Healing the Divide

The flu came on me suddenly on election night.  By 3am I was exhausted and very sick. The next morning didn’t improve. It felt very much like September 11, 2001. My body ached and feelings of grief and despair permeated my day. Unlike 2001, I found no comfort in daily routines.  I could no longer mask my feelings from my children with the busyness of life with toddlers. There were no distractions, no stories and no playgrounds to visit.

Following the September 11 attacks the feeling of safety slipped away, and like many others, I found myself in a state of constant anxiety.  Though I didn’t vote for President Bush, I did look to him for reassurance and for a brief period I felt somewhat confident that we might eventually return to a state of normalcy.  But my fear was pernicious and I began to get physically ill. The hidden blessing was that I became more aware of my body and its intuition. I began to listen and trust the signals it sent.  Fifteen years later my election night flu came as no surprise.

To some drawing a parallel between September 11^th and election day 2016 may seem ridiculous.  After all a presidential election is not a terrorist attack. On election day we weren’t attacked by violent extremists who hated us and were driven to inculcate fear into our daily lives.  No, this time we were assaulted from within.  This time the fear and hatred was homegrown.

I know Hillary Clinton wasn’t perfect, heck I was with Bernie.  She is a part of the establishment, a politician with tons of baggage.  If she was running against Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio or Chris Christie( I can’t include Ted Cruz here) we could unpack all that and have a real discussion.  If she was simply running against a billionaire businessman who claimed a few bankruptcies, made a couple of shady real estate deals and was offering a voice to those who have been economically disenfranchised I’d say fair game. All these scenarios seem like a breath of fresh air compared to what we all experienced, because this was no ordinary election. Donald Trump was no ordinary candidate and by that I’m not implying he was extraordinary.  

The 2016 presidential election dismantled our commonality and fractured our moral core.  It feels less like a democratic process and more like a farcical Shakespearian comedy.  So how do we move beyond this? How do we, as a nation, heal?

Many people are saying…   Give him a chance, trust the process, this is how democracy works and get over it!  In other words let’s just pretend that this is normal.  Well, guess what?  It’s not normal and I think we all know this in our gut.

Dysfunction in a family system is protected by secrets and denial and a nation is no different.  Those that call out problem are often attacked and ostracized. The system will go to desperate lengths to protect itself. Lifting the covers and revealing the shame and vulnerability that lurks beneath is just too painful, but it is necessary to heal.

Being prejudiced and judgmental is a part of the human psyche. To a greater or lesser degree we all have prejudices and we all judge.  Our awareness of this dismantles its power over us.  Donald Trump has done a stellar job of bringing our hidden and darker sides into the light.  He’s our nation’s identified patient, our problem child.  

We can’t put our nation on the couch and we can’t send it to military school, but we can begin a conversation. I have a starter question… Why?  If you voted for Donald Trump how and why were you able to look past all the hate, fear, misogyny, racism and xenophobia to justify your vote?*  Honestly, I really want to know!  I really want to understand. In fact, I’m desperate to understand, because if I don’t I will fall apart inside and slowly drop out of your life. If our paths cross I will pretend everything is normal, but deep down I will feel fractured and broken, my faith in humanity shriveled. 

My hope is that such a conversation would shift our perspective and begin to draw us closer. If we were all blessed enough to see our small and fragile planet from afar we might begin to realize that deep down we have more in common than we realize. The astronaut, Edgar Mitchell offered the wisdom he gained from viewing our shared home from a distance with this quote:

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”

I’m not sure this view would shift the Donald’s perspective. He would probably wonder how he could stamp TRUMP, in big gold letters across the planet, just in case it was good for intergalactic business. For now let’s leave him and politics out of this. Let’s start a conversation that will help us to understand each other and heal.

~Christine Cameron DiLillo

*I don’t think it’s necessary for me to include an exhaustive list of all the disturbing things that Donald Trump has said. Unless you have been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard them all. If you haven’t, please find below some informative links.

For viewing:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSZFrRsuSyYFor reading:

For reading; http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-24/nyt-publishes-complete-list-donald-trumps-twitter-insults

For reading and viewing: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/03/movies/youve-been-trumped-an-unflattering-documentary.html