The U.S. Presidential Election
The result of the recent presidential election in the United States was not what many of us had hoped for or expected. The person elected is someone who has been willing to openly act on his oppressive distress recordings of racism, sexism, and other oppressions. We all have many restimulated early hurts to discharge related to this. And we need to discharge these not simply to stop feeling defeated, misled, and powerless but also in order to understand what has happened and what actions we can take to continue to move forward against the way undischarged distresses are acted out in society.
While the unguarded expression of oppressive positions played a significant and restimulating role in the election, trying to understand the election only in those terms ignores class issues, which were an important factor. While there are differences in the policies the two major parties promote, neither offers anything resembling the changes needed to stop the ongoing impoverishment of a significant and growing portion of the U.S. population.
I think that one candidate’s willingness to bring up and act “mad” about the decline in the quality of life for this portion of the population played a significant role in the election.
The decline is caused by the functioning of our economic system, not by the people targeted by our upcoming president or by most of the policies he blamed. He will likely continue to distract people from looking at the changes needed, by blaming different groups of people.
As we discharge on our restimulations from this election, we also can think about reaching the people who are facing an ongoing erosion of their lives and who will, in desperation and restimulation, back someone who is promoting and promising false and empty “solutions.” Racism, sexism, and other oppressions serve to keep economic exploitation functioning in many ways, including by restimulating us enough to distract us from the underlying struggle against economic exploitation. This has worked other times in human history, and our surprise that it worked this time points to some of the work we have not yet done.
Reprinted from the e-mail discussion lists of the Re-evaluation Counseling Communities
(Present Time 186, January 2017)