Fixing a Nation is Possible

Fifty years ago, when I first moved to the harbor area, I worked at a halfway house for the mentally ill.  It really gave me a lot of insights into mental illness ― the thin line between what we might call normal and that which is not.  The men in the particular halfway house I worked were all schizophrenics, a serious mental health condition involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perceptions, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation.

These are things I am increasingly seeing two years after the COVID lockdowns and seven years of divisive MAGA sloganeering. That there is an actual psychological impact on the mental stability of our nation comes as no surprise.  The barrage of disinformation perpetrated by social media corporations, propaganda by political factions, the failure of the mainstream media in debunking and adequately fact-checking news stories, and then the decline of news reporting across the nation have all contributed to this condition. Who knows what’s true and what is not? It’s kind of a national psychosis.

So much so that it seems to have filtered down to individual personal mental health issues, which has given rise to an increase in therapy treatments and wider acceptance generally. It’s why so many people have just turned inward and self-isolated into their own boxed-in worlds of depression and anxiety. Mental illness has probably contributed to the increase in the number of mass shootings along with the rise in hostile bigotry. It’s easy to blame Trump for much of this and you wouldn’t be wrong.

If only Donald J. Trump could be given a straight jacket, some Thorazine, and institutionalized we’d all be better off. But perhaps he’s just a  symptom? He’s not the only one responsible for fanning the flames of hate and vitriol, but he certainly is the band leader of the march of the mental health crisis in America. He is just taking advantage of what’s been slightly under the skin of this nation for a long time― the racism, bigotry, economic stress on the working class and systemic violence against minorities; using it to create chaos and confusion to his own advantage. This is just too obvious to me and the 80 million people who last voted him out of office.

I, in no way, want to normalize or give excuses for this idiot-savant who wants to be a dictator, as he truly exhibits a  neurosis of the worst kind… that of the delusional fascist authoritarian. What is far more troubling is his followers and his co-conspirators who continue to believe all of his victimization speeches, all of the evangelicals who “forgive” his lack of moral compass, and his 91 criminal indictments and omissions. Trump is the prime example of someone who just can’t be fixed because he is like an addict who hasn’t hit rock bottom, who can’t kick the habit. Who says power isn’t an addiction?

Silence in the face of evil is betrayal.
Those in the Republican party and his followers who stay silent or defend the wild accusations of the mad-delusional candidate are themselves delusional for buying into his psychosis. Those people who say they just don’t pay attention, who can’t make up their minds, or who have tuned out, or who just say “it doesn’t matter” are themselves betraying not only themselves but the national creed of freedom and liberty for all. Silence in this case is a betrayal, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said. This is not one of those times in which you can just “go with the flow” because the flow of the GOP is heading us off a cliff. The flow of disinformation and the PSYOPS being used to crash the country is the goal of the anti-Biden,  anti-Democrat far-right extremists.

Yes, there are a small number of them in this area, but by far the largest majority of voters in this county and state are in the never-Trump-for-president-again camp. You can say that you think that President Joe Biden is too old but he still believes in democracy and he has actually delivered what he has promised, unlike Trump who couldn’t build the wall.

Lost in the gloom of Biden being too old or feeble is that he has assembled the most impressive legislative record of any president since Lyndon Johnson. Drawing on his decades of experience, Biden deftly navigated a 50-50 Senate to pass a historic bipartisan infrastructure bill, generational investments in clean energy and semiconductor manufacturing, the first gun safety law in almost 30 years, a bill codifying same-sex marriage, a bill aiding veterans who suffered health effects from burn pits and an electoral reform to prevent a repeat of Trump’s attempt to use Congress to undermine the election. And that’s all without mentioning the nomination and confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to ever sit on the Supreme Court.

My friends and readers, it’s one thing to fix a broken motorcycle, but it’s nearly impossible to fix some broken human beings. Mending a broken democracy is something that is best done at the ballot box if people can take their heads out of the sands of fear, isolation, and ignorance.