I’m against urging people to dry their tears; there is good reason to cry for a long, long time.
So that’s what this is about.
I’ve noticed we hurt in different ways. And maybe, by accepting each other’s pain, advocating for each other’s pain and hurt — well, I’m not saying we can make everything better, but I think we can help each other.
I’ve heard of the five stages of grief. But they don’t strike me as stages, as if one is more or less “mature” than another, or as if your goal is to be on a linear path to get from A to B. No one way of grieving is more or less “mature” or “superior” than another. They’re all needed.
For example, when I looked in my Facebook feed recently I saw that there were insightful, valuable things said by multiple people. And some of the things said weren’t compatible — like the people who said they would close themselves off from Trump supporters and the others who said they’d open up to them. Those are opposite positions, on their face. But as I looked closer — I realized that both reactions were right. They weren’t contradicting each other. The just grieved differently.
We all grieve a bit differently, and too often that grief is demonized because it’s not identical to what someone else feels.
But the truth is that here, at the cusp of a nightmare, we will all need all the ways people are grieving.
We need the deniers.
We need people who help people for whom the reality of a Trump presidency and Republican Congress is too horrifying to deal with or contemplate. We need to defend their choices to defriend Trump supporters, because those choices deny Trump supporters their terms. They make clear that the support of Trump is unacceptable. They demonstrate to us and the rest of the United States that this isn’t something that Trump supporters can just shrug off and go back to business as usual, forcing us to accept it. No. What you did by voting Trump in was despicable, it was intolerable, it was hateful, and it was ugly. We need people to make it clear that there are no silver linings that make the choice acceptable. We need to protect these people with valuable perspectives from people who want to crush them or intrude or force themselves into their personal space. We need to give them support. And these people who roundly reject anything but a world without a Trump presidency and a Republican Congress and Conservative Supreme Court draw a picture for us of the future that we can fight for. We need them so that we realize what we are fighting, so that we don’t forget and get complacent about turning the dreams they need to protect into realities, so that the country doesn’t forget how thoroughly unacceptable and shameful the choice nearly half of its citizens made is.
We need the people who are angry.
Like it or not, as we saw here, few things are more powerful than anger. Anger created the Trump presidency. Anger, to some extent, will get us out of it. Yes, empathy helps, but raw anger often helps more. It helps us actually physically do things, like vote and rail and determinedly fight, to make things better. And some people need to be angry. Anger is how people gather the energy they often so desperately need to take back their lives. And so we need to support those who are angry, realizing that the anger comes from a deep sense of love and care in their heart for those hurt, and legitimate fear for what is to come if they don’t fight. And the anger can blossom into love and advocacy and activism that can create a wave of change. Even violence (as much as I don’t support it) gives voices to the unheard, especially if others do not demean the angry but, without condoning the violence, become advocates for the angry, representing their fear and pain. If there is one thing that this campaign taught us, it is that anger can create change. For many of us, Obama was like a vacation, and complacency dampened our resolve. But now those who are angry can reinvigorate our base and give us the energy and passion many need to fight. We need you badly.
We need the people who bargain.
We need people who come to the table and make small compromises for us in the pursuit of larger change. The ones who will go out and argue and debate and reason with the other side. This isn’t everyone’s inclination, but some of us can’t help ourselves. We need to go back and forth with the other side. We need to debate. We need to build bridges. We need to make things a little better for ourselves and others, even if that means wading and tolerating absolutely asinine, offensive, thoroughly disgusting positions. It’s not for everyone. We still need people who are angry to show how terrible those positions are to fuel a movement that can give us powerful change. We need deniers who can paint for us a better world without those positions, so we have something to fight for and can bind closer together in the strongholds when we need to. But we also need people who will take advantage of the smallest of opportunities we have, in the meantime — hopefully, ultimately, bringing some people from the other side over, or at least doing those small movements of the dial.
We need the people who are depressed.
Because what happened is sad. We need to realize that some others are sad, too. And we need to help them without ignoring their pain, because this hurts. The reality is that it hurts. And the people who are depressed have come to grips with the fact that it hurts, and they need to serve as reminders, too. We need angry people fighting, but not everyone can afford to be angry. We need deniers, but some people are forced into these worlds or are not able to ignore them. We need bargainers, but we also need people who can see and feel for their own hurt and the hurt of others. People who can cry and be a voice for our tears. Because if we’re honest, we’re all hurting right now, and we all need a place for us, when reality hits us in our face cruelly, to cry. Not just to be comforted. Not to be rushed into “being OK.” Not to be told to ignore. But to just admit the honest truth, and cry.
We need the people who accept (not be OK with, but accept) the world we are in and work to love the people in it.
Not people that are OK with it. But we do need to see the people who have given up fighting and somehow have kept going. Because we still have to live in this world, somehow, and there’s only one life, and not all of us can fight all the time. Some may be exhausted, and that’s OK; maybe we need to let them rest and help them believe in a better world. The truth, however cold and cruel it is, and the thing we’re all so terrified to say, is that this might be the world we are in now, at least for a good while. And if that’s the case, these people will be the people we need to lean on sometimes when, in spite of cruel truths we will likely face, we somehow will have to keep going for people who depend on us. It’s not that it’s OK. It’s not. It’s that it’s not OK, but rejecting it as much as the rest of us do is too hard for them and they can’t afford to fight, although they still show love in the corners they can. If you get tired, these are the people who may be here for you with a sliver of life in the brutal forced acceptance of a harsh reality. These people may be the trailblazers in how to live (or even die) in the current climate. Yes, we need these people, too, if for nothing else than that they provide a give a blueprint of how to live in Trump’s world when we are forced to accept that reality. And some of us may need them as a pit stop before we recharge and go out to fight, or embrace our sadness, or return to anger, or return to denial again. Because in the midst of tragedy, some of us need moments of beauty that make us smile in spite of overwhelming resignation.
I’m not trying moralize; these aren’t stages of progression. These are types of ways that individual people grieve, and each of them gives us something we may need at some point or another if we, as a group and individually, are going to keep going. We’re all going to be dealing with our grief differently in the next few years, but we can still work together, even when (as may happen with bargainers and deniers oftentimes, for example) we may have to work apart.
I’m sorry. It’s hard. I hurt; you likely hurt, too. I can’t promise it will be OK. But I can say that you are needed, important, and loved. I need you. We will need you, as our lives go on…
Together.
PS: Thank you for reading. I have a Patreon, in case you want to help me keep doing what I’m doing.