Damn, You Look Tired, America

How this cruel Administration is intentionally aging us in dog years

Photo by christopher lemercier on Unsplash

Yesterday was a long decade.

By the end of the day, when my head finally hit the pillow I felt ten years older; as if I'd somehow spent far more than merely 24 hours on the planet, gone through much more than just one earthly rotation.

By nightfall, after weathering another indescribably disorienting day here, I felt disproportionately older than I should have.

I know I'm not alone.

This exhaustion is a national epidemic.

This marrow-deep fatigue has become commonplace here now.

In this MAGA America, caring, empathetic, decent people are living dog years.

We're all aging unnaturally rapidly, friends.

This is what happens when every day is packed to bursting with real and manufactured crises; with perpetual legislative assaults, with relentless nonsensical social media rants, with continually-cycling bad news stories designed to heighten our urgency.

It's the logical result of being deluged by so many relational fractures to tend to, so many emotional land mines to try and navigate, and by an ever-growing mountain of horrible to try and climb out from under.

Getting exposed to prolonged stress like this isn't sustainable to the brain or to the body. Our systems weren’t designed for this.

The heaviness is naturally going to take its toll; on your emotional state, your physical health, your spiritual wellness, your relational conditions—and you're going to get older faster.

If you look carefully you see it in people; the worry etched deep into their faces, the frazzled disbelief set into their eyes, the hunched countenance they carry themselves around with.

You may see it in the mirror too.

I caught up with a friend recently who I hadn't seen in a few months. "Damn, you look tired today" he said to me, with sincere concern. I told him that he was right, but assured him that this was not an isolated reality.

"Yeah, I looked tired yesterday too and the day before that." I smiled and said. "You haven’t seen me in a while. This is how I look now."

Yeah, you look tired, America—and I don't blame you one bit. You've been through a helluva lot.

Everything seems exponentially multiplied right now:
the number of scandals to keep track of,
the environmental protection rollbacks to lament and push back against,
the attacks on marginalized communities to martial energies against,
the home-grown humanitarian emergencies to respond to,
the sheer breadth and depth of politicians’ cruelty to brace ourselves for.

In just a few weeks, we've already sustained decades of damage; worry line-manufacturing atrocities and relationship-destroying revelations, the effects of which will be irreversible. No miracle cream, magic fix, fountain of youth elixir, or self-care spa retreat will erase it all.

These days are taking years off of our lives. No matter what happens, we'll never be able to recover some of what we've lost in such violently-accelerated times. We're just going to have to learn to see the much older version of ourselves and our country and live with it.

Hopefully, with this artificially-advanced age will come some useful wisdom too.

Maybe we'll make sure we never do this again.
Maybe we'll be more vigilant in the future.
Maybe we'll guard against the apathy that got us here.
Maybe we'll communicate with each other across divides better.
Maybe we'll be louder in opposing the hatred that found traction again.
Maybe we'll each find a personal activism that leverages our lives better in the cause of love and goodness.
Maybe we’ll have a deep understanding of historically-marginalized, vulnerable people who experience this accelerated trauma as their default experience here.

If we never again put our nation through the world-class farce we're now living in, we'll have at least not aged this horribly for nothing.

If our children or their children never have to endure this worry and fatigue and sleep deprivation; if their days are more like days and less like decades, we'll at least be able to know we did right by them.

Yes, you look tired, America but that’s because your humanity is weathering inhumane days.

Rest and keep going. These days mean more than ever.