Traumatic, trump, same difference.  The symptoms are unsurprisingly alike, and the treatment and cure will definitely not be covered under the farce that is trumpcare (or trumpcrap, more accurately).  This should really be recognized as a legitimate disorder.  Increasing numbers of us are experiencing the serious effects in our everyday lives.

The symptoms include: depression, anxiety, insecurity, fear, loss of hope or motivation to live, anger, denial, trigger-sensitivity, and an extreme allergy to more bad news.  It may adversely affect the physical and mental health of vulnerable people who, not coincidentally, won’t be able to afford healthcare and other essential services any more.

In our own personal experience, we wake up from troubled sleep, apprehensive and fearful of what new disaster has become a part of our new bleak reality.  We’re afraid to even watch much news.  It’s hard to feel motivated to do anything, knowing our already uncertain future could explode in our faces.  I feel it in the slipping of my newly acquired good habits.  They just seem to take too much mental energy that I don’t have.  We’re experiencing new mysterious aches and discomfort that can’t be explained.  There’s this dark cloud of anxiety and tension in the air.

I know we’re not alone in this.  Many people we know have described similar fears and anxiety.  We feel helpless and powerless, watching our whole democracy get undermined and sabotaged by our own so-called leaders.  Everything we worked hard for and counted on for basic survival and human rights is falling out from under us.  The minimal ethics and justice we could rely upon, as imperfect as they were, are no longer assured.  It’s all we can do to just keep going forward and find someplace to lay low and ride out the storm.

I feel sad to think the latter years of our lives may be lived in a world reverting back to irrational, primitive superstition and cruelty.  We dared to think we were making progress–ha!  I realize that for some communities, this development comes as no surprise; it’s been pretty much their reality for centuries.  They could never take anything for granted or relax their guard for a minute.  Welcome to their everyday world.  For some of us it’s a rude awakening, realizing how such ignorant savages could still prevail and take us back to the dark ages in one election cycle.

But life must go on if you’re still alive.  Now is not the time to give up and be apathetic.  All the great battles for justice and civil rights were fought under extremely adverse, discouraging conditions and setbacks, but it only made the movements more stubborn and determined.  Not all of us may be up to the risks involved, but sometimes just staying alive, and acting as though there is a future, is the biggest thing you can pull off.  We’re going to proceed under that assumption.

Here are some wildflowers, courtesy of our local wildflower group, adapting to changing conditions and still forging ahead.  Sharp-lobed Hepatica, Blue Cohosh, Mayapple, and Dwarf Larkspur.