Post-Trump Stress Disorder: Many Lives, Broken and Bruised
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by E.A. Blair
I have been absent from these pages since the November election. I have had trouble finding the motivation to write. I tried to turn out some satire, but, unlike before the election, Trump had ceased to be a joke. The closest I got to humor was referring to my condition as PTSD (Post-Trump Stress Disorder), but it turns out that’s a real thing. I continued to post comments here and on other sites, but my heart wasn’t really in it to the point where I felt I could return to extended commentary.
As the month of May began, however, two things changed that. One was in a reply to a comment I made on an Alternet post about Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. It was from someone calling himself kyushuphil, who opened his comment with, “As you know, from the writing we also have from you under your pen name, language matters.”
The other came in replies to a comment I made to another Alternet post about the repeal of the ACA creating the Death Panels that Betsy McCaughey pulled out of the butt that serves her for a brain and that Sarah Palin made famous. In my comment, I briefly recounted the low points of 1999, my year of hell, which I wrote about previously. All I will say here is that it was a long period of personal loss and pain – loss of wife, pet, home, job and freedom. I pointed out that even in the face of all that happened, that my depression at the ascent of Trump is even worse.
Some people replied to express sympathy, but some thought otherwise. I was called evil for expressing feeling more depressed over an election than from causing a fatal accident. I was called a bad person for blaming the insurance company for not treating me. When I read those comments, I at first felt annoyed, but when I thought about it some more, I realized that there was something there, though not in the sense that the people who denigrated me had intended.
The events of 1999 were personal. My losses were personal. Although I eventually got entangled in legal matters and the justice system, they were all personal issues. I had friends and family to help me through those times, and all along I still felt that things would eventually work out. Counselors told me I would have been fully justified in feeling suicidal, but that would have been the ultimate surrender.
What I came to realize (and what my critics missed) is that the nature of the current situation is quite different. It shouldn’t be news to most people that there are different kinds and degrees of depression. Despite the severity of the events of 1999, they were my problems and, despite having the support of friends and family, I had to make it my own fight to keep from giving into despair.
The problems facing us in the Trump era are not personal, they are general, being inflicted on huge sectors of the American people. The people bringing these problems about are people who can inflict their collective will on others and the support of family and friends is powerless to help. The pain is not personal, it is general, but there is a powerlessness I and many others feel on the personal level that tempts one to feel that things may never get better.
Despite the events of 1999, I never felt that I didn’t want to ride them out. I managed to endure the Shrub years from 2001 to 2009. In 2017, however, I find it much harder to see a way through the years ahead. Throughout those years, suicidal notions never entered my mind. If Trump and the Republicans manage, by re-election or by overthrow, manage to keep the reins of government in 2020, I cannot be certain that won’t change.
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Sorry to hear about your problems man. I had similar ones years ago, and I know how it can suck. Trump makes it all much worse.