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Other Election stress

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I'm losing my freaking mind over it.
I'm off most media, but still can't escape it because it is everywhere.
Anytime I turn on the TV all I see is attack ad after attack ad. It's so hard to figure out what the politicians plan to do to better the country because they are so busy sending out negative "world will end!" ads against each other. And the lies. The never ending lies. From all of them - both sides. It is just astonishing the levels they will dive to just to make the other half look bad. And their supporters believe every word.

My biggest challenge is how divided we are as a country - the two sides are so far apart that they can't find anything near a middle ground. I truly think we are heading for a civil war because the belief that the election is rigged has been driven into so many people's minds. Plus, the hatred that has been allowed to run unchecked for years now has created an environment where behavior that would have never been allowed in the past is considered the norm today.

I don't see anyway out for us.
No matter who wins the presidency the senate and house will stay the same so this pattern will continue- which means no one will be trying to keep us together but will continue to force us apart.

I desperately want to come back to this post in two or three months and say I was wrong.
But I don't think there is any chance that it ends that way.
As one commentator put it -- The American experiment is over.

I hope, really hope, I'm wrong.
 
I'm off most media, but still can't escape it because it is everywhere.
Anytime I turn on the TV all I see is attack ad after attack ad. It's so hard to figure out what the politicians plan to do to better the country because they are so busy sending out negative "world will end!" ads against each other. And the lies. The never ending lies. From all of them - both sides. It is just astonishing the levels they will dive to just to make the other half look bad. And their supporters believe every word.
Spam text messages had me in a upheaval and I finally googled "how to stop polical spam text" and found out if you reply back STOP in all caps it unsubscribes you from the text. Which I didn't know cause it doesn't say that in the text as usual. I finally stopped them all. Or most. They were coming in like 10 or 15 a day. Don't know how they can call that legal just because it doesn't come from an auto dialer! That's bullshit!

I am purposefully living under a rock because with the pandemic, the election, and my own past and symptoms. It was just way too much. I had to finally just back away from it all and that made it much easier!

No matter who wins, the other side is going to raise all f*cking hell. "It was rigged". "The absentee ballots were rigged". There are videos about there being an "R" on the outside of the envelope of absentee ballots for Republicans and "D" on the outside for Democrats and that the post office would just toss which ever they didn't want to win and it's just like so f*cking crazy! Just anything to create upheaval! Backing away was just what I had to do. It means I am ignorant of the Democrat side and what that ticket's policies are and what not which means I likely won't be voting as I never vote ignorant of who I am voting for and what they stand for but I just could not watch nor read it anymore for my own mental health.
 
I've got low-to-no tolerance for hypocrisy. On a good day, I can unplug from whatever it is that's bothering me, because really - there's almost no-where to go with it. I can be confident I'm seeing hypocrisy, but the very mental - or moral - flexibility that allows someone to be a hypocrite...well, that gives them an almost super-charged ability to shield themselves from any neutral evaluation of their own actions.

Or in plainer language - a zebra can't change it's stripes.

Sometimes, I've seen people be able to look at their hypocritical actions and at least acknowledge that they doubled back on themselves, made an error. It doesn't necessarily mean they'll change how they are going forward, but at least it creates a moment of shared reality. I don't like looking at my own actions that way - it's painful and pushes my buttons - but, I truly consider it a useful human skill, to be able to step briefly outside of one's own point of view and see other points of view.

A useful, vital human skill. It's how we can carry on, together, even through immense tension.

I am enormously stressed today - partly about the outcome and the process of arriving at the outcome - but mostly about too many examples of straight-up hypocrisy, plain as day, that are far too big for me to confront, let alone tolerate. I want to reach through my computer screen and do what I don't know....but something.

I guess it's partly the powerlessness I'm feeling. But also, a lot of despair and rage. I'm doing what I can to limit my exposure to it, but the horrible thing is, it's everywhere.
 
I'm trying to decide whether to watch election night coverage at all. I know it sounds dumb, but I kind of want to know something about what's happening instead of nothing, even if we won't know who won until some unknown time in the future.

The fact is that if it's a landslide for either candidate, we'll probably know who won much sooner, and if all of the states who call the election tonight go towards one candidate chances are higher for a landslide.
 
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The election was really getting to me yesterday but not so much today. ( for some reason) I'll watch some of it, if I can, or stream it for free.
 
Still waiting. It looks like enough votes will have gotten counted to call the election pretty soon, probably by sometime tomorrow.

The stress won't end. The loser is bound to start suing and keep suing until he gets to the Supreme Court. Many of the current Justices were picked by the incumbent, so if he's the one suing and if it gets that far it seems pretty clear what they'll decide. That's a lot of "ifs" but they always say politics is the art of the possible.

And that still isn't the end of the stress because the loser may well incite a lot of violence. One of the candidates' tour bus was almost forced off the road by partisans for the other candidate a couple days before the election. I hope the Secret Service is ready because there are a lot of people with guns out there who might be very angry.
 
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