I’ve been struggling to come up with words to describe these last few months.  I am doing what many other Americans have been doing and constantly asking myself “why?” and “how?”  What has happened is simply so befuddling and confusing and lacking in any kind of rationality that it is truly difficult to realize. My faith in many things has been utterly and completely shattered, including the supposed inherent goodness, worth, and intelligence of human beings.

I know I am supposed to see those who fell prey to the spell of fascism as victims who were lied to so many times for so long that they finally began to believe those lies.  Lies that made them paranoid with the thought of various groups of people coming for them and their way of life, to the extent that they were willing to place their security and safety into the hands of criminals disguised as saints.

I wasn’t as confused when this happened the first time in 2016.  I could see the underlying factors at play and understood them, even if I didn’t agree with them.  I told myself that with the cat out of the bag, people would see the truth and we wouldn’t have to worry about something like that happening again.

And then it did, and I am torn between hating the everyday people who made it happen, and seeing them for the victims of lies that they are.  I want so much to be filled with understanding and compassion, and part of me is, but another part of me is furiously raging.  How could they all be so stupid and asleep?  Do they have any idea what they’ve done?  And yet, from another view, I recognize that it’s not their fault.  They were raised and conditioned to be unthinking sheep who just do what they’re told and to hate anyone who isn’t like them.

I recognize this as the culmination of a decades-long fascist campaign, if not also a centuries-long campaign on the part of Christianity as a whole, to dominate the country and possibly the entire world.  Eugenics, the root of Nazi policies regarding non-Aryans, was not born in Germany: it was born in the United States.  There was a substantial contingent of fascists in America that was rooting for Hitler, and ever since Germany’s defeat at the end of World War II, they have been seeking to establish those sick values in our own homeland.

It’s a long-played game, too, dependent on the passing on of Christofascist capitalist values from parents to children and then grandchildren over the decades, so the vision of dominance and suppression would not die.  Culture and society fought against these values from time to time, most notably during the Cultural Revolution of the 60s and 70s, but each social rebellion was crushed by more powerful forces who simply wrote laws to discriminate against anyone who opposed them, with prejudice.  The Drug War that began in the ‘70s is a prime example of this, as it deliberately targeted Blacks and progressives.

Normally this kind of takeover of a country would take place in the form of a standard ground invasion force, but the size and geography of the United States, the nature of its population, and also its laws prevented that.  Instead, World War III has been silently begun and quietly fought not with guns and bombs, but with dollars and ideology.  The average citizen’s primary weapons of defense have been their voices and their votes, and over the decades, one has been silenced via a deliberate sabotage of the public education system while the other has been slowly taken away, one demographic at a time.

The scale and grandeur of this plot to subvert and undermine the world’s largest democracy could almost be seen as impressive if it weren’t so diabolically malevolent.  The rich and powerful of our country and the world have been trying to do this for at least 80 years, if not longer.  They’ve been angry ever since the socialist policies of FDR were implemented, giving aid to people they considered to be unworthy of assistance, who deserved whatever suffering they were living through.

This is the aspect of the situation that shakes my faith in the inherent goodness of humanity.  If we are truly born innocent and good, then why does it seem to be so easy for us to fall into patterns of prejudice, discrimination, and even hate?Why are we so prone to “othering”?  I keep telling myself that this hate cannot be our natural state, because if it were, our species would never have survived this long.  Social species such as ours require cooperation to survive, not competition.  I keep telling myself that this hostility must be an imposed aspect of our behavior, not a natural one.

And yet we seem incredibly vulnerable to hostile states of mind when it comes to groups of people that are different from us.  Is this America’s culture rearing its head within the collective psyche of our country, or a natural artifact of human psychology?  The founding fathers managed to keep the Church out of the government (mostly), but they certainly couldn’t keep it out of society and our culture.  Beginning with the Puritans, Christian values have infected every single aspect of our society and culture since the 17th century, including how we raise our children.

That is when the human mind is the most psychologically vulnerable to being malleable to outside forces and it becomes possible to subvert what should be the natural goodness and cooperation of the human spirit into something exclusive to oneself and one’s family, and hateful to others.  And speaking from experience, it is extraordinarily difficult to take an unfettered look at that childhood programming and see how it has colored one’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.  It is even more difficult to tackle the task of deprogramming all of that conditioning and allowing benevolence and equanimity to emerge, which I believe are the true natural states of the human mind and spirit.

Most people are simply incapable of even acknowledging their conditioning, let alone dealing with it.  It requires a lot of admitting that you’re wrong about a variety of things, and most people’s egos simply will not allow that because it generates too much shame for them to bear.  It also creates cognitive dissonance in their minds between the lies they’ve been taught to believe, and the undeniable truth of reality.  Many Americans, including myself, have been dismayed to find that truth is not the antidote to intellectual blindness: sometimes it only makes it worse as the person further retreats into their own world because it’s what they’re used to.

What we have witnessed over at least the last 8 years, and probably decades longer, is nothing short of a hijacking of the collective unconscious of America.  Our collective psyche has been deliberately manipulated to make many of us think, feel, and behave in ways against our own best interests while simultaneously being convinced that we’re doing the right thing.  It is a collective psychosis that has deeply affected the least educated and privileged members of our society, creating a country with at least two, if not more, active realities in play, each of which is battling for dominance.

We have also witnessed the modern usage of “1984”-style ‘double-speak’, in which the meaning of words and phrases become reversed from their true definitions.  As a result, we have both major political factions in the United States often using the exact same words and phrases, but meaning opposite things.  I can’t decide if this is a failing of the English language, or if this is yet another tool of disinformation on the part of what has become the Enemy, which is engaged in a constant campaign to confuse and obfuscate the truth.

I do not know what is coming now, and I am consumed by the exquisitely unique torment of uncertainty.  I am painfully aware of all of the ways in which I do not conform to the vision of the Ideal American in the eyes of so many in my country.  I am a non-Christian woman with mental illness: I would probably have to be Black and homeless to be less desired in our society.  My book collection alone could have gotten me sent to the camps during WWII, or to the stake during the Crusades.

Yet I do have hope amidst my despair, though they make strange bedfellows.  I do not actually believe that fewer people voted for justice and progress than voted for greed and hate.  I believe the only way the Enemy “won” that election was by cheating and fraud, yet another of their long-played games through multiple decades of gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement, not to mention outright ballot interference, according to recent news reports.  There are more of us than there are of them, and ultimately they cannot stop us all.

More people will need to become “woke”, though, in the modern parlance.  And it is not too late to awaken either the self or others.  As long as we are alive, it is not too late, and we are far from dead.  As long as we are alive, “life finds a way”, in the words of Dr. Malcolm in Jurassic Park, even when those in control think they have squashed that potential.  In every great story where it seems like darkness and evil is about to overtake what is light and good, something surprising happens to prevent that from happening.  It is an archetypal truth of all epic tales.

Furthermore, more often than not, the event is not necessarily an act of divine intervention, but one of synchronicity brought on by the acts of simple humans working together with the natural energies of the universe with a singular focus on justice and survival.  By everyone doing their individual parts, what needs to happen, happens, though usually not without considerable effort and sacrifice.

The Lord of the Rings has been an internal source of inspiration lately.  A few days after the election, I heard Aragorn’s words in my head from The Two Towers as he’s speaking to a despairing young boy at Helm’s Deep prior to the battle: “There is always hope.”  Then he takes his own despairing soul and gears up.  We must all do the same.  Reverend MLK Jr. once said, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” a paraphrase of the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker.  It would be against the Universe’s nature for this darkness to persist for too long, let alone take over.

But just like in LOTR, everyone has to do their part, even if they are separated by great distances and don’t even know if the others are still alive.  The Breaking of the Fellowship seemed like a bad thing at first, but it was reformed in a way when everyone converged in Mordor for the last battle at the Black Gate and the Destruction of the Ring at Mount Doom.  Those things would not have been possible were it not for the experiences of the disparate parts of the Fellowship along the way, so in a way, the Breaking was necessary.

I’m trying to keep this in mind as I reel from the loss.  Despite my shock, I still have a general feeling of “it’s going to be okay”.  Perhaps this is merely self-soothing in the face of something fearful, but it feels like more than that.  I find myself hoping that what appears to be something terrible will actually wind up yielding something good somehow.  I just wish I knew when, and what to work towards.  I am not good at living with uncertainty.  When I dwell on this, my mind once again points to the mantra “it’s going to be okay”.

My biggest failing in allowing myself to succumb to despair is that it lets me think that there isn’t enough goodness left in the world, or enough people trying to save it, which makes me give up hope.  I think that’s a deliberate effort on the part of the Powers That Be to separate good people and make them feel alone and hopeless, which can make them give up and stop trying.  And that’s the worst thing that any of us can do right now.  This fight is not over.

I want to believe that this is the beginning of a new era for America’s people and what we are really witnessing are the death throes of the old way of doing things before something new and good takes over.  After all, as I noted, we are a social species that requires cooperation in order to survive.  A human institution based entirely upon superiority and competition is doomed from the start to eventually consume and destroy itself, something I believe we are presently witnessing as the American economy continues to destabilize.  It is unsustainable and cannot survive, according to the irrefutable laws of Nature.

My present hope comes from this knowledge.  My despair comes from not knowing how long we will have to tolerate the dying grasp of hate and greed, and from not knowing what suffering will occur as the result of that grasp.  While I do feel fear, there’s also a certain calmness and resolution.  I feel like a steel sword that has been through another step of the tempering process to strengthen me.

Like Eowyn in The Two Towers, “I fear neither death nor pain.”  But when Aragorn asks her what she does fear, she replies, “A cage.  To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.”  I too fear a cage and the snuffing of my spirit.  I try to remember what Aragorn tells her next: that she is the daughter of warriors, and that he doesn’t think that will be her fate.

For now, I’m just going to do my best to live my everyday life.  I just moved, so I have a house to finish putting together.  It is the end of spring and summer is about to begin, which means gardening.  Other good things are coming up the pike as well.  I’m just going to keep my head down out of the fray and try to focus on things that make me feel fulfilled.  If I don’t, I’ll spiral into a dark hole about all of the fearful possibilities the next four years could bring, and I can’t let myself do that.  It’s a very bad place to be.  I can’t fight from there, and I need to be able to fight if necessary.  We all do.