing so by his so-called Messiah, Elijah Muhammad, to protect the feelings of the (white) mainstream—the chickens have come home to roost. Centuries of racism, oppression, and dysfunction have blossomed into fleurs du mal. Trump and this GOP aren't some unfathomable, unexpected occurrence. They are the logical conclusion of our checkered, benighted history. For every Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., there is a General Nathan Bedford Forrest. And as much as we honor Dr. King, and even have a holiday dedicated to him, Forrest and his ilk hold sway, or at the very least scupper anything the likes of Dr. King and those of us who revere and take after him can bring about insofar as change.

We are war-torn. There's no other way to describe the past three years, or the past one hundred and sixty. Yes, the eruptions of political violence have been, so far, rare. But the grinding political, psychological, and emotional toll is no less traumatic, even if it doesn't end in a bullet, for most of us.

We have been shown to not be the shining city on the hill, as Ronald Reagan liked to say. He was one more signpost on the road to our current calamity. The Union was restored in 1865, but justice wasn't enshrined. It was a half-victory. It was a stitching back together of a country which still had deep divisions—divisions which didn't adhere to a North-South divide. If they did, why do Confederate flags fly in Michigan? In Wisconsin? In Ohio? In California?

Where do we go from here? By admitting that we're a broken country. A broken people. That the marvels we've achieved in the 20th and 21st centuries have been chimeras. That we've achieved marvels in spite of our brokenness. And that this can no longer be denied. That our dysfunction has to be addressed if we, and the world, are to have any future.

Hillary Clinton lost for many reasons. But one of the main reasons that she lost was because she was a white woman who centered the poison of white racism in her campaign. "We elected Obama. Stop with your race-baiting." But Barack Obama was elected in spite of his race. He was elected because he was nonpareil. He was a once-in-a-century politician. Once he was no longer on the ballot, once Ferguson happened, once Baltimore happened, once Black Lives Matter happened, and a white female candidate dared speak truth to this country's toxic racism, she was doomed. "We elected the black guy. We're good. Time to go back to normal. Stop lecturing us."

How does this war-torn nation recover? How does this war-torn nation regain the world's trust? By no longer ignoring its history. By acknowledging it. By seeing that we may be a city on a hill, but we're not shimmering with righteousness. We're not pristine. We have to still perfect our Union, as a skinny black guy said. And that we have to crush those who are bent on destroying that Union, bent on taking us back to the Before Time. We have to no longer cower before those who might be offended that we offend their Confederate great-grandfather. You know what? He was an evil motherfucker, and if you stan for him, you, too, are evil.

We will get through this. But only if we, as a society, as a nation, accept that our shit do stink. Humility goes a long way. The meek shall inherit the Earth. We're not good at meek. But if we want to reclaim our place in the world—if we want to reclaim our own humanity—that's what we must do. Anything less, and this last, best hope of Earth will surely fail.