Check In on Your Elephant

Hey there, how are you doing?

1.

How is your elephant in the room doing?

You know, the one about the next four years? That combination of—well, it depends, maybe uncertainty, anger, fear, apathy, determination; maybe it depends on the day, or the moment. How are you doing?

For me, the image that has kept coming to mind has been the scene in Stephen King’s Misery (the movie version), in which Kathy Bates, having discovered that James Caan’s character has tried to escape, ties him to a bed and suddenly sledgehammers one of his legs. It’s called “hobbling,” she informs him. (Funny how clearly I remember this scene, though I never looked up whether ‘hobbling’ was a real thing.)

The worst part, though, comes in the half-minute between the first blow and the second. The first hit, we imagine, was excruciating, but it was also a surprise. But then, already writhing in pain, Caan had to wait. He knew that the pain was about to be felt a second time. He knew it was coming, but he couldn’t just get it over with. He had to wait for it.

That’s how this past six weeks has felt to me, when my thoughts wander toward the elephant.

Pretty, but maybe a little too sentient. Just like Midjourney.

2.

Which is why, like a lot of you I suspect, I’ve reined in the wandering.

Basic mindfulness has been a big help; for example, trying to notice the seed of a political thought before it germinates into poison ivy. Sometimes I’ll let the thoughts sprout, but I try to do that intentionally, often asking myself whether this is really a good time to do so or not. Sometimes it actually is; if I never check on the elephant, I can find myself oddly disconnected, as if I’m repressing or ignoring how I’m feeling. But a lot of the time it isn’t, so I leave the elephant alone.

I do other things. I focus on my family or my academic work or films or friends. I go to the gym. Simple stuff. I even follow the news, which I enjoy doing, but non-political news, like the UAPs circling around my home state, for example, which I wrote about last week. There was also a great piece in the New York Times about a corrupt priest in Brooklyn which read like an episode of the Sopranos. I’ve also noticed how often I use the news as a distraction from work, so I’ve practiced getting comfortable with the itchy feeling of wanting to click, rather than scratching it by clicking. That’s been really useful.

And while I’ve written a bit on the question of pre-emptive pardons and on the feasibility of firing a ton of civil service employees, I’m not writing on every outrage. In both my consumption and production of news, I’ve been, as I did before the election, segmenting out the various threats that I’m worried about, doing a kind of emotional triage.

For example, it’s a certainty that mass deportations will involve a tremendous amount of suffering on the part a lot of innocent people. Yet we don’t yet know exactly what this is going to look like. It isn’t “ripe” yet, to use a legal term. When the time comes, if there is something I can do as a human being, citizen, professor, rabbi, or journalist, I hope I’ll be courageous enough to answer the call. But Kathy Bates hasn’t hit us that hammer just yet.

Ditto with the cabinet drama. That Trump has picked a bunch of loyalists with no expertise should not be surprising. It is true that a lot of these people are parodies of actual cabinet secretaries, but I don’t think this is three-dimensional chess. As Project 2025 (now warmly embraced by the incoming administration, shocker) proposed, these people are just caretakers put into place while assistants, under-secretaries, and others do the work of either weaponizing or dismantling their departments. I admit, I am curious to see if RFK gets confirmed (I think Big Pharma will stop him) and I’m nauseated by everything about Pete Hegseth. But all this stuff is a sideshow, really. The real work is being led by relatively anonymous ideologues, far away from the limelight.

That elephant can just sit there and make noise.

3.

Where can we each make a difference? Personally, I’ve focused on resisting the Putinization of America, by which (trigger warning!) I mean how we’ve become a society so flooded with misinformation that the truth has no way of standing out — a place, in the words of Peter Pomerantsev, in which “nothing is true and everything is possible.” This is a world in which most citizens under twenty-five don’t get their news in print anymore — only YouTube and TikTok (let alone X, Rumble, and TruthSocial), where there are no guardrails, no standards, and no easy way to tell myth from fact. And it’s a world in which lies are promoted by brownshirt bullies like Elon Musk and a legion of Betas who want to be like him.

I still can’t get over Musk singling out a particular government employee who works (or worked?) for a governmental agency tracking diverse forms of carbon emissions — apparently because he thought “diversity” meant DEI-type diversity. There already so many lies in this soup: about climate science, about DEI, about government waste. And then the hounds are unleashed: if this person’s experience was anything like my recent one, she was probably ambushed by waves and waves of hate, threats, and bullying. The misinformation is bad, but the meanness, indecency, and brutishness of the next four years will make it far, far worse.

Multiply that by ten thousand and you see how Project 2025 can win: the bullies will make the good people quit. It’s not just a single centibillionaire. It’s a hundred wannabe Newsmaxes, the Manosphere, the supposed “independents” and “dark web” and “heterodox” types here on Substack who all say the same things, Rogan and a hundred of his imitators, and even regular old Fox News — it’s quite a carnival, really, full of election denial, Covid denial, vaccine denial, climate denial, science denial in general, it’s like a giant polka band of know-nothingism.

But I call bullshit on this bullshit. There was no mandate for any of this. There was a narrow presidential win decided by widespread economic insecurity, in which the Democrats actually did better than incumbent parties throughout the world. And here, at least, ordinary people can resist, simply by continuing to live our lives. We can and should continue to build communities we want to live in that are inclusive, welcoming of intelligence and culture and creativity and, gasp, diversity. We can fight denial with denial — in this case, a stubborn denial that this election was some kind of referendum on every conservative’s pet peeve. It was not that, and by refusing to go along with it, we can stop it from happening. Zeitgeist shifts are a matter of attitude and rhetoric. Here, we really can manifest our own realities.

So I’m going to continue living my coastal elite life, thank you very much. I put oat milk in my coffee. Sometimes it’s a latte. Suck it, Shapiro.

4.

Finally, I find consolation in, ironically, the great limitations of homo sapiens as a species.

First, after the election, many of us asked how this could happen. The answer, really, is that this happens all the time. Humans are subject to strong emotions—insecurity, fear, anger—and the powerful have always taken advantage of them. The strong have almost always oppressed the weak, and politics has always been an arena of venality and violence. The recent election was not an anomaly.

Paradoxically, I find that accepting this historical and anthropological reality leads to hope rather than despair. Because it’s not always this way. Sometimes the better angels of our nature do prevail. Sometimes, we do grow as individuals and societies, and if you look at the last few hundred years of history, the arc of the moral universe has still bent, overall, toward justice. That it does so in fits and starts, with reactions and counter-reactions, is clearly the case. And we are clearly in one of those reactionary periods. But overall, most human societies are still more fair and less warlike than they were even in the relatively recent past. And maybe that’s as much as we can hope for.

And when small victories do happen, they are to be celebrated. We can adjust our expectations; instead of being constantly disappointed in our fellow humans, we can accept that they and we are only human. This is who we are.

Obviously, this isn’t a call for complacency—human suffering and the harm we’re doing to the planet are all terrible, and there are plenty of each happening right at this moment, with much, much more to come. But fundamentally, we don’t have to ask how justice, sustainability, and equality can lose to demagoguery, misinformation, and resentment. It happens all the time.

It’s also clear that we have no idea what’s going to happen, even in the near future. There are massive changes afoot in our times. I don’t write much about AI, crypto, or technology, but the rapidity with which all three are changing should, at the very least, be cause for reflection. I do write a lot about psychedelics, and I wonder about their sudden emergence at this time as well. And let’s not forget the soon-to-accelerate climate crisis, which is already transforming the human and natural worlds. There are large-scale transformations taking place, and we don’t know how any of this will play out.

We don’t even know how the next six months will play out. We know that some things will be very bad, but some things may just be ridiculous (cf. the recent Republican vs. Republican battle on the debt ceiling). We don’t know, to paraphrase Woody Allen , whether things will turn out to be horrible or just miserable.

Will there be a 2026 election? I think so, albeit one rigged with more extreme gerrymandering, barriers to voting, and “election integrity” liars in positions to invalidate legitimate vote counts. Will there be systemic failure? I think for a lot of comfortable people, things will be basically fine, which is the tricky thing about authoritarianism; it’s easy to turn away.

Then again, who knows. Maybe the bird flu will be the next Covid. Maybe Trump will arrest journalists and activists. Maybe the AI will become self-aware. None of us have any idea, least of all the people who make predictions. The elephant is in the room, but I have no idea what it’s going to do next.

What am I going to? Well, I’m co-leading a meditation retreat that starts tonight. No matter what happens, it seems like a good idea to try to be more aware, more resilient, and more compassionate. If we’re headed into a dark storm, these qualities are ballast. If we’re not, they give us perspective. That’s really all I can offer.

Hold your dear ones close, take care of yourself, and have a joyous holiday.

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