Yesterday, a friend of mine and I were talking about the excruciating wait for Inauguration Day: watching the president attempt every desperate and Unconstitutional political maneuver to overturn the election results and wondering if the system will hold.
She said something I often hear Americans expressing:
“I think we’re all shell-shocked.” she said. “We all have PTSD from this presidency.”
Technically, she wasn’t right—but she soon will be.
On January 20th she will be right.
We have to get there first.
Unfortunately, we don’t have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from this incessant national injury because we’re still in the middle of it.
We are experiencing present trauma.
We are currently being harmed.
We are still absorbing the violence in real time.
With every one of his incendiary, flagged tweet rants,
with every complicit politician’s sycophantic press conference,
with every recklessly frivolous lawsuit,
with every partisan media denial of the election results;
every day that this virus is ignored,
every day that thousands more get sick and die,
every day people sink deeper into the financial abyss,
every day that his family’s malfeasance goes unchecked,
every day that his callousness and corruption seep deeper into us—we accrue more scar tissue.
We are sustaining collective wounds that we can’t even begin to grapple with right now because we cannot get out of harm’s way in order to do that.
We are still too busy just staying alive.
That is the staggering truth of this chapter of America’s story: as fractured as we know we are, as far down into the marrow of our bones we feel the exhaustion goes, and as bleak and dark the present moments seem to be—we really have no idea what it’s done to us individually or corporately.
We can’t accurately assess the way it has eroded our trust in the system or erased our faith in the goodness of people or severed the ties between us and those we once loved.
We can’t measure the toll it’s taken on our physical health or our emotional well-being or our spiritual lives.
We can’t do any kind of proper post-mortem on our government to begin to measure how invasive the systemic damage has been and how many decades we will need to repair it.
And we can’t fathom how it has beaten the hell out of each of us.
That will happen one day.
There will be a place and time when we are seeing this unthinkable ugliness in the rearview mirror; when we can slowly process the people and the nation we have become, but that is not this place and time—
because in this place and time the bruises and blows are continual,
in this place and time we are still pushed to the breaking point,
in this place and time survival is all we can muster.
The best we can do right now is to take each wound as it comes: each constitutional crisis as it arrives, every trending terror, every breaking news assault on our tenuous peace, every vile word spoken by someone we once knew to be compassionate human beings—and try to get to the next one.
We face this present struggle and we keep going until a coming moment when we can all exhale and inventory our wounds, grieve the losses, and repair the fractures.
But until we are post-this trauma, we won’t know what’s been done to us.
