Reality is a terrible thing to waste. It's one of our most precious possessions. For when we depart from reality, truth obviously suffers. So does our ability to deal with problems, which to handle appropriately, almost always requires a healthy dose of reality.
Problem is, and I struggle with this often, as almost everybody does, evolution didn't confer upon us the advantage of knowing the world as it is. Rather, evolution through natural selection promotes reproduction of our genes by living long enough to mate and have offspring.
Sure, that necessitates an ability to know how the world is, since our distant ancestors needed to distinguish the sign of a dangerous animal hiding in brush from a breeze rustling branches. However, the human brain isn't optimized to know how things truly are, but to know how things seem to be as viewed through the lens of our needs and desires.
Ever since Trump announced he was running for president again in the 2024 election, I've been hoping that the Democratic candidate would defeat him. So after Harris became that candidate following Biden's withdrawal from the race, I've looked for reasons to be optimistic about her chances.
I realized that my desire to have her win was affecting my ability to see the presidential contest objectively. One attempt to counter that bias was following election models that use polls and other data to come up with predictions of who will come out on top on November 5, Trump or Harris. In the end, the models basically predicted a 50-50 tossup, so they weren't very helpful.
Yesterday was election day. It turned out badly for Harris. Well before midnight west coast time, it was clear that Trump almost certainly was going to be victorious. That saddened me, as I wrote in a post for my Salem Political Snark blog last night, "Win or (probably) lose, I'm grateful for how Kamala Harris campaigned."
I started the post out this way:
It's turning out to be a sad night. I started watching the election returns on MSNBC around 5 pm with a lot of optimism. After all, a couple of days ago I wrote a blog post called "Why I expect Harris will beat Trump fairly easily."
For sure, that's not going to happen. I was wrong.
At the moment the New York Times Live Presidential Forecast gives Trump more than a 95% chance of victory. Harris' only option is to win Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Currently Trump is leading by 3 points in Pennsylvania, 6 points in Michigan, and 4 points in Wisconsin.
The Blue Wall is crumbling. When I wake up tomorrow, likely it will have fallen, and Trump will have been declared the victor.
Which is so depressing, I had trouble writing that last sentence. My daughter is depressed. Friends are depressed. My wife is watching something on TV that isn't the election results. I read an update from a New York Times reporter that said:
The Harris campaign just shut off the sound on the TVs at her watch party and replaced it with music after a guest on CNN said tonight felt "more like 2016 than 2020."
I feel the same way. Once again, a competent, highly qualified woman is poised to be defeated by one of the worst presidents our country has ever suffered under. And Trump has vowed to make his next term in office even nastier.
When I woke up this morning to a clear Trump win, I was tempted to take a break from political news. I felt a bit like someone who had gotten a fatal cancer diagnosis and wanted to blunt that awareness by doing something, anything, that would distract from the disturbing knowledge.
Yet there I was in mid-morning, doing my usual stretching exercises in front of the television, switching between MSNBC and CNN, which not surprisingly were focused on yesterday's election. I simply feel better when I'm being exposed to news, even if the news isn't to my liking.
I'm not sure why. I suspect part of the reason is that my mind is capable of imagining larger problems than are actually occurring. Dread is an emotion that can be paralyzing, since it is about what might happen. I've found that usually it is easier for me to deal with what actually is happening, reality.
New Scientist and Scientific American are magazines that I keep in the bathroom I use before heading off to bed at night. Yesterday I was pleased to come across an article in the October issue of Scientific American that helped my mood somewhat, "We Can't Turn Away from Reality." I liked the title, which differs in the online version.
Download We’ve Hit Peak Denial. Here’s Why We Can’t Turn Away From Reality | Scientific American
It isn't always easy to embrace reality, which includes both the objective reality that most people agree on, and the subjective reality of how we feel about things. Yet I'm convinced that this is a laudable aspiration -- to know how things truly are, not just how we desire them to be.
This is how the article ends:
Truth tellers are the Achilles heel of collective denial because they call attention to what’s being ignored. Thus, another playbook tactic is to hush them up, often by painting them as subversives or deviants. And so those who wear masks are ridiculed, scientists reporting on COVID risks are cast as fearmongers, and those with long COVID are dismissed as having anxiety disorders.
Time and again society pressures people not to see, hear or speak about the elephant in the room. To maintain our own peace of mind, we tune out, malign and shoot the messengers because they remind us of what we would rather disregard. Just look at physician Ignaz Semmelweis, environmentalist Rachel Carson, and NFL player and social justice advocate Colin Kaepernick. Indeed, people are regularly punished for being right.
So what do we do about our “ignore more, care less, everything is fine!” era? We need to stop enabling it. We can start by being more attuned to the everyday ways in which we ignore or otherwise fail to engage with troubling events—like that pinch we feel when we know we should click on a concerning headline but instead scroll past it.
We need to work harder to catch ourselves in the act of staying silent or avoiding uncomfortable information and do more real-time course correcting. We need to guard against lowering our standards for normalcy.
When we mentally and emotionally recalibrate to the new normal, we also disassociate from our own humanity. We need to demand that our leaders give the full truth and hold them to account. We must stand up for the silenced and stand with the silence breakers. To counter the new normal’s assault on normalcy, we must double down on our duty to know, to speak up and to remember.
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