How Are You Doing?
I'm departing this post from my usual focus on workplace wellbeing. Instead, I'll speak about my own mental health and responses to what's happening on the national scene.
I'd love to know how YOU are faring in the face of all the chaos and damage to our sector and the whole country. I hope you're taking good care and hanging in there. Drop me a line, won’t you?
The Berkeley artist in the photo above was my favorite person at Presidents Day “Not My President Protest.”
I was so happy to join about 100 like-minded citizens showing up Monday to lift their voices in favor of preserving our democracy. The young and old were there, carrying signs saying: “Trump Is the Swamp,” “Your Silence Will Not Protect You,” “Unchecked Power is Tyranny,” “Trump Eats DOGE S**t” and “Dogs Against Trump” (on the back of a pooch). The pictured woman was down to earth, humble and grateful for the chance to demonstrate her resistance to what's going on.
Obviously, we’ll need to do a lot more than stand on a street corner preaching to the choir in Berkeley. But I felt deeply affirmed to do something besides feel powerless. It felt like the start of something important for me and probably for people in other demonstrations across the country. We saw that there are A LOT of us who do not support what’s happening.
As a person of privilege, I’ve been spared the most severe impacts of the past month’s horrendous actions. But I’ve not been unscathed. To save my sanity, I’ve been trying to limit my intake of the whiplash-inducing deluge of shocking news. I’ve also been scratching my head about what’s going on with Republicans in Congress and wondering how those who put the would-be king in office are feeling now. And pondering where to focus my energies to resist the takeover of our country by those whose values could not be more different from mine.
Stepping Back to See the Big Picture
A guest on The PBS News Hour recently, Kim Lane Scheppele, made a lot of sense to me. A sociologist at Princeton who studies law and politics, she said she has studied and personally witnessed the rise of autocratic leaders in Hungary and Russia, where she has lived.
Scheppele described how in Hungary, far-right leader Viktor Orbán used a “blitz strategy” -- a constant barrage of attacks on long-standing institutions and norms to stun, confuse and silence the populace. Feeling threatened, citizens focused on protecting their own group and didn’t see the big picture to come together in opposition. As a result, Orbán has led the country into a form of fascism. she said the same strategy failed in Poland a few years later when a far-right leader tried it; the Poles recognized it as Orbán’s approach and rejected it.
“We haven’t experienced such an attack on our government and institutions like now,” she said. So we aren't sure how best to respond.
Orbán’s “blitz strategy” is precisely what the new president and his pals who wrote Project 2025 are doing now. It’s what long-time Trump advisor Steve Bannon described in an interview with Frontline reporters several years ago. He called it “flooding the zone” -- doing several outrageous things every day in order to make it hard for the media and other watchdogs to comprehend them all. This strategy is meant to raise the odds that at least some of them will stick.
It's the most dangerous kind of political and psychological warfare. We must recognize, unite and resist.