This Game is Not Reality

Post-Election Thoughts

a baby meditating in front of an election returns map of the united states

I had the honor of being invited to lead an event the evening that election returns came in at a new social club/salon in NYC called the CX. Instead of doing a discussion about the electoral college or party politics, I decided to conduct something more, empathic. These were mostly artists, activists, and counterculture folks who - like me - tend to absorb a whole lot more from the environment than may be healthy. It’s a bit like we are “tripping” all the time, with our nervous systems exposed to whatever may be happening.

So I chose to use a modified version of a Quaker meeting as our format. We just sat together, and after a bit of framing by me, people stood up one at a time to share their hopes, fears, and experiences, and then sat back down again. Everyone processed whatever had been said, maybe “metabolized” the stress or anxiety together, and then someone else would stand and share.

We did that for about 90 minutes, so by the time the election returns starting coming in, we were in a different state. I had actually begun things by reciting part of a Jewish prayer/poem called the Unetaneh Tokef (which I’ve been thinking about a lot lately). It comes off like a pretty severe prayer at first. It’s the one Jews read on “high holidays,” which essentially says that “on Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, who will live and who will die…” It’s about how God supposedly puts the names of all the people who will die that year in his Book of Life. It contains the fates of everyone: who will get sick, who will suffer some tragedy, and so on. And it sounds like this awful forgone fate. Except at the end of the poem, it says that only through charity, good will, mutual aid, and compassion can we “lessen the severity of the decree.”

So in the context of election night, it meant that the vote were in, but we can lessen the severity of the decree by being present for one another in the spirit of compassion and solidarity. And it really did work, at least in that the revelation of how our country voted - while disappointing - did not devastate. I was not traumatized. I did not feel brittle. We breathed through it, together.

And I realized this same principle applies to the world we will live in now that the votes have been cast and the choice of a president has been made. So many of my friends and colleagues are participating in podcasts and zoom meetings about “what now?” and “what happened?” Mostly, they’re trying to understand what the democrats did wrong (did Biden drop out too late, did Kamala ignore the working class, should the party tilt more center, more progressive, more openly supportive of Palestine and Gaza, less controlled by super-delegates?). But to me, this is largely wasted effort.

The political institutions that seem to be failing us now are just one symptom of a civilization whose many institutions are no longer up to the challenge of contemporary, digital life. Their inconsistencies and compromised value systems simply can’t hold up to the stresses of this time. How can we discuss border policy and immigration when the essential premise of the “nation state” is itself an intrinsically unjust construction? People who live on one side of an imaginary line are entitled to basic human rights that are to be denied those who live on the other side? No amount of policy can correct for the injustices of neoliberalism, nationalism, or colonialism. So we can’t pretend that any political solution is more than duct tape.

While a good one percent of us might choose to task ourselves with party politics at this moment, I think it’s ultimately a distraction from the matter at hand. Rather than spend all of our effort at getting the right person in a seat of power, many of us can do things that make it less important who controls the strings of government. I’m not saying it’s not important; I’m just saying that presidential politics may not be our primary means of lessening the decree.

Rather than focusing so much on the institutions that are failing us, what if we take on the functions that our institutions are failing to execute? The more engaged we are in mutual aid, the less our impoverished neighbors need to depend on the institutionalized social safety net for their food and shelter. The more we engage our troubled friends in our own and less fortunate communities, the less they will need to turn to welfare, mental health clinics, homeless shelters, and other failing national programs.

The more we do for each other, the less stress we put on the institutions that are already crumbling under their own weight, and the more time and slack we give them to reconfigure. The more resilient we are from the bottom up, the less we need to be provided from the top down.

Yes, I’d love to have a functioning government that cares for the oppressed and lifts people out of penury and despair. And I will do what I can as a citizen to support and promote leaders who mean to institute such policies. But in the meantime, rather than wringing my hands at what the democratic process has wrought at this moment in history, I’m going to do what I can on the ground, where I live, and wherever I can reach.

Some problems, like global warming or wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, may not be directly impacted by all this local and regional effort. I get that. But when we support each other in community instead of consuming more slavery-produced goods, we do reduce our negative impact, our carbon footprints, and our unwitting empowerment of the very corporations and institutions imperiling the planet and its many inhabitants. If we live energy-intensive lives driving cars or prompting AIs, we generate geopolitical stresses.

So, here’s my post-election monologue from the new Team Human podcast. You won’t find any cogent political analysis (except for a moment on how the daddy and mommy archetypes may have played into people’s perceptions of the candidates), but I do offer what I believe may be our best hope for lessening the decree.

Listen to the whole Team Human monologue here.

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