This autumn, I stopped by a local nonprofit run by a friend who helps refugees, immigrants, and formerly incarcerated victims of abuse get jobs that can transform their lives. I was there to donate, and when I found my friend distressed, I asked why he was so down. He had recently lost his dog of 14 years. Then, days later, his mother passed. I embraced him, expressing my condolences. As we embraced, he said, “And then my country died.”
He referred to the election, which put one party in charge of the White House, Senate, and House. And in that moment, I realized that perhaps half of the nation’s voting population is grieving what they perceive to be the death of their country.
I contemplated how America came to this. After an election marked by harsh and extreme rhetoric, whatever the outcome, half the country would dwell in grief, convinced that the world’s oldest democracy was finished. Why?
This moment warrants a much deeper examination of what happened, how it happened, and the impact on our health, well-being, and hope for the future. It’s a bit cliché, but this must become a teachable moment. We must learn from this campaign never to be so divided again.
The campaign rhetoric was often shaped in terms of strong men. Well, I have known some strong men in my life. My father was a strong man. Serving in Europe during World War II, he was lucky; he came home alive, met my mother, and started a family. I think of my son as a strong man. He is a choreographer, dancer, and artist. I have a friend who is Jewish but professes to be an atheist who’s dedicated his life to civil rights. Another strong man in my life is my handyman, who unclogs toilets, removes trees downed by high winds, and never says no to my obsession with needing new bookshelves.
What bonds them is a strength characterized by hard work, dedication, service, compassion, kindness, a minimum of complaint, and no self-pity. Each of my strong men supports a woman’s right to choose and to reproductive healthcare. Their qualities sharply contrast those targeted by campaigns in rural, suburban, and urban America toward men of all ages, races, and ethnicities with an urgent need to feel strong and victimized simultaneously. With extremist views rising at home and abroad, these men are the followers, searching for ways to embrace symbols and positions perceived to make them look strong.
Today, strength for too many males is characterized by bombast, lying, bullying, violence, and attacking the vulnerable.
ABC News reported that some campaign groups spent over $21 million on ads demonizing the transgender population. Only about 1.7 percent of the global and U.S. population experiences genetically based variations in sexual expression. It wasn’t until 1990 that medical and biological science discovered the gene that dictates how the “Y” chromosome is expressed in the developing fetus and is influenced by hormones and chemicals. For some, assailing transgender people evolved into a sign of strength, as did depicting immigrants as violent and criminal. “Immigrants—including undocumented immigrants—are less likely to commit crimes than the U.S.-born. This is true at the national, state, county, and neighborhood levels, and for both violent and non-violent crime,“ says the American Immigration Council. Yet vilifying rhetoric has rallied voters to support candidates who assail immigrants and transgender people.
The demonization is possible because of toxic social media, algorithmically driven communications, and the news landscape. This social media environment manipulates emotions using fear and hatemongering for personal and political gain. There must be reform and regulations to stop the lies and fake news from becoming ingrained as conventional wisdom. This must not be allowed to shape future campaigns.
Unregulated social media is contributing to the stress and grief experienced during and after this recent campaign. It’s naive to think this tumult will pass on its own. This level of despair and hopelessness does not bode well for our democracy. Violent rhetoric and bullying the vulnerable can unleash an addictive cascade of hormones. In other words, the more you bully, the more likely you want to do it. Most of us have experienced bullies. Life has taught us they only stop when you stand up to them. So how does a society accomplish that against the onslaught of violent rhetoric, lies, dehumanization, and cruelty that is centered in a presidential election campaign?
We stop it by seeing it like we saw the COVID-19 virus. A virus finds its way into the body until there’s an opportunity to take over cells. And it’s not even the virus itself that kills the body. It’s the body’s reaction to the virus that causes the demise. An inflammatory cascade triggers the body’s fight against COVID-19, but many people didn’t have the reserves to mount that defense and died.
As with COVID-19, America needs an inoculation strategy, making us immune to inflammatory, dehumanizing, rhetorical assault. The lesson comes from the human body—a vaccination mobilizes our inherent capacity to heal, and an amazing panoply of cellular reactions and rapid responses respond to the invasion without being overwhelmed.
What would it take to inoculate the American population to mobilize a defense mechanism so that we instinctively turn away from algorithmic toxicity? What would it take to inoculate enough of the population so that they could not be easily manipulated or, in neurological terms, have their amygdala hijacked, their emotional centers of the brain swayed into an addiction to violence or violent rhetoric? It would take wide-scale development of the innate capacity for compassion and empathy. We are social beings, and our most fundamental human need is connection to others in a loving and nurturing way.
With our scientific world created and dominated mostly by men, the focus on human adaptation has centered around fight-or-flight mobilization as a stress response. This refers to the physiological changes in the body when faced with a perceived threat, preparing it to either confront the danger (“fight”) or flee from it (“flight”) by activating the sympathetic nervous system and releasing hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Little attention has been paid to a more dominant innate response—nurturing, loving, and caring. In other words, the human experience’s normal state is not one of fight or flight. The normal state of the human body is of resonance and balance.
Continuous exposure to stress and fight or flight mobilization makes us sick and breaks down the capacity of our immune system to protect us. We need a national campaign to elevate and strengthen individual and collective capacity to balance calm, empathy, compassion, and caring about our fellow human beings.
We’ve never invested in developing this capacity. It’s a form of healing. To those languishing in despair and hopelessness, no matter who you voted for, use established self-healing tools to ease grief and perceived loss. These include focused meditation, often called loving-kindness meditation, or social engagement, like greater participation within your community, whether racial, religious, or based on some other affinity. These methods open our hearts and restore balance. There are dozens of efforts at the city, county, and state levels around this country trying to build bridges of civility and trust. There is an urgent need for this country to invest in these efforts and scale them up so that we will never be so vulnerable to this type of toxic, algorithmically racial, and gender-driven manipulation of our psyches.
For instance, Healing Illinois is an initiative launched by the state of Illinois to promote healing, unity, and equity. It addresses disparities in healthcare, education, criminal justice, employment, and housing with grants to community organizations and local governments to support healing and racial equity projects, healing circles that allow individuals to share their experiences, emotions, and perspectives in a safe space; and a fund that supports organizations promoting healing, equity, and justice.
For decades of the 20th century, a universal phrase in high school typing instruction books was: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.” Today, I think that needs to be updated to: “Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of ourselves and our country.” We are in a moment when we need to be fully present on behalf of our country, and that calls for self-care. Grief and despair are emotional, mental states of mind that compel us to look back or forward in anxious anticipation. Neither allows us to be fully present and marshal our innate healing, restorative powers. But that is what we must do.
Our country didn’t die on November 5, but our country needs us to have open hearts and open minds during these transitional times.
