After That Election, Feeling Bad Might Just Be Good

Well, I’ll be processing my feelings about the election for some time to come. I’ve noticed that they parallel the well-known seven stages of grief - shock and disbelief, denial, guilt and bargaining, sadness and regret, and anger.

I haven’t made it through yet to the final stages of acceptance and hope, but I’m working on it.

There’s so much disappointment in the fellow Americans who didn’t see the candidates the way I did. Maybe it was ignorance, but maybe what I saw that disgusted me about the eventual “winner” actually appealed to them.

Maybe his appeal was that he hated the same people his voters hated. Maybe it was denial that no matter what he said, no one could really be that cruel and self-centered.

Maybe it showed that old-fashioned racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are more central to the worldviews of his voters than we imagined. There seems to be enough evidence for any or all of this combining to enable him to scare the living daylights out of people with his party’s fear tactics.

Maybe it was the failure of so much corporate media to just tell truths that threaten their billionaire owners’ bottom lines. To me his words were blatant – there was no guessing as to what he proposed to do and whom he planned to hurt, punish, and erase from our country.

Maybe it was some failures of the Democratic Party’s approach itself. Maybe it was due to one third of the voters staying home. 

Maybe it was all of this and more. We can guarantee that media pundits whose speculations were wrong in the past have all kinds of ideas to keep themselves in the news cycle.

But I do know that for now I’m personally not in the place to listen to all that chatter. I need to process my own feelings.

And besides disappointment in fellow Americans who see no problem voting for someone who says he will take away the rights of anyone not rich, white, straight, and male enough, I’ve experienced fear, hurt, and confusion over it all.

After over thirty years of advocacy, mostly for LGBTQ+ people, I feel a loss I haven’t felt before. I’m afraid of what the future holds given all that the incoming guy has said and what he did in his last term. Future generations including that of my grandson could pay a real price.

There are times when the scope of the MAGA victory feels overwhelming and raises a hopelessness about the next four years and more as new radically right-wing Supreme Court justices take the bench along with the other judges he’ll appoint.

It doesn’t help me at all when well-meaning people respond with all kinds of “help” that amounts to saying “You shouldn’t feel that way” or tell me “Oh, it’s not that bad.” Trying to save me from understandable feelings might be their way not to face them, but it’s also a dismissal of those feelings.

So, let’s start here with these feelings. Feelings, after all, aren’t “good” or “bad” but are meant to be felt. We don’t necessarily have to think, act, or decide based on them.

First, we need to congratulate ourselves for having those emotions, experiencing them deeply and having difficulty in dismissing them. They are, in fact, telling us that we’re truly bothered by injustice, cruelty, prejudice, and inequality.

If we merely felt ho-hum about it all or could “get over it” right away, I’d question whether justice, fairness, kindness, humanity, diversity, equality, and concern for our fellow human beings really were our core values.

So, don’t buy the easy advice about how to feel instead – you should feel the way you do. And you can feel it as long as you have to without guilt before doing any work to move forward. These feelings will change as all feelings do.

As comedian and progressive talk show host, Dean Obeidallah advises: “The resistance starts Monday. For some, that might be this Monday. For others, it could be many Mondays from now. But first it’s time for self-care to repair and re-charge.”

Try not to get caught up in useless ways people commonly use to divert them from feeling those feelings by looking for someone or some group to blame, embracing conspiracy theories, or even expending energy seeking the real “why” behind it.

That means not only not spending time pointing fingers. It also means not blaming ourselves.

The next thing it seems to me is for each if us, when we’re ready, to seek community. Over 65 million voted with us.

Then, continue doing the work for human rights with many of the same strategies we’ve used before. Our problem is not that these strategies don’t work – it’s that they aren’t often or widely enough used.

Politicians are so focused on winning the next election that their tactics aren’t suitable for those who pressure those politicians to do the right thing. It’s not our job to compromise our values but to remind politicians what matters to us.

As American historian Howard Zinn warned: “When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not fall in meekly behind them. We who protest...are not politicians. We are citizens. Whatever politicians may do, let them first feel the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not for what is winnable, in a shamefully timorous Congress.”

We haven’t changed no matter what changes in the powers that be. We’ll adapt, but our message and messaging should continue with the same clarity and conviction. Our disappointed and scary feelings now are actually telling us to do so.

Today it looks dark, but there’s also a long game. And our choice isn’t just hope but to continue to affirm who we really are, what we value, and their importance. 

Don’t hurry that “Monday” without respecting your current feelings first. Monday will come - at the right time when you’re ready to answer those feelings’ call.