Here We Are

But where on earth is here?

My inbox is full of postmortems. I wrote a small one on Twitter late on election day and immediately regretted it. What am I doing? Why am I yelling at people who are just as upset as I am?

(There will be a postmortem, oh boy will there be a postmortem, but not today)

I don't know if this is healthy but there is a sort of cold comfort, for me, in the fact that Trump won outright. He didn't steal the election or wrench this country from us by force, he won the popular vote: first Republican to do it in 20 years. It's like in horror movies, where the victim does something stupid before being brutally murdered. We can tell ourselves they asked for it, which frees us from guilt as we watch them die horribly for our entertainment.

People who did not vote for Trump did not ask for whatever’s coming and do not deserve it. But America, the country, does. Over decades, we slowly became the kind of place where someone like Trump could win. Now that he has won, we have made that status official. We are, in fact, not going back.

What now?

I posted a quote in my last article about getting lost. I'm going to post it again, because I think it's the best model for moving into the future and because I'm going to spend the rest of this article writing about it:

The research suggests five general stages in the process a person goes through when lost. In the first, you deny that you’re disoriented and press on with growing urgency, attempting to make your mental map fit what you see. In the next stage, as you realize that you’re genuinely lost, the urgency blossoms into a full-scale survival emergency. Clear thought becomes impossible and action becomes frantic, unproductive, even dangerous. In the third stage (usually following injury or exhaustion), you expend the chemicals of emotion and form a strategy for finding some place that matches the mental map. (It is a misguided strategy, for there is no such place now: you are lost). In the fourth stage, you deteriorate both rationally and emotionally, as the strategy fails to resolve the conflict.

In the final stage, as you run out of options and energy, you must become resigned to your plight. Like it or not, you must make a new mental map of where you are. You must become Robinson Crusoe or you will die. To survive, you must find yourself. Then it won’t matter where you are.

-Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival

A lot of people and pundits are mired in Stage 3 right now. There are a lot of examples out there of people making plans for the future based on a past that may no longer exist, but the most clear-cut and widespread example is gaming out the 2028 election. Many of the people talking about getting it right next time were well aware that Trump was a threat to democracy itself right up to election night — or at least, they pretended to be. But we are lost now, and elections are something familiar, and so we are bending the map asking ourselves questions that could not possibly matter less right now, regardless of how free and fair the elections will actually be. Gavin Newsom? Tim Walz? That’s four years out, a millennia away: might as well be a different planet. Meanwhile, Trump takes power in less than three months. He has promised mass deportations with reduced due process, he has promised to go after trans people’s right to medical care, he has promised retribution on everyone who has ever wronged him. Whether and to what extent he will do these things no one can know for sure but the odds are very good that his administration will take this country into uncharted territory.

The people worried about future electoral politics right now are doing the thing Gonzales calls "bending the map," in which you impose your preconceptions onto a world that no longer matches them. In his most chilling real-life example, Gonzales writes about a man who smashed his compass with a rock while lost. It was broken, you see. It kept telling him he was going in the wrong direction.

I don’t know exactly where we are — I’m as lost as anyone — but I do have a compass, and here’s my reading. Trump has spent the last few years purging both his inner circle and the Republican party apparatus itself of anyone who might stand in his way, and the purges will continue. The people have expressed majority approval, or at least tolerance, of his threatening and openly fascist rhetoric. He has both a mandate and a team of enablers: not just yes-men, but “yes-and” men.

I mention my military service on here a lot, too much probably, and when I mention it I am always careful to mention that I never saw combat. I talk a lot less about what I did see: officers casually sending soldiers into life-threatening situations for no tactical gain in hopes of getting a pretty ribbon for their uniform. People died because of those decisions — not people they’d demonized or decided were the enemy, but people wearing our uniform, on our own team.

I didn’t see combat but I did face down a Lieutenant Colonel and refuse to hand over classified information I knew he was going to use to jeopardize the lives of every patrol in the area. He screamed at me like a madman for what felt like a very long time. The ends of his sentences did not match their beginnings, he was nearly out of his mind with rage. Every other person in that room nodded in unison to everything he was saying, even though many knew that I was right. I was alone, some punk-ass E5 on a forward operating base in the middle of goddamn nowhere, I expected people to have my back that day and nobody with any power did, any more than they had the backs of the men whose lives and limbs were hanging in the balance. I experienced no retribution, thank God — the LTC got the information elsewhere, used it the way he’d wanted to, and proved me catastrophically right in very short order. Perhaps he just wanted the whole thing to go away. Which it did. LTC Michael Wawrzyniak of the 4-73rd Cavalry Regiment got his shiny fucking medal in 2010 and I got out of the Army and took that lesson with me.

People tell me Milgram’s Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment are deeply flawed, and perhaps they are, but I know the core of them to be true. When incentives change, people change too. A lot of people are afraid, and they are weak, and it’s not even their fault really: they were made that way or brought up that way or maybe just have a lot more to lose than those who find courage. The point is, there are people who will carry out any orders Trump might issue, even if they don’t want to. Good people. People you know.

I bring this up not to be morbid or melodramatic but because it’s important to understand the hazards of the wilderness we find ourselves in. If you understand what’s possible, you’re more likely to see it before it’s too late. You can also keep an eye out for the signs and defend yourself against it. If you refuse to see that darkness, you are susceptible to it. None of us are immune. All of us have the capacity for immense evil.

The best way to avoid dying in the wilderness is to avoid getting lost in the first place: recognize the signs early and retrace your steps back to safety. This was not an option for us as individuals. We did not wander this far off the path, our country did. We will, therefore, be going through all the steps of being lost whether we like it or not. This is is a natural progression and, while it's best to move through them as quickly as possible, refusing to feel your feelings places you on a path to the bad Stage 5: the one where you terminally disconnect from reality and lose yourself forever. “You must become Robinson Crusoe or you will die” presents two perfectly viable options and, as former UFC fighter and current right-wing shithead Chael P. Sonnen once said: failure is always an option.

The first step towards the good Stage 5 -- the one where we see reality clearly, for what it is, and make our decisions accordingly -- is understanding how lost we are. Trump has repeatedly told us where we are going, broadly speaking. We know the basic shape of what comes next. But there are no details or even a coherent outline of this brave new continent. Trump is capricious and a liar; he will do some of the things he's promised to do but not all of them, and he will also do things even he hasn’t thought of yet. Anyone who says they know exactly where we’re going is lying -- not only to you, but to themselves.

To establish our new mental map we must learn to see beyond both our desires and our fears, getting as close as humanly possible to the reality we find ourselves in. Gonzales borrows from the Tao Te Ching to explain the proper approach: beginner's mind. You cannot add more water to a cup that's already full. We have to have enough humility to know how little we know, to understand our own fallibilities and biases, our individual strengths and weaknesses, so that we can work with what we have.

People keep asking me about my plan. Here it is: I came home from canvassing in Wisconsin, got extremely high, and slept for 11 hours -- more than my total amount of slept in my 72 hours on the Red Blue Wall. Now, I'm going to get back to work. I'll do yoga, visit with friends, do my DBT workbook exercises every single goddamn day…and wait. Observe. Piece together our new reality as it emerges as best I can, so that when it's time to act, I'll be making my decisions based on the best and most complete understanding of our reality I can possibly create.

It would be best if we could all get to Stage 5 by inauguration day.

Perhaps this all seems very dramatic to you. I certainly hope you're right, but consider taking this advice anyway. It’s not about preparing for the worst case scenario. It’s about preparing for whatever comes next.