As many who know me are aware, I am mildly bi-polar. When I get
depressed, I tell myself “this too shall pass” and it does. But when I become
manic, it’s like I can’t stop myself. When I was working, there were many times
when I stayed up all night, often several days without sleep until I crashed.
For decades, doctors thought I was suffering from
depression. But a great doctor at my university finally figured out I was
bipolar when I showed up in manic mode. All those anti-depressants were
literally driving me insane. It took more than a year to get the right balance
of medication, but it’s been good for nearly a decade now – not perfect, but
much better.
Why am I saying this? Because I believe the political
situation of the past two years has become a manic obsession for my friends. I
recently suggested people take a weekend off from writing about politics for
the weekend. In the wake of the incredibly emotional election we have just gone
through, I thought that taking a couple of days off from the chaos would help
everyone.
See, it’s my belief that all this political fighting has
gone from “discourse” to “hate” and now “rage.” Any shrink, or a person with
common sense, will tell you that being filled with rage is unhealthy for you. I
see people on both sides of the political spectrum simply can’t give it a rest.
The pushback I got from friends for the suggestion implied that I was trying to
shut them up instead of simply taking a couple of days to purge the emotions
and say nice things.
I came to this conclusion when I realized how much this
crazed me. I started calling real friends – not just Facebook friends – Nazis.
You don’t treat people that badly. I realized that I was just adding to the
anger that so infused my Facebook newsfeed. It was more than enough. I decided that
I had hundreds of photos I had taken during my travels, each one with its own
story, that I started posting a “photo of the day” instead. I easily have more
than enough to last until the end of 2019.
Some of the photos are merely “liked” while others have
stirred comments from friends about the memories we share.
So my contributions for about the last three weeks have been
generally positive. The only political posts I have made were urging people to
vote or shut up. I am hopeful now that the Democrats have taken back the House
that the more extreme things Trump does can be stopped. And I am willing to let
go for a while and let these people do the work instead of me. When Trump’s
minions took control of the government, I felt that it was our obligation to
fight because we were not represented. Now we are to a degree that we can halt
the insanity.
What I really hope is that because the Republicans took such
a beating in the election that they will back down from their extreme positions
and spend the next two years trying to reach some sort of legislative accord – or face losing their seats.
Things like robbing children of their birthright citizenship need to disappear.
If you are the descendant of grandparents or great grandparents from the great
immigration waves of the 1890s to 1910s, your parents may be citizens only
because they were born here. Few immigrants of that era applied for
citizenship. My mother and her sisters certainly are birthright citizens. And
my grandmother shares a grave with a husband who was one of Teddy Roosevelt’s
“Rough Riders” and who fell in the last month of the First World War.
Anyway, I digress. The fact is I care about my friends –
especially about their emotional well being. Most of us recently celebrated our
70th birthday. We are going downhill physically. But so see so many
of them in an emotional state that is extreme bothers me. I also suspect that
as retirees, we are looking for something to contribute and have too much time
on our hands. In some respects, we have become the cranky old people we never dreamed we would become.
By no means, do I advocate censuring them. I simply want
people to lighten up a bit. Draw down the battle lines. Americans have far more
in common than our differences. Yes, I hate the rise of racism. People must
stop this. But we can all be better than what we have become. We must remember
that we are out of many, one.
Americans have far more in common than our differences. Yes, I hate the rise of racism. People must stop this. But we can all be better than what we have become. We must remember that we are out of many, one.
But this will not happen if we continue to take extreme
stances and discard the opinions of others as wrong. We insult one another and
we will never become a society that works together. And we will die of
stress-related diseases.
I just realized that I’m stressing out about my friends.
