The post-election political blame game occurring right now has reached almost Olympian proportion. I haven’t seen this much blame bashing and finger-pointing in all my 25+ years as a therapist.
What blame game, you might ask? Unless you have been living in a sterile bubble on Mars, this contentious race is still not over. There are those still hoping that someone will wave a magic wand, undo the election results, and their deepest wish for the first woman president will be granted.
We don’t always get what we want, so after Hillary Clinton lost the Electoral College count, the accusations began erupting fast and furious. It is sad to say, but what we are now witnessing is a nation of chronic blamers.
Hillary blames FBI Director James Comey for her loss; Bernie supporters blame the DNC for sabotaging his campaign (when polls showed he would have beat Trump); the pollsters blame those lying “unknown” Trump supporters for skewing polling results; Clinton supporters blame the press for painting an unrealistic “rosy” picture of Hillary’s chances of winning, and the blame list goes on and on.
At least Vladimir Putin is getting a break from always being blamed. This time around the U.S. disallowed Russian diplomats from observing the election process (fearing they would somehow influence it). Both sides have provided this service to each other for years in order to avoid voter fraud. If they hadn’t prevented observers this year, I’m sure they would be blaming Putin right now as well.
From a therapeutic standing, any good mental health professional will tell you that one can’t begin to transcend anger and heal until one first does some painful soul-searching and accepts responsibility for life choices. This whole election process is no different. First comes a little compassion and understanding…
In a recent viral post, Bernie Sanders acknowledged that Trump’s narrow victory (by about 300,000 votes) was a result of the anger of the American people. Anger towards the establishment, of which people view Hillary Clinton as a part of, as well as low wages, lack of decent jobs, and unfair tax advantages the rich enjoy.
The nation’s great divide was spotlighted in a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, asking voters to compare their lives with those of people like them 50 years ago. When Trump supporters were asked that question, 4 in 5 said life in the U.S. today is worse for people like them. A nearly equal number of voters backing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton said life today is just as good or better.
This is extremely eye-opening. We are clearly a nation out of touch with our fellow-man—calling them idiots, racists, and a whole
torrent of “deplorable” labels. The question is WHY? They’re hurting and we dismiss them as somehow inferior to us. We all have some prejudices, so to point the finger at someone else is spiritual arrogance. There are a lot of people I don’t see eye to eye with, but name-calling is not the answer. Both sides are now equally guilty of hate speech.
There is finger-pointing going on with the Republican side as well. President-elect Trump blames “professional protestors” for trying to incite a civil war. Unfortunately, he may be right on that point. It is no secret that some of the anti-Trump protests in the US have been organized by groups that were sponsored by Clinton sympathizer and billionaire George Soros.
According to USA Today, last Wednesday saw protests in the streets of at least 10 major U.S. cities. Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, D.C., Portland, Ore., St. Paul, Minn., Seattle, and several other cities. A long caravan of chartered coach buses was caught bringing protestors into Chicago—many who had responded to Soros-sponsored multi-city Craigslist ads offering them as much as $1500 a week to cause unrest.
Back in August, hackers from a group called DC Leaks got into the private documents of The Open Society, an organization founded by George Soros. DC Leaks referred to Soros as “the architect and sponsor of almost every revolution and coup around the world for the last 25 years”.
While protesting might seem like fun and games to unemployed, directionless individuals, some of these people are now responsible for causing millions of dollars in property damage as well as personal injury.
People are pushing back. This week Soros was sued for over $500 million by the family of a Dallas policeman who was killed by a Soros-sponsored protestor. Peaceful protest is one thing. It’s our constitutional right to have our voice heard, but attempting to stir up violence and potential civil unrest to manipulate the masses for some elite political agenda clearly falls in the category of domestic terrorism.
It’s time to awaken from our shock and denial. A display of retaliatory anger and violence is not the answer. The hangover is lifting and we must accept that we are all Americans together. So when I talk about taking responsibility for one’s choices, the first would be the responsibility to see information from all sides.
I discovered early in the election process that CNN and other mainstream media were not reporting all the news we Americans needed to hear. I couldn’t understand why the networks had all colluded to ignore the damning information coming out of WikiLeaks using the lame excuse that the Russians were responsible for the hack, which somehow justified totally ignoring the content. I wanted to know what was not being revealed so I started including Fox TV News in my information gathering process.
I must admit I have never been a Fox News watcher and was shocked I would even consider it, but I did. To my amazement, I learned Fox was extensively reporting on the content of the WikiLeaks emails, just as was the online “alternative media”. Even though I am not a Trump supporter, I began to understand the Trump phenomenon. It soon became evident (at least to me) this was becoming a bigger movement than I thought.
Throughout the election process I was amazed that so many people I talked to didn’t have a clue about what was really going on in the Heartland of America or what was coming out of those multiple source email leaks. They, like so many others, were all mainstream media watchers.
Michael Moore, filmmaker of the documentary “TrumpLand”, saw the writing on the wall early on. He lives in the Heartland of America, not in the bubble of California Democratic Land, as I do. He knew Trump could win.
The only thing during this election that California got right was from the USC/LA Times poll which clearly showed Trump consistently ahead. The other national polls always showed Clinton with a rosy digit lead.
Were these other pollsters over-sampling Democrats, as some believe, or did they want us to believe their unrealistic numbers? These are questions we should all be asking ourselves. CNN and the other mainstream media stations quickly dismissed the USC/LATimes Poll as being “too experimental” even though this polling method, using a proprietary algorithm, showed the most accurate numbers during the Obama election as well. Now experts are calling this once “too experimental” poll as the new gold standard in polling. Unfortunately, it comes too late for much of the nation who was told to dismiss it.
A friend of mine, who is an intellectual news junkie, warned me before the election that anything outside of the mainstream papers was an “unreliable” news source which I shouldn’t pay any attention to. I didn’t listen, of course, and kept my thoughts to myself. I was on an open information quest.
After the election, this same friend revealed that he now felt betrayed by the same media he had always trusted and would never make that mistake again. He admits perhaps deep down he desperately wanted to believe what he was being told, which he now recognizes as a propaganda machine that mesmerized so many with false data.
Days after the election, the publisher of The New York Times penned a letter to readers promising that the paper would “reflect” on its coverage of this year’s election while re-dedicating itself to reporting on “America and the world” more honestly.
The publisher’s letter was released after the paper’s public editor, Liz Spayd, took the paper to task for its election coverage. She pointed out how its polling feature Upshot gave Hillary Clinton an 84 percent chance as voters went to the polls. She compared stories that the paper ran about President-elect Donald Trump and Clinton, where the paper made Clinton look functional and organized and the Trump discombobulated.
Spayd wrote, “Readers are sending letters of complaint at a rapid rate. Here’s one that summed up the feelings succinctly, from Kathleen Casey of Houston: “Now, that the world has been upended and you are all, to a person, in a state of surprise and shock, you may want to consider whether you should change your focus from telling the reader what and how to think, and instead devote yourselves to finding out what the reader (and nonreaders) actually think.”
Spayd cited another reader who asked the paper to focus on the electorate instead of “pushing the limited agenda of your editors.” It said: “Please come down from your New York City skyscraper and join the rest of us.”
Yes, much of the middle class is hurting and hoping that Trump will “drain the swamp” of political corruption in Washington. While some people’s intent may be seen by some as naive, or misplaced, none of this matters in the bigger picture. We are all more than the sum of this election. We are actually on the cusp of a real spiritual and political revolution.
Whether Trump will be the leader some people hope he will become, we will just have to wait and see. Like him or not, it’s time to give him a chance to prove himself. For most people, Trump represents fear of the unknown. Fear is not only the great destroyer, but the tool that has been used to manipulate the masses for centuries. Yes, Trump is certainly a wild card and, while not perfect (nor was Hillary), wouldn’t it floor us all if he actually managed to do some good?
I’m choosing to focus on him actually accomplishing positive change. If we are indeed all co-creators of our reality, then it is up to each one of us to choose cooperation over discord. I suspect this is really an evolutionary test for mankind. While it’s clear some of us are really struggling with the fear this election has stirred up, I trust we will work it out together in time. It’s really not the end of the world as some people might tell themselves.
So let’s take responsibility today for our thinking process as well as our behavior. Focus on the positive; let go of blame. Ultimately, we all want what is best for this country and we can make it happen.
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Dr. Kathy Forti is a clinical psychologist, inventor of the Trinfinity8 technology, and author of the book, Fractals of God: A Psychologist’s Near-Death Experience and Journeys Into the Mystical
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