How Not to Go Crazy over Politics

I am writing this post for myself, because for the last two days I have been fretting pretty nonstop about American politics. For one thing, I discovered that almost ALL of our news media is owned by Republican-supporting corporations. Fox, yes, we knew that - but NBC, ABC, CBS, even CNN are also owned by huge corporations that donate millions to the Republicans. So much for the "liberal" media.

The more I looked into that, the more I kept feeling like there's a giant shell game going on where the corporations are blinding us all - whatever "side" you are on - to the reality of what they are up to, by making us all angry with each other instead. And my immediate impulse was to run out and tell everyone. I did post a few things here and there on the Internet, and wrote a letter to the local paper. And stayed awake most of the night stewing.

And then I caught myself.

I have a friend who got caught up in an environmental issue about a year ago, and began educating herself about it. At one point she told me she was spending 12 hours a day researching it. It was the only thing she could talk about, and she couldn't stop talking either. I dropped by a yard sale she held one day and she talked at me for two hours straight before I could get away.

Later she told me that she had had a dream where she was floating in the ocean and a voice told her to forgive herself. She didn't understand what she had to forgive herself for - wasn't she doing all she could to bring awareness of the issue threatening the ocean to others? But I think I know what the dream meant.

There's a two-fold trap people fall into that turns them into fanatics:
1. Thinking that they have total responsibility for solving the problem
2. Thinking that the only way to solve the problem is to get other people to change.

I figured some of this out after reading Marion Woodman's Addiction to Perfection. In there she said something about people going a bit crazy when they make too much of the world "sacred" - for instance, all animals. There is no way one person can protect all the animals in the world! But that's exactly what the animal rights activist feels obligated to do. Every time an animal dies or is harmed, that person takes it personally, both as a failure on their part and an attack on what they hold sacred. They realize the job is beyond them, but the only option they can see is to convince the rest of the world to see all animals as sacred as well. Another impossible task. But because they feel this huge obligation to FIX THE WORLD, they can't stop trying. So everyone they meet must be enlisted to the cause. They end up focused all the time on what is wrong with other people that they don't "get" it and attacking them for that.

Not effective.

But that's exactly where I went the last couple of days. If only I could get other people to understand what is really going on with our politics . . . yeah. Good luck with that.

It's so hard not to fall into the trap. Because you can't not care, not try to make things better, right? What kind of person would I be if I didn't care? And the problems are so huge and so immediate! Armageddon is coming! How many people do you know who think that?

Makes you crazy all right.

That's what I think my friend's dream was about. Forgiving herself for being one person who doesn't have the power to solve the problem in its entirety. Letting go of that responsibility and instead just taking on as much as she personally can do. That may mean educating others, sure, but not thinking that she has to convince everyone. Letting herself take a break from always being "on" the issue. Letting herself be one human being. Letting herself not go crazy.

I recently heard a talk by a woman in my program whose dissertation was on the myth of Demeter and Persephone as experienced by a mother of a son with an addiction problem. She related to Demeter because her daughter was taken by the lord of the underworld, just as this woman's son had been "taken" by drugs. She could not stop trying to fix him, to get him back into the daylight world as Demeter managed to get Persephone back for half the year at a time. But what she had to realize, she said, was that she is no goddess. She doesn't have the power to change the world. She can't fix addiction.

She will never give up on her son. She will never stop trying. But she has forgiven herself for not being able to solve the problem. When her son falls back into using, she no longer blames herself. She has stopped making herself crazy over something she can't control.

And so must I. Wish me luck.