On Trump Derangement Syndrome<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It's time to stop. \u00a0It's time to acknowledge that your political opponents are not Evil Incarnate.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2017\/06\/trump-derangement-syndrome.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"On Trump Derangement Syndrome\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It's time to stop. \u00a0It's time to acknowledge that your political opponents are not Evil Incarnate.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2017\/06\/trump-derangement-syndrome.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Jane the Actuary\" \/>\n<meta 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{"id":6668,"date":"2017-06-14T17:05:29","date_gmt":"2017-06-14T23:05:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=6668"},"modified":"2017-06-18T21:40:25","modified_gmt":"2017-06-19T03:40:25","slug":"trump-derangement-syndrome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2017\/06\/trump-derangement-syndrome.html","title":{"rendered":"On Trump Derangement Syndrome"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

$\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Trump-WomensMarch_2017-top-1510075_(32409710246).jpg\"$ <\/p>\n

Readers will note that I do not spend a lot of time writing about Trump; most of the time I neither praise or lament his activities.<\/p>\n

****<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the first sentence of a post that I started last week in which I wanted to explain my general tendency to disengage from issues like the Comey hearings. \u00a0I didn\u2019t get very far, but kept that line as a \u201csee, I was thinking about this before today\u2019s shootings.\u201d \u00a0I see all the anger and shouting around me and I don\u2019t want to be a part of it. \u00a0I think that the whole notion of \u201crighteous anger\u201d is very risky and it\u2019s too short a step from that, to the sort of blind anger which is very unhealthy and which worries me when I see it in other people.<\/p>\n

I had a friend a number of years ago who was very much into being outraged at all the injustices of the world, and those which had been perpetrated against her. \u00a0I haven\u2019t talked to her in years, but she occasionally resurfaces on social media; she writes blogs, then shuts them down and makes them private, then writes another blog again some other time. \u00a0When I last saw something from her, a couple months ago, she was divorcing her husband because she had decided that his lack of support for her in their battles with a willful child was not a matter of personal abilities or lack thereof, but outright abuse, and that, just as much as in the case of a woman with recurring black eyes, she was fleeing an abusive marriage. \u00a0And she sees social justice as her vocation, and doesn\u2019t have regular employment but just some freelance income, so she depended on his income.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s been off social media for the past couple months and I worry about her. \u00a0So far as I know, she hasn\u2019t gotten a gun and shot anyone; she\u2019s probably busy with protest marches. \u00a0Whether she reconciled with her husband, I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

But I see her story as a cautionary tale about the consequences of anger, and blending together anger about the World Around You and anger about all the Bad Things People Have Done To You. \u00a0Anger that manifested itself in today\u2019s DC shooting<\/a>, just as much as the Chapel Hill killer<\/a>, or the Kansas City killer<\/a>. \u00a0Again, she isn\u2019t a killer. \u00a0In general, I am not saying that\u00a0people dealing in the politics of anger are killers. \u00a0But conservatives on twitter are currently busy pulling out old tweets from leftist pundits and celebrities which make claims, more or less starkly, that some Republican or another is so heinous in his politics that he is deserving of death, or that they would celebrate his death from some other cause, or that he deserves for terrible things short of death to happen to him. \u00a0(\u201cYou won\u2019t fund universal health care? \u00a0May you lose your job, be diagnosed with cancer, and be unable to find anyone to treat you for it!\u201d) \u00a0And conservatives may not play the same game, exactly, but you can\u2019t deny that the Colorado Planned Parenthood shooter was a right-wing, not left-wing extremist.<\/p>\n

Right now conservative twitter is just mad. \u00a0They\u2019re pissed off. \u00a0Are they necessarily saying that left-wing twitter and pundits directly caused the shooter to pick up his gun? \u00a0No, not really. \u00a0But to see what happened today and read past tweets (as well as some present tweets) suggesting that GOP congressmen deserve it, well, it\u2019s dismaying, to say the least. \u00a0And to see that, now, in 2017, people perform a play in which the assassination of Trump is dramatized<\/a>, which, though it claims to do so as a means of\u00a0exploring some deeper themes, certainly seems to have a large portion of its appeal be the desire to see, even if only in fiction, Trump killed, and people who oppose President Trump style themselves the Resistance (connoting violent resistance, in the manner of World War II partisans) \u2014 it\u2019s time to stop.<\/p>\n

Sure, you might say that things were every bit as bad when Obama was president and I just didn\u2019t notice. \u00a0Maybe that\u2019s true. \u00a0I\u2019m not even going to argue the point if readers say this very thing in the comments.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s time to stop. \u00a0It\u2019s time to acknowledge that your political opponents are not Evil Incarnate. It\u2019s time not to let your blood boil, or at least reduce it to a simmer, about what you read in the news.<\/p>\n

Remember when everyone was worried that the Cold War was going to turn hot, and we would all be nuked like in The Day After<\/em>? \u00a0It didn\u2019t happen after all, did it? \u00a0So let\u2019s all calm down. \u00a0Please?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Image: \u00a0https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Trump-WomensMarch_2017-top-1510075_(32409710246).jpg<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"