Have you ever been in a car crash? I have. It was a nothing thing — okay, it totaled the car, but I walked away — but it’s at the basis of my driving anxiety. Sometimes I manage the anxiety. Sometimes I’m incapable to and don’t drive for years at a time.
Which is stupid, because I know what caused that crash. We’d moved an hour and a half away. We’d left my car at the old place, and drove back to get it on Saturday morning very early. So early I forgot my glasses on the bedside table. I have hellish astigmatism. In fact, back then I wasn’t nearsighted. I only wore glasses because of the astigmatism. I became aware I didn’t have my glasses on halfway there, and I drove back fine, being extra careful. Except ten minutes from the new home, a bunch of cars had got between Dan and I, and I was afraid he’d turn, and I wouldn’t make the turn at a light. So I rushed. And the experience of it is that a telephone pole jumped in front of the car. Of course, it was the astigmatism giving that illusion.
But the experience was everything is fine, everything is fine, oh, sh*t! And by then it was too late to do anything about it. In my mind, it is hours between realizing I was going to hit and there was nothing I could do, and actually hitting and destroying the car.
Sounds stopped, there was an unnatural silence, and time became taffy, extending indefinitely.
As a country, we’ve been locked there since 2020. Which probably also explains how you feel. Tired and anxious, and often hopeless.
Because you can tap the brakes and try to turn the wheel all you want to. It’s too late to change. There’s nothing you can do except anticipate how bad it will be, and hoping you walk away.
Only it’s more like a crash in WWI, which, yes, sometimes you could walk away from, but not often. And you could burn to death in the crash far more than in the car.
If you feel like what happened this week makes it more likely that we’ll be consumed by fire in the wreckage, you wouldn’t be wrong.
But there’s not much you can do. Except anticipate the crash and maybe make it more survivable by positioning yourself slightly differently, clenching or not clenching, moving slightly back so the airbag doesn’t kill you.
All you can do is think through likely — remember LIKELY. No, going back to the middle ages is not likely, unless we get hit by the Sweet Meteor of Doom — scenarios and anticipate what you’ll need, and what to do.
Looking at my experience with a car crash, above, some other things to take from it:
- There is nothing you can do. There was nothing you could do due to the initial condition. In my case driving without glasses. In our case, FDR highjacked our system and made it vulnerable to this. This was done before most of us were born, let alone voted.
- Time seems unusually lengthened. All those memes — the ones not made by glowies trying to get you to do something stupid — about the Founding Fathers and “Me and my homies would be stacking bodies” is because your sense of time is way telescoped. You’ve been aware of what’s going on before anyone “normal” was, because you’re a political junkie (the diagnostic circumstances are “you read this blog.”) The funding fathers were political junkies in their time too, granted. But they didn’t jump hot for a loooooong time. And they kept a toe in diplomacy to the end, so when war broke out they were still trying to petition the king.
- As with a car crash, the tempo is ‘excruciatingly slow, then very fast.’ Once you hit that pole, you’re back to normal time, and you experience it as everything moving very fast, suddenly. Like coming out from a dark room into the light, you’ll be startled and blinded by the fact the light is magnified by your eyes being unprepared. Remember that, metaphorically, so you don’t lose your bearings/feel as if the world has gone mad.
- Prepare, prepare, prepare. Sure, physically. But also mentally and emotionally. Prepare for what will be very hard though possibly/probably brief times when you might very well have to do what is for you unthinkable. We’ve lived ridiculously comfortable, easy lives compared to our ancestors. I don’t expect it to get to even 19th century level. But it will get tough.
It has been noted in studies that people who think through possibilities experience less disorientation in a disaster or disruption, and are less likely to experience shock/depression.
So prepare mentally. Prepare, prepare, prepare.
Until then, hang lose. And pray the Republic doesn’t catch fire in the crash. And we don’t all perish in it.
According To Hoyt 