How Terrified Are You? January 2017

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 president's closest adviser has an apocalyptic agenda for the world and will clearly do whatever it takes to accomplish it, and he has the most powerful country in the world nearly at his fingertips. This doesn't seem like some average usurpation of power, at least as far as Bannon's concerned. If you're not worried about that, then you've got ice for blood.

My anxiety levels have lowered a little bit seeing people unite, take to the streets, and successfully resist Trump. So I'd say 6-7 right now.

8 because he's so fucking nebulous that anything could happen at any moment. not 10 because (a) i'm shielded somewhat by not being in the usa and (b) after what australia's gone through in the past 3.5 years i seem to have lost the ability to sustain panic.

Wild oscillation depending on how much Updates I'm consuming and how cynically sanguine I'm being as a defense mechanism

just1n3, just wanted to say: as an immigration lawyer that is also living in the u.s. on a green card i got through a spouse, you can attend a protest and get arrested. only certain crimes render an lpr inadmissible to the united states -- they almost always involve either fraud, violence or drugs. and never political offenses.

you can also travel. there's an estimated 13 million green card holders in the u.s. there won't be a blanket ban.

yes 8 is p high, but my job's future is tenuous and i'm sick, not a good pairing in this era.

btw Silence lost 80% of its theaters last weekend, i wouldn't wait.

not quite as worried about nuclear annihilation as i was in the mid-80s yet but on the other hand the possibility of Trump's pirate junta actually getting away with seizing control of the whole machinery of government is fucking with my anxiety fairly steadily, gonna give 'em a 6 today

two threads at top of sna about dr who has pushed me to 8 this morning

what would push you to 9?

being forced to watch that shit

3-4 but I'm sitting in an airport with "Shake It Off" on the loudspeakers, ymmv

it's like watching your parents fight, while one of them is driving the car in a rainstorm.

otm

is it time to finally watch hypernormalization or is it going to push me over the edge?

I was a teenager during Cold War II and the worst I've existentially felt terrified was when the Korean airliner was shot down in 1983. Wargames had just come out a couple months earlier and I was convinced that every political escalation that week was leading down to some KOREAN AIRLINER nuke war plan sandwiched in between ALBANIAN DECOY and AFGHAN MISDIRECTION. I was just about to start college, do I even bother to buy books?

I don't feel the same way now. Everything Trump touches turns into Atlantic City-sized pools of poison and his non-plan for fucking up the government has been and will be completely fucked. Four years of this? I'm thinking that this charade barely lasts four weeks. Perhaps a little bit hoping/praying so. I would have felt like a martian had people *not* protested, and seeing the sheer numbers self-organizing and being out there among it all was good for the soul. I'm not terrified of President Bannon nuking Chicago ("told you I'd send in the Feds!"). I'm not even particularly terrified that the end point of this is when Federal troops square off against protestors - that's just suspense. I'm terrified that 62 million people have joined a cult. They've come to this cult for any number of reasons, but it's a cult and cults all have strange bedfellows .

I voted 7, but my girlfriend's mom is in the hospital - she's 83 and not expected to leave. I'm not terrified of anything.

when trump won i compared the shock to 9/11, but this migrant ban feels closer to it actually. after election night i just felt profoundly hopeless and depressed. right now i feel like my entire body is on high alert. my senses are like fucking tingling. and right after 9/11 in new york the reaction of new yorkers was just incredibly galvanizing and heartening, suddenly this shit-fuck petty city found a wellspring of generosity within itself that no one knew was there. i feel like that's happening now all over america.

I was all depressed and solipsistic but seeing the JFK protests self-organize in minutes was legit inspiring. I didn't see any Trump supporters out in the streets.

Bad:
- TrumpBannon's tactic seems to be to keep the outrages coming at such a rate no-one questions the last illegal manoeuvre because a new one has come along (divestment of business interests, golden showers video, Russian election interference - all off the front pages now)
- the world is now relying on traditional Republican politicians to stand up to a cabal of wannabe-despots
- the new regime, to a large extent not being from a political background, couldn't care less about democratic principles and probably have a long-term plan to suspend the Constitution if they can get away with it
- if not, and if this clown is still there in 4 years' time there is NO WAY he'll accept the legality of an election defeat
- this may have a knock-on effect on European elections, leading to far-right govt in France at the very least and the subsequent annihilation of the EU once and for all
- my personal experience with narcissist sociopaths tells me that predictions are impossible, as even Trump doesn't know what he'll do next (although Bannon surely does, which might be even scarier)
- this may well be a foretaste of how the world will be once the looming environmental crisis kicks in for real in the near-future

Good:
.................cat pics?

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