Mid-Term Election Rage Reaction Redaction

What’s the difference between a hobby and a hobbyhorse? I think it’s a matter of whether or not you’re able to let the thing go. A hobby is a pastime, a hobbyhorse is an obsession.

People are creatures of habit. Some habits help get us through hard times by allowing us to navigate through the turbulence on autopilot, but it is generally better to try to base behavior on realistic awareness of what is happening around us rather than programmed reactive patterns of thinking.

Unfortunately, few of us escape childhood without developing habits that, while very useful in helping us cope with the peculiar circumstances of life in the home we grow up in, often are blocks to happiness later on in life.

You don’t have to go any further than the comments posted after online blogs to see the effects of people getting gummed up in balls of nasty emotions. What people refer to as the polarization of American politics to me seems more like watching the entire population of the country falling in slow motion down an enormous flight of stairs, tripped up by ropes they’ve wrapped around their own emotional legs.

Frighteningly large numbers of people are nursing habitual anger and resentment, self-medicating themselves with rage directed outward to escape—God, I don’t know what. Lack of love? Overpowering feelings of isolation? Fear of their own feelings of powerlessness? Fear of their neighbors? Fear of their own shadow?

Whatever the origins, the habit ain’t healthy. I say round up these people and get them all into 12 step. What’s the addiction? Are they rage-aholics? Politicaholics? Wing-nutaholics? Anxiety addicts? Maybe it matters, maybe it doesn’t.

In any case, I’ve become convinced that nobody is going to win the mid-term elections this fall. A USA Today poll last week found two-thirds of those surveyed describing themselves as “angry” about conditions in this country, the highest percentage in the decade the question has been asked. By nearly 2-1, they would rather vote for a candidate who has never served in Congress over one with experience.

It looks more and more certain that most people will vote no this fall, and that is bad news. If this is a nation of rage-holics, this election will play out as the fullest national expression yet of the classic reaction of angry addicts of all stripes to all of life’s setbacks—“I’ll show you, I’ll hurt me.”

This country is trapped in addictive reaction. That defines the hair-trigger defensiveness that sends people into a rage at any challenge to the way they’ve been doing things. It’s what turns couples counseling into an argument designed to prove to the therapist that the other partner is the real crazy one, rather than a search for ways to get out of such knock-down-and-drag outs when they explode in the privacy of the home, where there’s no referee around to make the final call.

Therapy—and the coming to serenity and peace that the therapist and client together should be working to achieve—has nothing to do with who gets kicked off the island, who gets fired, who’s the last man standing. Right now in America, nobody’s interested in serenity, and nobody’s playing by the rules. The therapist is nowhere to be seen. The ref has thrown up his hands in disgust and left the playing field.

We’re in the middle of a spastic, thrashing, hysterical free-for-all that will throw a lot of people out of office who may not know what we should be doing about this mess, and replace them with people who almost certainly will not know what to do.

Most people who go to the polls will be there to vote against what we’ve got. Not enough people will be there to vote for what we might have. We’ve got plenty of no votes; what we need are more people willing to vote yes.

Fear Itself: How to Make It Through the Recession

The latest numbers show unemployment in the U.S. up to 9.9 percent. Economists say it’s the result of previously discouraged jobseekers returning to the hunt inspired by news of incipient recovery poised to sweep across the country.

Meanwhile, the stock market plunges down five big stories before hopping up one, scared investors pour into the bond market, and Europe teeters on the edge of bankruptcy.

Above all, this stuff has been going on two years or so now, and a lot of people have been out of work that whole time. Credit cards are maxed out, foreclosures continue, and retirement savings are about gone in many households.

How long can we hold our breaths waiting for better times? When do the hobo jungles reappear? What do we tell the kids? How are we expected to keep from just freaking out?

It can be done. You don’t have to whistle a happy tune, imagine pennies falling from heaven, declare happy days are here again and believe that wishing will make it so.

We’re not even looking for happiness as an ultimate goal here. We’re just after a way to maintain our composure and not collapse into quivering blobs of anxiety. We just want to remain functional enough to be able to think rationally and come up with a plan that might lead us out of our personal quagmires.

And just as that state of composed functionality is what’s required to be able to change our physical circumstances, it’s also what we need to grab and hold onto any peace at all, in bad times or good.

Because, whether or not it seems like this in times of physical want, what really matters in the long run is how you’re doing inside. America came through the Great Depression physically without ever emerging spiritually. Despite Greatest Generation nostrums about money not being everything, when our fathers and grandfathers got back from the war they acted like it was all that mattered. They threw up shopping malls and suburban sprawl, turned the countryside into a parking lot, and settled back on their sofas to watch commercials interrupted occasionally by sit coms.

There was a brief, failed rebellion in the 60s against the materialist, conformist spiritual swamp we had fallen into, followed by five decades of miserable reaction.

Now this second great economic crisis may be giving us a second opportunity for regeneration. I doubt that a lot of people will seize the moment with the gusto they should, but maybe you, sitting there reading this, can do something really good for yourself, and for the people around you who have to deal with yourself.

Rather than losing yourself in anxiety, panic, and every-man-for-himselfism, concentrate on what you can do next.

Don’t freak out over some imagined final disaster falling upon you and your loved ones next week, or next month, or five years from now; focus instead on what you can do right now. The next step is not only the most important one you can take to start changing things, it’s also the only thing you can do right now. The next step is all you’ve got.

Delay taking it and you just increase the odds of future calamity.

The fear comes from all the things that you can’t do anything about, because they lie in the future and you’re here right now. Let the future go. At this moment you can do nothing about it.

Believe in a power that is there to take on the fear when you decide to let it go. Then let it go. Then take the next step.

The Secret of Happiness ($9.95, with a money-back guarantee)

I’ve been looking for a job since the beginning of April. I’m a freelance writer, and while 2008 and 2009 went well enough, the recession caught up with my clients and me at the turn of the year, and since that time, work has been spotty at best.I just got a promising freelance project this week, but I continue to look for full-time work. There’s only so much money left in my family’s savings to pay the bills.

It doesn’t faze me. I’m doing fine, one day at a time, because I’ve figured out the secret to human happiness.

It’s all in our heads.

I guess you’ve heard this before. But when was the last time you actually managed to go into your brain and put it into practice? Self-improvers tend to wade inside themselves with a potato masher, bent on personally squishing all the bad stuff out of their grey matter and forcing the remains through a sieve to filter out the nuggets of serenity, joy, and peace that might be hidden there.

Such was my approach for a good 40 years. I thrashed around my insides with blunt instruments, determined to beat my misery into submission. The whole spastic effort just left me gummed up in a ball of misery.

Generally, this will be the result, no matter what your misery of choice. You might be a habitual self-kicker, or a bigot, or a punitive martinet, or a workaholic, or self-absorbed, or a lazy good-for-nothing, or an angry, violent, lying, son of a bitch. You may hate your misery with a purple passion, but be unable to overcome it no matter how you struggle and strive. People become so wrapped up in their hatred of the problem that it becomes impossible do deal with the problem itself.

I only began to make progress against my self-hatred when I figured out the effective limits of my jurisdiction. Some parts of the universe—specifically including those areas where decisions are made on my worth to humankind, the value of my contribution to the greater good, my moral batting average, my ultimate eternal destination, the sorting out of my pluses versus my minuses, the final judgment of my goodness or badness—all that stuff is simply outside my bailiwick.

What I control are my actions in this moment. I can make the next step down the walkway and see what happens. If it gets me toward my destination, I try another. If it causes pain to me or others, I stop and reevaluate. If the pain might result in a better outcome, I might keep moving in that direction, with all due caution.

At the end of the day I can check where I am, and who I am, and if I’ve lost ground or caused pain I can change direction and make amends the next day.

What I cannot do ever is assume that I’m in charge of the final judgment on myself. The small, moment-by-moment calls are up to me. The big ones I let go to someone else. And that leaves me at peace.