News & Notes

I wasn’t surprised by the election this time around, but that doesn’t mean it hurts any less.

Really big emotions have a physical component for me. Anguish is a sharp pain in my chest; dread is waves of nausea in my stomach. I had a lot of both in the first few days after the election results. The nausea has mercifully settled; the anguish still spikes occasionally but is at least no longer constant.

I don’t even pretend to know what the most emotionally healthy response to this situation looks like. What I’ve done to cope is focus primarily on concrete, logistical problems in my immediate surroundings, where I have enough control to make a visible difference.

Phase two of our house remodel wrapped up in early October, excepting only the curtains and towels that we’ll be picking up in the States this winter. Literally before the paint was dry, I dove directly into detailed planning for phase three. This last push is a big one, including our primary bedroom, bathroom, and closet, plus Jak’s office. We plan to start construction in February, at which point Jak and I will be crammed into the smaller guest bedroom and bathroom, and working (inasmuch as the noise and chaos will allow) in our dining room.

Our remodel is not merely cosmetic; I’ve spent hundreds if not thousands of hours identifying every last organizational and procedural difficulty in our lives and designing a solution for it. The improvement in our quality of life in the wake of phase one — our big kitchen remodel in 2022 — cannot be overstated. Even the much less dramatic redesign of our guest room closet and front bathroom, just completed, has measurably upgraded our everyday experience. The plumbing works! We have places to store things!

So I know that we’re going to have a few hard months next spring, but I also know that daily life is going to be much improved on the other side. There’s eager anticipation to offset the dread, a visible light at the end of the tunnel.

For America, I have none of that. There may be a light somewhere, but it’s too far to see.

Two days before the election, Professor Heather Cox Richardson answered the question “How do you maintain a sense of hope?” with a précis of the political events of the decade from 1853 to 1863. “If you had been alive in 1853,” she wrote, “you would have thought the elite enslavers had become America’s rulers. They were only a small minority of the U.S. population, but by controlling the Democratic Party, they had managed to take control of the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court.”

She sketched out the political run-up to the election of Abraham Lincoln and his signing Emancipation Proclamation, and concludes, “In less than ten years, the country went from a government dominated by a few fabulously wealthy men who rejected the idea that human beings are created equal and who believed they had the right to rule over the masses, to a defense of government of the people, by the people, for the people, and to leaders who called for a new birth of freedom.”

Yet all I could think about, reading this, was the elephant in the room: that the end result of that period was a civil war. Richardson is not the only historian I have heard recently drawing parallels between our current position and the late 1850s. Given the way Trump had convinced so many Americans that the 2020 election was stolen, and primed them to respond with rage and violence to another loss, I was worried that a Harris win would kick off something very much like a second civil war.

That would still have been preferable, in my book, to a Trump win. The next two years in particular are going to be appalling, worse than anything America has seen … probably since Joe McCarthy. And it’s worse than the 1850s, as Republicans now have not just the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court, but also the House of Representatives. All of the people in government who inhibited Trump in his first term — and there were a lot of them, in positions large and small, protecting the country from his most erratic impulses — have been, or soon will be, purged.

But here’s the thing: there really isn’t anything ordinary citizens can do about the federal government between now and the 2026 midterms, and I don’t think a breathless attention to Trump’s actions is going to do much except make us exhausted and sick.

In general I feel more confident giving logistical advice than emotional, but if I could recommend just one self-care action to everyone I know, it would be to get the fuck off social media. It is an utter shitshow of disinformation, propaganda, and hate these days under the best of circumstances, and under a Trump administration is also just one giant nonstop cortisol factory.

I don’t have my head in the sand; I read news summaries from a small, carefully curated set of calmly factual sources (which I will include at the end for anyone who’s interested). But — because I consolidate them, and because I don’t have to worry about fact-checking every rumor that comes across a feed — that takes up maybe twenty minutes a day on average. My nervous system definitely appreciates not being on high alert 24/7.

Yes, there is some cost to abandoning social media, especially for someone like me whose remote location sharply limits my options for in-person interaction. One of my goals this month is to reach out to several old friends — people that I genuinely care about, but have lost contact with since leaving Facebook — and see if they are willing to keep in touch through other means. I expect that this will not always succeed, but my relationships that have successfully transitioned to some combination of Signal messages, email, and phone calls are definitely stronger for the one-to-one attention.

America — possibly humanity in general, but certainly America — has a collective action problem. For a while there, about fifteen years ago, it looked like social media was going to be at least part of the solution (remember Occupy, and the Arab Spring?) … but all of that potential has been systematically destroyed and replaced with bullshit that isolates and divides us.

Letting billionaires and corporations continue as the gatekeepers of our personal connections looks to me like slow suicide. The ragged threads that pass for a social safety net in America are breaking; most of us can expect some real level of personal threat from MAGA policies like those promised by Trump and Project 2025. We all need resilient relationships now more than ever, because at the end of the day, all we can count on is each other.

Coming soon: some practical advice on preparing for the new regime.

Karawynn’s Top Low-Cortisol News Sources

1. American History professor Heather Cox Richardson posts Letters from an American almost every single day, summarizing important sociopolitical news while also providing important historical context. (I have never been so interested in American history as through Richardson drawing parallels with current events.) I particularly appreciate the way that she maintains a calm tone without ever seeming dispassionate.
2. Jessica Yellin’s News Not Noise posts on Mondays and Fridays with a measured recap of recent political and political-adjacent developments. All posts are paywalled but have a lengthy free teaser; even if you can’t afford a subscription (and it’s too steep for me) it can be worth reading above the paywall.
3. Isaac Saul’s Tangle News is a recent addition to my lineup; I heard about it from an episode of This American Life, where it was profiled as the one and only news source that a politically polarized married couple could agree upon. Each post focuses on a single political development —first laying out the factual events, then summarizing media takes from the left and right, and finally giving Saul’s own opinion and reasoning. He also sometimes answers reader questions. Saul describes both himself and the publication as “centrist”; so far I’ve tended to find his opinions thought-provoking and — notably — not offensive, even when I disagree. Free posts Monday through Thursday, paid on Friday and Saturday.
4. Vox’s Today, Explained podcast drops every weekday afternoon; each half-hour episode covers a single subject in some depth, an approach I prefer in a podcast over the “here’s everything that happened today” format, because it tells me exactly what I’m about to get into. They respond to most major political developments, albeit often a day or two later; this is not about “breaking news” but about thoughtful context. I particularly enjoy their sense of humor and creative staging. No paywall.