Post Election Jitters

Currently at the 8th? day after the 2020 election. Lots of half thoughts spinning around.

Amongst my more ___ friends/coworkers/community is a sense of relief, “we are back to sanity now!”.

Except that.. there are so many people who did vote the other way. Why was that? What is in their belief system? What are their needs? How are you going to reach out and.. i don’t even know what? How can we live together? What do we believe in common? Where is the divisiveness coming from?

Amongst my more ___ friends/coworkers/community is a sense of “No worries. He will outsmart them after all. He had this planned. He’s 4 steps ahead of the game”.

I personally hope this is not true, because that would make him or his handlers more competent (than I thought). Also, I like my democracy, and I perceive him (his handlers) doing a straight up power grab.

Also, I think this comes down to a more fundamental thing that’s going on, that I can sometimes taste.

One viewpoint: Everything has been fine, Everything used to be good, we need to stick with those ways / work hard / keep your head down / authority is kind and knows what its doing / that’s the way to be / why do these people want to to destroy our country.

Other viewpoint: Things have been broken for a while, please can we fix it, the world is changing and needs different answers than what it has been, please can we fix it, look at all these other systems that could be better, please let us make it better for all. I do fall into this viewpoint; i do believe that automation and climate change are going to make fundamental shifts in so many things.

I think the conspiracy theory stuff comes from something like: Life is already so damned hard, its too hard to take in all the additional brokenness especially when it runs contrary to that-which-we-base-our-security-on, so .. double down, believe the weirdest angle to hang on to sense of reality.

A sad thing (from my viewpoint, there’s always a viewpoint) is that these folks, its like being in an abusive relationship, where you believe the abuser’s viewpoint on things. And there’s enough “others” to shift the blame to, that they get away with it.

So, yeah. This is what is stirring in my heart. I don’t think my little blog post will change anything, but at least I could get the words out. I want to love on my abused community. My heart sinks with the gravity of the stuff coming down the road that it doesn’t feel we are ready for. Covid was wake-up call. I wish we could figure out a way to do better safety nets for all because we’re going to need them, but somehow, that voice is lost on both sides, mostly because its not short term $$$.

Oh, and there’s the other problem that news is now an industry that requires eyeballs, which changes it from “level headed” to “appeal to emotion” the best two of which are anger and fear. I even helped them with that.. one of my work gigs was in the news industry. I got paid and it was a fun little project dealing with scaling elastic beanstalk stuff.