The year that feels like it will never end
Relentless challenges of 2020 taking a toll as election approaches
Like much of Connecticut, Andre Rochester is feeling the weight of this relentless year.
“The uncertainty that I’m dealing with right now, with this pandemic that is looming over everybody’s head and this push for vaccines, I’ve never dealt with any situation like this,’’ said Rochester, 35, of East Hartford. “I’ve had very stressful times in my life, but this is unique.”
A deadly pandemic. Widespread social unrest and financial instability. Upended daily structures and routines. Hurricane damage and exorbitant energy bills. An election season marked by anger, bitterness and ugliness.
With weeks to go before the election — and with both parties claiming the country will fall apart if the other side wins — many are feeling lost, hopeless and sapped of energy. Wave after wave of bad news rolls up on a
daily basis, with no end in sight. Even when election day comes and goes — and it will — the battle over the White House will likely linger for weeks.
“Being a Black man, I feel like there’s a target on my back,” Rochester said. “You have the pandemic situation, then you have all of the civil unrest around social issues that our country just cannot seem to get a grasp on. ... There are layoffs coming at the company I work for, so I don’t know if I will be in that list of people who will unfortunately have to deal with involuntary separation, so I have to develop some kind of strategy for how I’m going to move forward if that happens.”
Shortly after reading a news story, Nick Teeling, 24, of Winchester, tweeted, “really feeling the burnout today :-\ so much bullsh*t happening in our country at once and not enough time to fight/process any of it.”
“Yesterday was just particularly tough,” Teeling, who is vice-chair of the Winsted Democrats, said.
Teeling lives in the same house with his parents, his brother and his grandparents — a “three-generation working class family,” he said — and both of his parents work in health care.
“They’re on the front line of this pandemic. They didn’t have words when they watched the president talk about how he was not going to accept the election results, how we were not going to have a peaceful transition of power. They were at a loss for words when they watched the injustice dealt in the Breonna Taylor case. ... That was just the biggest blow that I felt yesterday,” Teeling said.
A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that more than half (53%) of all U.S. adults reported negative mental health impacts due to the coronavirus, including the effects of job loss and social isolation — a huge jump from the 32% reported in March. Adults are also sleeping less, consuming more drugs and alcohol and seeing chronic health conditions get worse.
More than eight in 10 Americans now feel the future of the country “is a significant source of stress,” the American Psychological Association found in a survey released over the summer.
“We are experiencing the collision of three national crises — the COVID - 19 pandemic, economic turmoil and recent, traumatic events related to systemic racism,” said Arthur C. Evans Jr., CEO of the APA. “As a result, the collective mental health of
the American public has endured one devastating blow after another, the longterm effects of which many people will struggle for years to come.’’
‘We have to push forward’
Bishop John L. Selders Jr., organizing pastor of Amistad United Church of Christ in Hartford and assistant dean of students at Trinity College, said the pandemic and other stressors have caused long-simmering family problems to bubble to the surface.
“At least for the hour or so on Sunday and the several hours during the week I am in touch with folks in my faith community, they’re looking to me to say something that will — if it does nothing else — inspire them. You try to speak a word to the moment, but also lodge it in our faith, lodge it in the traditions that have fed us,” Selders said.
“We have to push forward. There will be life after Nov. 3. There is an end to what we are now dealing with,” he added.
As a pastor in the San Francisco Bay area, Selders lived through the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. He’s seen enough hardship to draw upon for strength; one of his earliest memories is the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
But the students Selders works with at Trinity College, he said, may not have developed the same resilience.
“They were just born when 9/11 occurred,” Selders said. “This is something they’ve never experienced before. But just like anything else, once you’ve been through a thing and you’ve now gotten to the other side of it, you then
have some background for the next time you have trouble. The next time you have a circumstance or a situation that comes and you can say, ‘listen, let me think it through. There’s a process: we can get to the other side, and maybe I might be better for it, although I may end up with scars for life.’ “
College students and twenty-somethings, who would typically be exploring independence, launching new careers and feeling hopeful about the future, instead are taking online classes and moving back in with their parents.
Mi c h a e l C e r u l l i o f Trumbull, a sophomore at UConn and president of the Connecticut Federation of College Democrats, said there’s a breed of college student he and his friends call “doomers” — a mashup of “baby boomers,” “zoomers” (as Gen Zers are sometimes called) and “doom and gloom.”
“It’s somebody who’s so cynical about things that they just sit and sulk on how bad things are,” Cerulli said. “I do think that there’s a certain sense that this moment is bigger than any one of us: what
can a 19-year-old do about a global pandemic, a president who, regardless of whether or not you support his policy positions or not, it is causing a lot of division in the country?”
The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sent shockwaves through college campuses, followed closely by revelations that Senate Republicans would move quickly — perhaps even before the election — to appoint Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett.
As younger Trump supporters rejoice, Cerulli said the idea that Coney Barrett will mostly likely serve on the Supreme Court for the rest of his adult life, without any say from firsttime voters like himself, was hard to stomach.
“It’s almost as though there’s this sort of unseen, unnamed force that’s just working against our future, whether it be on climate, whether it be on abortion, even with this pandemic,” Cerulli said. “[Friends] describe it to me almost like, we’re kind of screwed inevitably, and the screwing has been done by these really kind of dark, shadowy, vacuous forces that they can’t even put their finger on. ... They feel a sort of ratcheting up of the pressure on them, and I don’t think most people know who that ratcheting is being done by.”
A deteriorating political climate
Gary Rose, professor and chair in the department of government at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, said the current political climate is “the worst I’ve ever seen it in my 40 years of teaching politics.”
“It’s like the other party is an existential threat to our being as free people, it’s really unbelievable. ... There have always been claims about what’s going to happen, but the consequences have never been presented in such dire terms, and that’s really concerning,” Rose said.
In August, former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton advised Joe Biden not to concede the election “under any circumstances.” Last week, The Atlantic reported that President Trump is considering a strategy to install electors in swing states to bypass election results and vote for the president in the Electoral College. Asked if he would peacefully transfer power if he loses the election, Trump said he would “see what happens.”
None of this is good news, Rose said.
“Even though somebody wins and somebody loses, it’s still nevertheless supposed to be sort of a grand display to the world of how our democracy works. We show the world that there is a good way of doing things here, as opposed to violent revolts and beheadings of kings and leaders and so on. I’m afraid we’re at a point where that’s not going to happen this time,” Rose said.
In recent weeks, the destruction from the West Coast wildfires has quickly pushed climate change back into the forefront of political debate in Connecticut. Nearly two thirds (63%) of Connecticut adults are worried about global warming, according to recent findings by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, while more than half (56%) said a Presidential candidate’s views on global warming are important to their vote.
But even climate change is polarizing; Democrats overwhelmingly see climate change as an emergency, while Republicans take an opposite view. A recent Quininpiac survey shows that 81% of Republicans do not believe climate change is an emergency.
Trump has blamed California for its wildfires and threatened to withhold federal aid, telling officials “it’ll start getting cooler, you just watch ... I don’t think science knows, actually.” Biden responded by calling Trump a “climate arsonist” and denier, stating that climate change was “another crisis he won’t take responsibility for” and likening it to Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In suburban neighborhoods, political yard signs pit neighbor against neighbor, while on social media, acquaintances snipe at each other about the news of the day. For many, working from home already creates a profound sense of alienation; they see only faces on Zoom, stretch their legs occasionally in the fading daylight and collapse into Netflix with takeout food and alcohol.
Meanwhile, thousands of families in Connecticut are struggling just to survive, said Office of Early Childhood Commissioner Beth Bye.
“They’re having trouble working. They may have lost their job. If they have a job, they’re trying to balance being parents and working and not having school in session full-time. There are a whole lot of people who know there’s an election coming, but they’re so worried just about day-today survival,” Bye said.
People with stable housing, transportation and money for utilities and food feel a sense of dread, Bye added, but there’s a whole group of people who are truly desperate. “They don’t know how to manage childcare, work, schooling and just getting through day to day,” Bye said. “Then you turn on the news and it’s like throwing gasoline on the fire, because there is so much discord in addition to that.”
A recent Center for Disease Control report, meanwhile, suggested that the stresses are accumulating: mental health effects, thoughts of suicide and substance abuse were “considerably elevated.” Young adults, racial and ethnic minorities, essential workers, and unpaid caregivers also reported having experienced “disproportionately worse mental health outcomes, increased substance use, and elevated suicidal ideation.”
All of this has combined to create what can feel like a swirling and even crippling set of circumstances.
Rochester, the East Hartford artist who specializes in portraits, figure drawing and figure painting, has turned to therapy for cope with anxiety and creative blocks.
“I’m kind of stressed and worried that there’s a lot of things on my mind, and art just hasn’t been the top thing as it usually is,” said Rochester, who still has his eye on good things the future may yet reveal.
“I have to keep myself creative and try to get those juices flowing,’’ he said, “because I have commissioned work that I need to complete.”