If you see tweets like this:
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
and your gut drops with the sort of ice-water dread usually reserved for hearing phrases like “metastatic cancer,” then you are not alone.
Nicholas Kristof has some suggestions which I think are a super-duper solid starting place: “Are you traumatized by the election of Donald Trump? Here’s the program for you.“
Here are a few additions/refinements:
- You can’t take care of anyone else if it takes all of your available energy just to keep your shit together and function. I made myself this “survival” playlist and listen to it first thing every morning while I’m writing; I’m not sure all the choices make sense to the general public, but they all buoy my spirit. Make your own survival playlist and listen to it religiously. Keep your heart, kid!
- Wigged out that the erratic President-Elect—either through his business practices or bellicosity—will trigger (or maybe somehow worse, fail to trigger) a Constitutional crisis? Give monthly to the ACLU.
- Wigged out about the shouts to repeal Obamacare? Call your congressional reps and call Paul Ryan, who has set up a sort of voice-mail straw poll to take the temperature of the electorate on this issue: 202.225.3031. Doing both of these will only take you a few minutes, tops.
- Wigged out about voter suppression and election rigging? I talked to my state rep, Jeff Irwin, at the local coffee shop. He pointed me to this very good project for fixing our damned-near broken electoral college system: http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/ He also suggest you should work in your state to support expansion (or creation) of early voting and a shift to “universal absantee ballot” If you want to support the Greens’ recounts, you can still give money to fund that (recounts are paid for by whoever requests them—not the public at large; I’ve already kicked in). More importantly, you can volunteer to help with the recount itself in MI, WI, and PA. It looks like they’re maybe getting deluged with trolls spamming their forms, so I’m sure honest, legit volunteers are much appreciated right now.
- Wigged out about access to women’s health services? I spoke to Sarah Erdreich—author of Generation Roe: Inside the Future of the Pro-Choice Movement—and she noted that the best place to give is as locally as possible: “A lot of the effects will be felt by women that need the services but won’t be able to afford them. … as long as the government is still funding non-[abortion]-related services at PP [Planned Parenthood] health clinics, it has a guaranteed funding source. … Near-term, a lot of the issues women have with accessing PP’s [abortion] services as financial, so if the local PP has a way to accept donations targeted towards defraying the cost for patients, that would be the most immediate. If they don’t, check out NNAF—Nat’l Network of Abortion Funds—and see what independent clinics in the area have set up.” Here’s the direct link that allows you to give to state/regional/local Planned Parenthood organizations. Sarah especially supports the Willie Parker Fund for Abortion Access in the South; the map on this page will help you find similar funds in your area.
- Wigged out about hate crimes? Wear the safety pin—but more importantly, cultivate a good natured and incredulous: “Hunh. You don’t really believe that, do you?” Practice saying it with a squint and smile, and deploy it frequently when someone gets out of line. Gently obliging someone to articulate their feelings and acknowledge the repercussions of what they say, and to own those words—or, hopefully, to decide they don’t really want to own those words and where they lead. The safety pin is a nice outward symbol, because I like the idea of “safety” in the safety pin, and of being a presence to help calm the nervous. But more importantly, for my own mental health, I like to dwell on what a safety pin is for: We use them in an emergency to hold our shit together long enough to get somewhere safe and really assess what repairs we need to move forward. And, goddamned if we ain’t in that place right now, brothers and sisters.
- BONUS ROUND: Wear the flag, too—not with snark or irony or upside-down, but with pride. Let us not cede our unified identity to the haters. E pluribus unum; the Union forever.
