How Terrified Are You? January 2017

I voted 8 but my resting heart rate is always in the 90s even when there isn't an anthropomorphic chinchilla in office

Was gonna say a 6 but when I remember each individual thing it goes up to like, a 16

Ignoring the judiciary branch definitely amped it up a notch

It's super frustrating that nobody in Congress seems to be doing anything to stop this madman but the fact that the anti-Trumpers seem to be so numerous and motivated these days definitely gives me some hope. I'm seeing a lot of horrified reactions from people in my FB sphere, many of whom didn't vote Clinton, a few of whom I know voted Trump even if they don't admit it. If his approval gets into the low-30s I suspect Congress will finally start taking action. Hopefully it's not too late!!

I have a low stress personality but having to keep up with + process the info overload has def made me way more anxious than normal. so maybe 5?

I think I would be more concerned if trump's first week had been really normalizing and he had an approval rating that was ticking up. like the idea of a soft-fascist friendly trump with a 60% approval rating scares me more than what he's done so far. right now he's putting business leaders, the media and even many republican politicians in a position where they don't even have the *option* to support him. so I put a lot of faith into the idea that his unpopularity 'matters' and I'm rooting for him to keep putting himself out of normal range, even though short-term that means terrible things for the country, economy and many individual people.

still - we don't know the end of this story yet, but it's gonna be pretty unpleasant. the most powerful man in the world has a mental disorder. the chances that there will be violence on the streets and/or a real constitutional crisis seem a lot higher than they did a week ago. but as far as personal safety goes, I would feel more scared walking around NYC w/ a MAGA hat than a clinton hat.

I feel exhausted more than anything. the 2016 campaign and having to deal with Trump's alternate universe was a mire I didn't want to get stuck in but did, with the understanding that it'd all be over soon, only for him to unexpectedly win.

I certainly wasn't *happier* with the deplorables hiding in plain sight because we all knew they were there and pointed out it for years to anybody who wanted to listen. But it's one thing to know that there are a lot of garbage human beings that believe heinous shit and another to be smacked in the face with supporting evidence day in and out.

Cent FL definitely has some Trump nests, people decorating their trucks with obnoxious slogans, bumper stickers, etc. The most bizarre one was being at a karaoke night shortly after the election, where this lady performed a duet of Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come" with her friend (who happened to be Black) and at the end of the song, after singing softly and politely, starts barking "Yay Trump!" and "Go Trump!" and then I realized why she picked the song and went flush with rage.

but the fact that the anti-Trumpers seem to be so numerous and motivated these days definitely gives me some hope. I'm seeing a lot of horrified reactions from people in

maybe they're plotting a coup in private

oh wait i clipped the wrong quote

i meant to clip this

It's super frustrating that nobody in Congress seems to be doing anything to stop this madman

sometimes i'm happy that he's so incompetent, sometimes i'm terrified that something like 100 million americans are cool with him _anyway_. more than trump it's those 100 million people who scare me.

Trump's approval ratings have stabilized my nerves, yeah.

xxpost I mean other than the "not voting against confirmation" fiasco (which I have started to gravitate towards Shakey on), what else can they really do other than public rebukes, which they have done? It isn't like they can censure him at this point, and many of them actually went to airports to try and get CBP to comply with the judge's order.

Discipline though would require more flagrant abuses, ones that would actually cause people to cross party lines. And may be coming, but we aren't there yet.

Really though the Dems should just put 5-10 reps/senators on tweet duty each night and do nothing but troll Trump 24/7 until he either deletes his profile or goes back to Valhalla

2-3 - it's getting harder to tell where hysteria ends and reality begins though.

7

i'd say 5.5 - more just an ongoing background static of unresolvable anxiety than any kind of real abject terror

it's getting harder to tell where hysteria ends and reality begins though

for me this is part of the terror

fear of the unknown

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQUcjt10NGg

For various pockets of the country: 8 (political unrest plus economic turmoil plus ready access to guns). Less a formal, full-scale civil war, more regional skirmishes on the lines of the Malheur occupation or the Baltimore riots.

For myself: 3 (I am a middle-class white female who lives outside of those pockets I fear are vulnerable). Unless I start regularly going to demonstrations wearing a t-shirt reading "NASTY WOMEN OPPOSED TO TRUMP," I will be a lot less directly exposed to the brewing trouble.

Thread needs darraghmac for some balance.

― Eats like Elvis, shits like De Niro (Tom D.), Monday, 30 January 2017 21:41 (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm white, insured, in a well paid public service job in a country thats in the EU and I think I voted 1 in that other poll.

Voted 7. I'm too young to have experienced a world leader I think is likely to tear up the social fabric of the US and/or start a nuclear war before and I'm not enjoying it

posts not not at all in character!

srsly seeing dmac even slightly worried is more troublesome to me than most things

Bah, I was looking for some justificatory support for my state of non-terror.

Am genuinly surprised by yr 7 deems. This is why these 'describe yr pain on a scale from one to ten' things don't make sense to me.

Voted 5. Which feels high, as it should be. Shit be stirring for real. As it stands the world totally sucks. Me and gf can't go to the US as planned because of her Iraqi passport. Family troubled even more. I've enough priviliges to pull through, but this is not the world I want to live in.

yeah i try to stay chill for y'all and its love rly it is but idk its not any good to even play blasé when i think of how much worse the movement behind trump has made the world in a year.

and i had a good day at work, im straight and i married recently, and the car passed the nct this week, i mean rly 7 is fucked

q for anyone who lived through any period of the cold war as an adult: did you feel any level of routine anxiety about the possibility of nuclear war? i'm feeling it now (not a lot, but it's there) and i'm curious how you coped w/ this. it seems fairly unlikely trump would start a nuclear war but "unlikely" is a major change from "unthinkable."

7 is fucked
5 is fucked
3 is fucked

even 1 is fucked tbh.

id have thought that the pending likelihood of a nuclear war was.... the...defining characteristic of living through the cold war, unless ive missed the point there

True, but I don't remember feeling much anxiety, plenty of other people (to put it mildly) did.

I probably wore a CND badge at some point. Actually I don't think I did.

didnt live during the cold war but did experience blackouts and the terror of being bombed if out on the streets during a civil war in a developing country plus other craziness

so my threshold for these things is pretty high

i didn't live through the cuban missile crisis or prague spring -- for me the rest of it was just *there* in the background. also sting suggested that the russians loved their children too

i do recall being relieved that i lived close enough to a major target that i would likely be vaporized rather than having to fight off mutants and wild dogs etc

I've never felt worse about the direction the world is heading in.

I'm probably at like a 4 or 5. helps that i live in canada and have healthcare, housing, and I'm a pasty white man. my overwhelming reaction is not fear or anxiety, tho there is a little of that, it's anger.

Tension, lack of sleep, general paranoia and exhaustion at my house*

*Some of which is admittedly in relation to other IRL stuff

weirdly my anxiety just shot up after the good news of the acting AG's decision moments ago, mostly cos while it was a hornet's nest that needed kicking, it's still a hornet's nest.

Still, though, Trump only recovered in the election because he was able to escape his ugly moments when the media focused on the opposing candidate. he doesn't have the deflection available now. he's digging deeper and deeper.

hopefully I go to bed a 3 tonight

This govt. sucks, but it kinda always sucks and has probably has since Kennedy got shot. I got to think that bastard Nixon probably put as much loathing and hand wringing into the world as Trump. Right now Trump is potential death, Nixon and his lackey Kissinger did policies that LITERALLY lead to a couple million people's death. Now all of that was when I was a child, so it wasn't my angst but I did grow up with fear of nuclear war. Shit to me, Freddie Krueger was a cartoon after seeing something like Threads or The Day After when you are like 14- that's a real horror movie and the contemplation of it probably is still with me now.

I'm way more wary of running into the heroin/pill head zombies or being out in the middle of the night and running into some idiot with a handgun who wants something that's not his. That seems way more probable fear to me as I see elements of it all the time.

xp i don't think it's that weird. my anxiety went up too. stuff is happening very fast, and it all seems very chaotic. between the open disagreements between branches of gov't and the pace at which the new administration is moving it's like watching your parents fight, while one of them is driving the car in a rainstorm.

if I'd known how fast things would go tonight I wouldn't have eaten an assload of gyros

^my fav Meatloaf bootleg

I usually fear the potential of personal smalltime apocalypses more than the dangerous global paradigm shifts that are being compared to early 20th century fascism recently. Typical self interest really. Tomorrow my partner who is very disabled with MS has an ATOS appointment in Pudsey which gives me more anxiety than Trump tbh. But even then I think "do your worst arseholes" can't be bothered with fear generally. it doesn't make any difference.

I think I struggle with two things atm:

1) social media makes everybody's reaction front and center and my legit OCD combined with left-brained means of assessing things 'adjusts' my mood to match that of other people if it's out of alignment

2) i'd already been mired in a 3-year battle w/ depression and worsening anxiety and had hit a real low point last year, so i've been repressing a lot

but the excitement in pushing back on this fucker is exhilarating.

Worries me that people I know are already getting tired of hearing about Trump and turning a blind eye to what is happening because of him.
Worries me taht other administrations are acting in sympathy with him at all not trying to work out how he can be removed.
Also worries me taht America still sees itself as the police force for the world with this crap going on.
Would think it forfeited any right to point the finger anywhere else with this nutter getting anywhere near power.

Optimistic taht something can be done before too much damage is inflicted but not sure what that point would be. or what that doing something about it would be. Other than continued protest & also pessimistic that an administration with no sense of shame is probably doing its best to undermine protest.

if I'd known how fast things would go tonight I wouldn't have eaten an assload of gyros

― Neanderthal

in other words "one", right?

they gave me 4 little pitas instead of 1 big one

PITAs

I am terrified that when my Sir Thomas More moment arrives I won't have the balls to do the right thing, or I'll do the right thing, and then my family as I know it is discontinued.
Now that's ridiculous, that won't happen, and we're not even likely to get to the part where it even has a chance of happening, but I feel that being frightened enough about it is an important ingredient in my morning routine, until we're all safely on the other side.

so you saw Silence again then

I still haven't seen it!

Gonna say 8, feels like a 9 but there's plenty of room for things to get worse.

8 because I'm constantly certain that things are gonna get worse

anxiety has levelled out substantially since October / November though, so that certainty's good for something

id have thought that the pending likelihood of a nuclear war was.... the...defining characteristic of living through the cold war, unless ive missed the point there

― Mother Teresa May I (darraghmac), Monday, January 30, 2017 7:06 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yesterday I was wondering what it was like to live in Germany during the rise of Fascism. Were there days when it was possible to ignore that Hitler fellow's language, because the weather was nice and there was going to be chicken for dinner?

The point of this, is that from what I remember of the Cold War, some days Mutually Assured Destruction was in my mind; other days I was happy or upset because of what was happening in my (sheltered) life.

Similarly, since the election sometimes I have found myself personally happy because things were going pleasantly for me. But I wonder if this is what people mean when they say we need to prevent the "normalization" of Trump and his associates' ways of behaving.

no, that's not what "normalization" means. you don't have to force yourself to never feel joy as long as trump is in office. you've probably run across lots of examples of normalization in the past. when somebody massacres a kindergarten class and the response is "it's horrible, it's too bad we can't do anything about it", _that_ is normalization.

My stress level was already pretty high under Obama and the things that can fuck up my life then aren't necessarily going to be worse/more likely under Trump.

Trump stress is more of a constant low-level tension of not being able to predict the future and the constant news cycle of new insanity, maybe a 4-5.

I'm at 11 now, but it'll be 6 when the shock of this wears off.

I'm kinda glad Trump did it because it was the kneejerk move that a seasoned politician wouldn't have made, and he is so blinded by pride and rage that he just lunged at it.

for me, the anxiety is because on one hand, everything in my actual day-to-day life is still totally the same and normal, but on the other, all these bizarro political things are happening that feel very threatening and very unpredictable. i mean, i grew up in a country (new zealand) that always felt very politically stable to me, i was very ignorant, and i've looked at other countries going through strife - the middle east, russia, even ireland because the IRA bombings and all that stuff was always all over the news when i was growing up - and never imagined i would be living in one of those countries. and it feels like the US is heading that way.

i'm white but i'm still on a green card, so that's also a bit nerve-wracking. like, i can't even imagine how truly scared a lot of people are right now, because of their birth country and religious beliefs. i'm too scared to even participate in any rallies or marches, because if by some small chance i got arrested, it would totally fuck up my green card status, and make it hard to get citizenship. i can't even plan a trip back to nz because i've got that worry that maybe i won't be allowed back into the US. i know it's unlikely, but trump and his cronies are just freaking me out too much to take that risk. i even told my husband we shouldn't make any long term plans or commitments to anything because i don't have any idea what's going to happen with this country. at least we have the last-resort option of moving to nz, which is more than most people have.

The problem with letting judges "handle" Trump is obviously that there are plenty of terrible, destructive things he and Congress can do that are perfectly legal.

literally shitting my pants but i don't think it's because i'm terrified, someone plz help

here take these alpine static. they may not fit as well but they are nice clean pants

i would buy a brand of incontinence pants called "alpine static"

soiling yourself can be the ultimate expression of contentment

For sale: shit pants, worn once

Despite whether it's proportionate to reality, every single morning I wake up irrationally listening for a large explosion (I live across the river from NYC).

Other than that I'm generally not feeling a ton of dread, but that's mostly due to a defensive numbness I've always had switched on my entire life.

terrified of retribution IRL against judges and shit.

― Neanderthal, Sunday, February 5, 2017 11:01 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you can be sure all these judges ruling against him have received death threats im sure

Yes, I'm positive that people who are petrified of terrorism have themselves been terrorizing these judges.

Feel like we could save ourselves a lot of time by pointing out the rare instances of cognitive consonance among Trumpists.

up to 8 or 9 over the last few days, highest it's been for me, and almost entirely due to the IC leaks and their potential resolution, win or lose

loss of sleep, lack of interest in normal activities, drinking too much...

the first couple of weeks with the massive protests, overwhelming volume of calls to reps, etc, felt terrific by comparison

i've started having recurring nightmares about large scale disasters which has raised me back up a point or 2

at more of a 3 or 4 now, not because it's normalized, but since my brain eventually said "you can't function if you're freaking out every damn day".

shit like the DOJ Affirmative Action story or North Korea developments and I go back up p quick tho

terror of trump administration starting to level out, terror of americans continuing to increase

eesh yeah that's kinda where I'm at too.

my 5 has dropped to a 3 thanks to normalizing. good job everyone who tirelessly reposts every tweet

Your sarcasm is actually spat truth

At this point, I'm almost less afraid of Trump and his administration than I am the possibility that they're going to coast through four (eight?) years without suffering anything like a real consequence of their actions. Because if there isn't sufficient pushback on this level of naked hate and ignorance and venality, how much lower do we go before we're just done?

i must insist that my disposition is correct

bout 9 rn

america's institutions are strong

as long as you're not near the statehouses