Choosing the adversity we will confront can be calming
when Donald Trump tweeted that we might need to postpone the November election, I was primed for outrage. That’s the language of Third World autocrats, I ranted to a colleague, further evidence of Trump’s utter disregard for American democratic values. He doesn’t care that raising false questions about the validity of the vote could destabilize our political system for years to come.
But I found comfort in a most surprising place, namely, the words of Mitch Mcconnell. Ordinarily the great enabler on Capitol Hill for Trump’s worst ideas, Mcconnell all but shrugged when a local television reporter in Kentucky asked about Trump’s explosive idea.
“Never in the history of the country, through wars and depressions and the Civil War, have we ever not had a federally scheduled election on time,” Mcconnell said calmly — was that a smile playing at the corners of his mouth? — “and we’ll find a way to do that again this November third.”
Since it’s up to Congress, not the president, to set the date of the federal election, Mcconnell’s view on this, unlike Trump’s, actually matters. And when later in the day we learned that the U.S. economy had tumbled at a record rate in the last quarter, and that
Trump was unable to deliver a recovery plan before unemployment benefits for millions of Americans expired, it was clear that the tweet was just Trump trying to distract us, yet again, from what matters: a pandemic he has ignored, a foreign policy of his design that has left America almost friendless, a society torn apart by his dalliances with white nationalists and demagogues.
Those are reasons enough to be both outraged and unsettled, but old Mitch’s nonchalance at one day’s presidential bluster let me sleep soundly that night.
Maybe this is what the self-help advisers mean when they talk about resilience — that is, our ability to handle adversity. If we haven’t yet developed the skills we need to be resilient, this is the moment, for the troubles of this time could make even the most agile among us stumble.
Aging can help with that, of course, since over the years we find ourselves forced to deal with the buffeting that life delivers: loved ones dying, relationships failing, finances collapsing, jobs disappointing us, public figures betraying us. If we are lucky enough to avoid any one of those, we may ironically find ourselves less resilient than people who have confronted such troubles, and more. Hardship can yield immunity to the adversity we next confront.
A century and more from now, after all, curious descendants may uncover a bit about us, and realize that we lived through the great pandemic. Beyond that fact, we will seem from that distance to have lived a straight line from birth to death; the twists and turns of the road we travel daily, which may seem to us to impede our travel, will be long erased from view.
That argues for the value of discernment — of being able to determine what to fight and what to ignore. We might absorb some other lessons, too, from those who are clearly resilient: to practice optimism, to take breaks from what we find stressful, to get outside our own lives by practicing altruism, to find and enjoy moments of humor.
Face it, there are plenty of reasons to be anxious these days. But we imperil ourselves if we don’t confront them with perspective and discernment.
For my part, I have decided that the good Methodists must want me to feel the joy of Christmas in these hard days. Just a bit ago, the chimes offered “Hark the Herald Angels.” It made me smile. Peace on Earth, all.
Rex Smith is Albany Times Union editor-at-large. rsmithtimesunion.com