Why I Despair

This isn’t polished, but it’s the best I can do right now, readers. I can barely get through the basics right now; being able to write anything at all is a minor miracle.

After everything that has happened in the past 7 years, half the country really does think it's "crazy" and "bigoted" to not welcome millions of illegal aliens. They believe it's "hateful" to stop children from being mutilated in the name of trans.

Momentary pause—both those two things above, regardless of how one is emotionally disposed to feel about them, or to perform feeling about them, have dire, real-world consequences. Real people, including the sons and daughters of that half of the country, are being physically, emotionally, and financially brutalized by these phenomena. Really. Truly. We all of us are in the same boat with this. They don’t hurt the children or the security of liberals any less than they hurt me. Yet, that doesn’t move their hearts or minds.

Half of my countrymen believe Joe Biden is a good man, and has done good things for the country. They believe that Donald Trump (badly flawed, yes) is an actual dictator in waiting who will outstrip Hitler's evil. They believe we had a "pandemic" that killed millions of people who never, ever would have died under any other circumstances. They still believe it is right and good to suspend Constitutional rights because some people got sick.

They still believe "the vaccine" was good, healthful, and that it was right and proper to force employees, military members and others, to take it. They claim to have so much compassion that their hearts grew a whole two sizes larger than mine or yours, yet they transparently do not care that people are injured or sickened or killed or given an economic death sentence.

They believe they're right and correct to have worn masks simply to signal that they were not 'far right', and that they 'cared about people'. You can find some in this set who will actually admit that they know the masks probably don't work, and they still, in seriousness, say it's good and right to wear them. They will not allow even the tiniest objection. They will not acknowledge any downsides.

No matter how reasonable one's objections to any of the above may be, they will not hear you. They will not treat you, if you object, as a fellow human who has his own legitimate interests and his own worth and dignity. You are outside their sphere of moral concern, and they make sure to communicate that to you, especially in public to ensure that you feel even more isolated and powerless.

I find this unbearable. Every day it's harder to take. It's not getting easier. I'm not getting used to it. It doesn't sting less. Perhaps it "stings" less, in the sense that it's no longer a shock. But the deep ache that follows the initial sting is getting worse over time.

This is half the country. It includes people who used to be my friends and loved ones. Half the country is not evil to their very core. But they are profoundly disconnected from reality to such a degree that their actions and attitudes can't be accurately described as anything but "functionally evil." This half of the country feels the same about me and my half. They really believe it.

It would be dishonest for me to ask, "How could you believe these things, how can you deny the plain evidence in front of your eyes?" Because I used to be one of these people. I used to believe most of these things (but no, I never fell for "Covid" and I never accepted abrogation of constitutional rights, even in the beginning). My views have been misguided, sometimes catastrophically so. I was a member of the cult of the left. I am not stupid, yet I believed so much of this, too.

This allows me to understand that half the country is not "stupid" or "essentially evil." That was a profound moral mistake I made when I was a leftist, and I will not allow myself to make it again.

And because, yes, I do feel the need to defend myself, I do know how broken and flawed I am. The depth of my capacity to be deluded and stay deluded out of emotional fear is obvious to anyone who has known me. It's just as obvious to me. But I do know that I'm not essentially evil, and I'm not a dullard.

That allows me to understand that the people "on the other side" are not necessarily those things, either. Yet, here we are. Not being a dullard, and not being essentially evil, are not enough to make sound, wise, rational, or compassionate decisions. What is enough? I have no idea. It is true that I'm writing this during a serious depressive state; undoubtedly my current emotional problems are coloring my view. But is the world not also contributing to my emotional problems, and to yours, to your fears, to your reasonable worries?

I think that is so, too. It is also true that even when I am not in a depressive morass, I believe and observe the things I've written about above. They are not all coming from my own psychological damage. The world, our country, our culture, is not getting better. It has gotten worse. Yes, even "since Covid ended." Just because that acute period is past us and we're not universally masking does not mean that things have improved. They have not.

We still have had not reckoning of truth as a public conversation. Half the country still believes the most extreme things they believed when this was going on. The highest levels of government, media, the universities, medicine--all of them are doubling down on woke. On anti-white racism. On elevating non-victims--often, actual aggressors--into sacred castes who are morally and socially untouchable. They're going harder. They have not been reined in.

We have been living in a disturbing episode of the Twilight Zone for years, and it's not stopping. I don't know how much more of this I can take, because I don't know how to live with it. It's not enough to just bear it and keep going through the motions. This is why I despair. I can ask others for a different view, I can try to talk myself through the worst and frame it differently. Hell---I've been praying to God and asking for help and grace and I don't even know if I believe. It's not enough.

I am sorry this is not more hopeful, and I worry about disgorging too much of my melancholy onto readers. That worry is at war with (to be frank) my desperate need to connect to other people in some way, at least some of the time. I’m not enough, alone.

These past few weeks I’ve pulled away from talking to friends the way I do normally. When I was younger, I let my turbulent emotions spill out unchecked all the time on the people closest to me. Desperately clawing comfort and reassurance from people who love you is a burden on them, and I’m determined not to be such hard work that way. Back then, I didn’t realize what hard work I was to friends. I know it now, because I know what hard work I am to myself.

Yet here I am, doing some form of it in public, trying (probably artlessly) to thread the needle between desperation for connection and enough distance to protect myself and people I care about from my turbulence.

As I may about the last few pieces I’ve put here, I may regret this, when I finally emerge from this state. You may regret it reading it, and I wouldn’t blame you if you did.

There is something else that motivates me to write this way, now, in times like this. Psychological problems are the warp and woof of my weekly show, and my writing. I have a lot to say about what’s wrong with people’s minds. But it would be a lie to present myself as if I were whole and unbroken, to claim or imply that I have things figured out in a way others don’t. It’s not true.

To the degree that my show, Disaffected, helps people to see the world more clearly (even to find comfort, which, shockingly to me, is something countless people have written to tell me that it does for them), I’m glad. But I feel compelled to be honest that underneath whatever level of professionalism or entertainment the show achieves, there’s mess and untidiness and flaw. I’m not going showcase it; that’s “bad television” unless you’re trying to get rich through the reality TV formula of constant self-and-other humiliation and excess.

It’s probably “doing it wrong” to even write this. Big, well-known people with big, well-known names and shows don’t do this, and probably for a good reason. But I’m not them. I’m this.

Thank you as always for reading.