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Post-Election Fears & Anxieties


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I'm really not doing well. I asked this on the Live Chat thread but I'll check here tomorrow too. If someone knows about the best way to block mentions (and pictures) of someone online, can you let me know how to go about it? 

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16 minutes ago, aradia22 said:

I'm really not doing well. I asked this on the Live Chat thread but I'll check here tomorrow too. If someone knows about the best way to block mentions (and pictures) of someone online, can you let me know how to go about it? 

Hi Aradia, fancy meeting you here.

I came to see if there was any comfort up for grabs in the Anxiety Support Thread.  Is there?

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I'm anticipating ignorant dumbasses in the next several days, sobbing on camera - "But I didn't think it would happen.  I didn't mean it.  I wish I could do it all over again".  Shades of Brexit.  And I will have not an ounce of sympathy.

I plan on taking a long break from politics and the news.  I will turn them back on when the blue collar whites discover Trump has no respect for them, and start complaining about how "unfair" it all is.  You reap what you sow.  And I hope the right people catching the majority of reaping.  Our country is destabilizing and it's terrifying.

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I am going to go into a bubble for a while. In spite of my protestations to the contrary, I will not sulk for 4 years. I will not allow this to defeat me. I am going to pick myself back up somehow and get my mental health and my educational and career paths back on track. I will figure out my shit and I will fight because there are people who cannot and someday I want to be strong enough to be there for them in whatever way I can. There is a little light inside of me that has not died in the three years that I've been in a kind of shitty place and I will not let this extinguish it.

The tears are finally leaking out. I'm not totally sure how I'm going to handle this (I have not been kidding about relishing tomorrow for the Trump defeat I thought was coming and the reprieve from his face and voice and words and just fucking all of it). I think I'll keep watching Last Week Tonight. I might have to cut out everything else topical completely and only tune into NY1 for the weather. I might try and figure out this browser extension thing or else I'll have to just excise certain things from my internet life. I don't know how long the self-imposed bubble will last but it will be for as long as I need it. But it won't stop me from being engaged in the world. I just can't deal with his face and voice popping up and catching me unawares. I need some control over the situation. 

That's all I've got for now.

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6 minutes ago, aradia22 said:

I am going to go into a bubble for a while. In spite of my protestations to the contrary, I will not sulk for 4 years. I will not allow this to defeat me. I am going to pick myself back up somehow and get my mental health and my educational and career paths back on track. I will figure out my shit and I will fight because there are people who cannot and someday I want to be strong enough to be there for them in whatever way I can. There is a little light inside of me that has not died in the three years that I've been in a kind of shitty place and I will not let this extinguish it.

The tears are finally leaking out. I'm not totally sure how I'm going to handle this (I have not been kidding about relishing tomorrow for the Trump defeat I thought was coming and the reprieve from his face and voice and words and just fucking all of it). I think I'll keep watching Last Week Tonight. I might have to cut out everything else topical completely and only tune into NY1 for the weather. I might try and figure out this browser extension thing or else I'll have to just excise certain things from my internet life. I don't know how long the self-imposed bubble will last but it will be for as long as I need it. But it won't stop me from being engaged in the world. I just can't deal with his face and voice popping up and catching me unawares. I need some control over the situation. 

That's all I've got for now.

yeah, I'm right there with you.   I'm sadder than I've been in I don't know how long.   THis is not the country I thought it was.  I thought I lived in a country where people were equal and accepted for who they are.   How can we be that country, with a misogynist, racist asshole in charge? 

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I have been listening to Spotify on and off the entire night trying to calm myself. I don't really listen to anything on the level of Blurred Lines but the fact that I can't not take anything as "just a song" right now... even something like Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man" worries me. This is the world now. 

NO. This is me telling myself to shut up.

It's just some self-indulgent sulking. I'll be good soon. Maybe not tomorrow. But eventually. We'll fix this. We have to.

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I was afraid this would happen. Twelve years ago (pre-Obama), some friends I'd made in college and I had a discussion online. Someone asked if we thought the US would elect a black man or a woman first. The guys thought it could go either way. Every single woman said, "Black man. Not even close." The guys didn't get it.

But I look at this election, and I think of some of the people I know who refused to vote for Hillary because they "just don't like her" (she's a politician... what are you expecting?) but would have voted for her husband in an instant if he could run again, and it's hard not to think her gender made the difference. And that pisses me off.

(Obviously not to everyone, but to enough people.)

Edited by simplyme
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37 minutes ago, WendyCR72 said:

I really wish I could move to Canada.

Me too. I'm really scared I'm going to end up homeless due to loosing my SS. 

Edited by Jaded
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4 minutes ago, magdalene said:

I feel like I am in this nightmare, waiting to wake up.

I'm an American living in Europe right now, and I literally woke up this morning to a nightmare. It makes you wonder if a Bernie VP would have helped at all.

Holy shit. The song that is playing in the background after Trump's speech? "You can't always get what you want." 

Edited by Curio
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I'm off to curl up in bed with my hot water bottle.

Good things to think about:

Survivor is on tomorrow.

I'm going to sleep in.

The sun will rise.

If I suddenly turn tangerine, maybe half the population will think I'm a cool rebel.

And I've been unhappy with election results before and survived, so let's not panic yet. I expect attempting to run a country with Congress may be more difficult than Trump expects. Hell, doing anything with Congress sounds like my idea of hell. :P

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And I've been unhappy with election results before and survived, so let's not panic yet. I expect attempting to run a country with Congress may be more difficult than Trump expects. Hell, doing anything with Congress sounds like my idea of hell. :P

But they're a largely Republican Congress and now that they've seen the way he's won, they'll be even more likely to go along with what he supports thinking it will endear them to the voters that elected him. They got by on opposing Obama. Now we have to be afraid of what they will do.

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4 minutes ago, simplyme said:

And I've been unhappy with election results before and survived, so let's not panic yet. I expect attempting to run a country with Congress may be more difficult than Trump expects. Hell, doing anything with Congress sounds like my idea of hell. :P

But it's ALL Republican ruled. This...this is just a sick joke.

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16 minutes ago, WendyCR72 said:

I really wish I could move to Canada.

Marry me.

 

I AM Canadian, livin' the shit life in sunny SoCal ... my last indoor cat is diabetic, insulin is too expensive, cigarette tax just went up 2 bucks, and my Mum's dying in hospice.

Can life suck any MORE???  ;-)

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I mean this in the nicest possible way, and I love many of you, but seriously: Fuck America. Fuck it hard. With an unlubricated cactus. (Edit: It's especially painful watching from Australia, where voting is compulsory and we get fined if we don't. We also have preferential voting so the Bernie or Bust people could still have voted for Stein and Johnson and McMullin without giving their votes to Trump by default. Sigh.)

Everyone who voted for Hillary: Thank you. You did the best you could with the tools you had. It's just unfortunate that the biggest tool of all won.

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2 minutes ago, walnutqueen said:

Marry me.

 

I AM Canadian, livin' the shit life in sunny SoCal ... my last indoor cat is diabetic, insulin is too expensive, cigarette tax just went up 2 bucks, and my Mum's dying in hospice.

Can life suck any MORE???  ;-)

I'll marry you.  But we better hurry.

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14 minutes ago, simplyme said:

I was afraid this would happen. Twelve years ago (pre-Obama), some friends I'd made in college and I had a discussion online. Someone asked if we thought the US would elect a black man or a woman first. The guys thought it could go either way. Every single woman said, "Black man. Not even close." The guys didn't get it.

But I look at this election, and I think of some of the people I know who refused to vote for Hillary because they "just don't like her" (she's a politician... what are you expecting?) but would have voted for her husband in an instant if he could run again, and it's hard not to think her gender made the difference. And that pisses me off.

(Obviously not to everyone, but to enough people.)

Then there's also the fact that Clinton, and I know saying it now is rubbing salt in the wound, wasn't the strongest possible candidate the Demcocrats could pick. Or at least she came with considerable baggage. We can discuss until the cows come home whether that's fair to her or not, but that was just the case. The hatred for the Clintons in general is strong, hatred for her tied to sexist prejudices is probably even stronger. She's also IMO not a very warm and charismatic presence. Nothing wrong with that, but since elections are so much performance and appearance, she was always going to suffer in that aspect. She suffered against Obama, who was a charismatic populist (I don't mean that in any negative way, just as a description).

But Sanders wouldn't have been a stronger candidate, he'd have been trounced as well. Perhaps Biden, I can see people maybe going for him. It's tough to keep the white house after two terms, it's tougher with a female candidate going against a populist demagogue. This must be personally so devastating for HRC. After 2008 the outcome was at least in general positive for Democrats and she became Secretary of State. This is a fatal blow for her and you know everyone will blame her and tear her to shreds, even though there were things out of her control at play as well.

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I feel like a lot of attention is going to where Hillary Clinton might have been weak or what could have been done differently. Not enough attention is going on Trump's bullshit rise to power. There were so many times people could have stopped this. There were so many chances for people to say NO. There were so many times to do more than fact check and joke and instead SHUT THIS DOWN. And that did not happen. The media didn't do it. The Democrats didn't do it. The Republicans didn't do it. The voters didn't do it. And I know because they outright admitted it that instead of voting their conscience, some voters squashed it and instead made excuses. And this is where we are. 

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I was afraid this would happen. Twelve years ago (pre-Obama), some friends I'd made in college and I had a discussion online. Someone asked if we thought the US would elect a black man or a woman first. The guys thought it could go either way. Every single woman said, "Black man. Not even close." The guys didn't get it.

It was at a party, but I was part of a group that had the same exact discussion around that time -- with the same exact result. 

Okay, I'm making another attempt at going to bed.  If only I could sleep for four years. 

Edited by Bastet
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2 minutes ago, katha said:

Then there's also the fact that Clinton, and I know saying it now is rubbing salt in the wound, wasn't the strongest possible candidate the Demcocrats could pick. Or at least she came with considerable baggage. 

True. I wanted Lawrence Lessig because he wanted to reform how voting works. That would be nice. I'm really tired of getting stuck with candidates that the majority of a party dislike, but who have a fervent enough following to push them to victory because the support for other, broader-appeal candidates gets split between several candidates.

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I have been a hardcore political junkie for years, but I think I'm probably done with national electoral politics.  I mean, I'm still going to vote, and give Democrats a few bucks when I can spare it.  But as far as closely following national politics as a kind of hobby, as I have done for so many years?  Yeah, no.

I was thinking about the brilliant post the author Jeremy Zilber wrote on Facebook the other day, in which he likened any attempted summary of this election to a bizarre dream ("Donald Trump was running for president, but he was WAY worse than the real Donald Trump, but the media took him seriously like he was a real candidate, and the polls showed it might actually be a close election because Clinton did something weird with her email or something, and then there was something about Trump being a predator but nobody seemed to care very much, and he kept saying he'd lock her up if he won or maybe start a revolution if he lost, and also he loved Putin for some reason...").  In a related vein, I feel like American politics now reminds me nothing so much as a once beloved TV show that has jumped the shark, and is just throwing crazy and wildly implausible shit at the wall, having lost any semblance of realism, consistency, or coherent narrative.

LOST was guilty of this, as was BSG and House of Cards.  Now it's "House of Trump", and I think I'm out (after kind of absorbing what has happened and reading and commenting on a few postmortems).  I'm going to stick to TV shows that make a little sense and have some respect for the intelligence of the viewer.

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I'm taking my lumps, but I'm also giving them out. This is fucked up beyond belief. Sure we have 2018 and 2020 to look forward to, but FUCKKKKK we have to get there. I'm burying my head in the sand. I don't think that I can take the news. I can barely tolerate Facebook. You guys have been wonderful. Hugs to you all, I know that we would all love to flee, but we aren't cowards. We'll sit through this, watch them fuck up, and see who's going to clean it all up in 2020. 

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