PAINFUL TIMES CAN BE SACRED TIMES

What being depressed about politics can teach us

I once read a story about an experiment involving a village of chimpanzees. A few of the chimps were what we might describe as “depressed” - they didn’t eat, sleep or play with the rest of the community, but rather hung around its edges in what mimicked a morose state.

Wondering what effect it would have on the rest of the community if the depressed chimps were taken away for a while, researchers removed their part of the population.

What happened then was astonishing. When the researches returned to the original community six months later, they found all the chimps left there had died.

What they realized was that the “depressed” chimps were the ones that knew when dangers threatened - whether from predators, storms or other sources - and served to warn the rest of the community in time to protect itself. The depressed members of the community were an important part of its social ecosystem, and without the information they conveyed the community could not survive.

For a long time I’ve sensed a deep relevance of that story to the world in which we live.

In the 1980’s, I was very involved in the AIDS crisis. Obviously, people whose lives were touched by the disease were depressed. It was a horrible thing. Life had been good, then something very terrible occurred.

Over the next ten or fifteen years, more and more people experienced depression that was not so much situational as free-floating. Among women particularly, by the end of the 1990’s the words “clinical depression” became a prevalent description of our overall state. It was even reported that one in four American women were diagnosed that way at some point in their lives.

There were many theories about all this, most of which I disagreed with at the time and which have since been debunked. To me it seemed stunningly obvious: so many American women (and men) were depressed because we knew in our hearts that something was wrong. We were like those depressed chimps; our depression should not have been seen as a weakness or even a problem within us, but as a warning for the society.

The fact that you feel something deeply doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. I used to say to audiences, “Given that our middle class is collapsing, 12,000 children on this planet starve every day, our environment is imploding, and our democracy is being eaten up by the very, very rich - if you’re not depressed, what is wrong with you?!?”

Most modern psychotherapeutic theories have only added to the problem. By concentrating on personal circumstances at the expense of spiritual and societal issues, it has often contributed to confusion regarding the origin of our pain. For example, millions of years of evolution have gone into a woman’s knowing in every cell of her being when enough time has elapsed for her to leave the side of a newborn infant. When a woman has to go back to work too soon and is feeling depressed about it, the issue going on there is more than post-partum depression. For most women, the bigger problem is a lack of paid family leave!

How ironic that our great, great grandmothers would have been more likely than we, to realize that if we’re in pain then perhaps the conditions of society have something to do with it. With their infinitely less political and economic power to change things, they were actually more likely to act on those conditions. And it’s more than ironic - it’s tragic. For decades now, the women of America could have and should have been acting on economic and social problems that instead we simply let fester.

I say all this because many looking at what’s going on in America today, realizing the authoritarian nature of the Trump administration and the terrible things it bodes for our future, are likely to be depressed. But psychic pain, like physical pain, is there for a reason. If you have a broken leg and it didn’t hurt, then how would you know that the bone must be reset? With emotional pain as well, the point is not to suppress it, but to find out why it’s there. What we need do is not suppress our pain, as Big Pharma has made so many billions of dollars training us to do over the last few decades. Rather, we need to listen to our sorrow. We need to own it, learn from it, and cry it out. We need to moan like ancient women at funerals. We need to realize - and to take responsibility for - how deeply, deeply, deeply our generation fucked up that it has come to this.

Then - and only then - will we be able to get to work.

It will not be easy to defeat the alt right fanatics who have embedded themselves in the functioning of our government. Every alarm bell that could possibly go off is going off now, as a regime of corrupt authoritarians more impressed by the ideas of Victor Orban than by those of Thomas Jefferson have now gained control in our nation’s capitol. In Washington, but also in Statehouses around the country, an anti-democratic axis representing the ideals of Christian Nationalists, Curtis Yarvin “post-democratic” tech bros, and people genuinely proud to be Nazi-adjacent have their hands on the levers of power. You can kid yourself all you want that it’s not that bad, but you can only do so if your head is in the sand. Our democracy is literally under attack.

Depressing, huh?

I’ve found in my life, having experienced my own share of deep sadness, that there are treasures to be found there. In Rilke’s words, “Let me not squander the hour of my pain.” We’ll have to dig very deep within ourselves to find a way to overcome the political calamity now confronting us. Everything we refused to be before, we need to become now. Our democracy wounded, we ourselves must become its immune cells. A depressed societal immune system is what led us here, in fact; we’re now plagued by a political cancer that should never, ever have been allowed to get this far.

And if I’ve made you sad, that’s okay too. As with any terrible event in life, First You Cry. But in your sadness, walking along the beach or walking down a busy street, don’t run away from the seriousness of this moment. If what’s happening scares you, remember that there is a power within us that’s greater than the power of evil.

Looking away from what’s happening is not the answer; our distractedness from things that are important is part of how we got here. These painful times can be sacred times if we use them to deepen our understanding. Read. Learn about the history of fascism so you can realize what’s occurring here. Take an inventory of your own engaged or disengaged past politics, and see what atonement or forgiveness might be called for. All of us have a lot to look at. We laughed at who we should have listened to, and listened to who we should have laughed at. Among other things, we trusted fools. Now, in being willing to look at all this, we’ll become who we need to be to do the things we’ll need to do.

We’ll become a critical mass of spirit-informed, nonviolent activists constituting a new political forcefield. Our soulforce will be as important as our strategy. Raw, emotional availability to this moment - praying in whatever way we pray, to be used by forces greater than ourselves to serve our country at this dangerous hour - will be the source of our political insight. A new dimension of power is called for now. This isn’t a time to minimize miracles. It’s time for all of us to work them.