Is Fascism Coming? Should I leave the country?

Dear Cary,

I was born in San Francisco six decades ago. I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Loma Prieta earthquake and have been close to a couple of street shootings in SF and New York City.

I’m not a nervous person by nature but I am full of fear and anxiety now.

I couldn’t listen to the first presidential debate because I knew it would upset me too much and, with the pandemic and fires it would be one thing too much. So I heard the summaries on the radio this morning and now I’m wondering if I should leave America as soon as possible to avoid whatever may happen during and after the election in November.

It feels like Fascism.

I would love to know what you think.

A fan 

Dear Fan,

I spent a lot of time thinking about fascism. Then I remembered who I am. I am not a political person. I cannot predict the future. What I do is try to help people cope with the situation they are in by taking steps that can be taken regardless of what’s going on out there, or what might happen. So after writing like five thousand words about the political situation, I finally calmed down and resolved to try to help you, an individual, cope with your own situation.

So let’s focus on the fear and anxiety first. It’s possible that the many disruptions to routine caused by the fires and the pandemic have brought a low-level, simmering fear and anxiety into full flame. So before turning to the possibility of leaving the country, let’s see if there is a way to lessen the fear and anxiety. Or at least identify the causes. And then ask if maybe some of those causes are going to lessen soon, and also if they can be softened, or blunted, through certain simple actions, in order to preserve the option of leaving the country but make it less urgent.

Fear, we know, is concern about something bad that might happen. Your house might burn up. You might catch a terrible disease. Those are pretty real fears. The disease part is particularly of concern. The fear of your house burning up is less likely. But there are other reactions associated with the California fires—grief, sadness, horror, anger, disbelief, etc.—that are awful to feel and not be able to express or share with others. Not to be able to be comforted in your experience of those reactions because of pandemic-related restrictions on socializing. Your support system is not functioning as it usually would. So the worries you would share with friends, and the emotions of outrage and anger, are experienced in relative isolation. Which is terrible.

As to anxiety, I will repeat the one most useful thing I have ever been told about anxiety, which a psychologist told me, and I don’t even remember which psychologist it was, there were so many of them telling me things over the years. But this one said that anxiety is not so much an emotion as the warding off of emotion. That feeling of restlessness, free-floating unease, fretting, repetitive actions, those are things one does when a genuine emotion threatens to overtake us but we won’t stop to feel it. Once I learned that, I started paying attention when I was pacing, unable to concentrate, unable to decide on my next step. I would ask, What emotion is knocking on the door? What am I afraid of, or angry about, or confused about? What the hell is going on?

That helped a lot. Sometimes it’s not pleasant. Sometimes I would be feeling deep shame, or sadness, or grief, or regret, and those are things I do not like to feel. But I learned to feel them, and that helped with the anxiety.

Which, as I say, is different from fear.

As to the fear, let me say that a lot of what you are going through is totally normal, because your world has been turned upside down. You are going to feel a lot of fear. Anyone would.

You are going to feel the impulse to flee. It is normal to want to flee. The circumstances of a pandemic and fires and unstable political situation naturally make a person want to flee. Especially fire and disease. Those are primal threats. We are primates. We fear fire. And we fear chaos, uncertainty, strangers, people acting insane. We don’t like that. As primates. We wish there was something we could do. Like tear these people limb from limb and eat them for dinner. As primates that is. Which would feel good. If we could then jump around and screech and be kings of the jungle again. Because it sucks. What is going on sucks.

But back to the problem. I favor identifying the threats, the stressors, and looking for ways to cope with them and mitigate them. And looking for the regular pleasures in your life that are missing, and look for ways to get them back. It might help to make a list of the things you do in your regular life that give you a sense of order and peace. Friends you socialize with in person. Places you walk to. Experiences like going to the movies, shopping, reading, working on projects, gardening, cleaning, etc. Especially friends who get where you’re coming from. Places where you are greeted kindly. Things you do to pamper yourself. It might help to write these things down, and to note the ones that are missing. Then try to get them back, in some form.

The overall idea is to try to build a life within this constricted universe, a life that resembles the life you had before the lockdown and the fires and the political upheaval.

There also might be grief involved. Grief for what has been lost in these last few years. It may not be just the pandemic or the political situation but many other things that have gone haywire lately. For instance, I think many of us share not just anger but also grief about the planetary destruction, the fires in Australia, the barrier reefs, the forests, all the destruction the planet is undergoing. Also grief for the many Black people who have suffered not just in the last years but in the last four hundred years in America.

It is a very emotional time is what I’m saying. And those emotions have not had the chance to surface. That’s kind of like what it’s like in war. All these terrible things happen but in quick succession, and there’s no time to process it. So you get PTSD. Maybe a lot of us what might be called PTSD, or what is similar to it: An emotional overload, a battering of the senses, a weakening of the spirit, a psychological and intellectual beating. We are all taking a beating, in a way.

Politically, if you are a progressive or a Democrat or a moderate Republican or even just a sane human being, you cannot avoid noticing that our system is not working right. That’s a stressor, because the “system” is our lifeline. It’s about water and air and food, ultimately. The “system” is not a luxury. It is about survival. The failure of “the system” to contain the virus, then, is a survival threat to us.

So that’s a lot. No wonder you’re thinking about leaving the country.

I personally am in favor of leaving the country whenever possible. It’s something my wife and I did five years ago. But ours was a personal decision. There was no pandemic, no fires, no Trump. We just didn’t like it there anymore.

So if you can leave the country and go live somewhere else, I’m all in favor of it. But now is not a good time for that, for Americans. Because of all the restrictions. We live in Italy and they aren’t really letting Americans in right now. It’s not that they’re mean, or don’t like Americans. They mostly like Americans OK. They are just taking sane steps to contain the coronavirus.

So my suggestion is to focus on taking care of yourself where you are for the time being.

I am also a big fan of psychotherapy. It’s a little like paying somebody to be your friend when all your friends are too busy, or when your problems would freak them out, or they wouldn’t know how to help you. A therapist, you can pay and be totally selfish with them. Kind of like psychological prostitutes. You give them money and then you can say anything and you don’t have to be polite or make yourself look good. It’s very satisfying to be able to look bad in front of somebody, to be the self you don’t show to the world. Personally, I always start out by crying. Most every therapist I’ve seen, I start out by crying.

So, but, it’s just another California self-care thing. Not a big deal. Helps a lot when things look dark.

So that’s it, my friend. Thanks for writing. I really shouldn’t talk about how easy or difficult any particular column is, but I must say I got a bit lost writing this because of the political question. I finally realized that to answer the political question required me to make predictions, and to make reasoned arguments and to sound like I know what the hell is going on, and I really don’t.

It’s more like, gee, you look cold. Here’s a blanket.