There is no more time for grief

So, I've tended to darkly joke that much of the U.S. is still wallowing through the five stages of grief that kicked off on 5th of November, but I think I should knock that off. The problem is that people really seem to be doing it. The stages (The classic model tends to constitute denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) may suffice to get over death of a loved one or the loss of the one fun car you ever owned after you drove it into a river (another story), but they would constitute a lattice of doom in terms of dealing with cataclysmic political upheaval. We can allow ourselves some denial for a little while (a week. That two weeks ago). Anger and its subset lists of moods have their purposes, which we'll get into. The last three are what the Trump regime will rely on individuals to lean into as it dismantles legal and protective frameworks, removes rights and undermines the systems that maintain any kinds of accountability.

Liberals, leftists and those centrists they hate — even the ones who loathed Biden and weren't very impressed with what Harris had to offer — were all gutted by these results, even if not completely surprised as the polls and bookies had painted increasingly bleak pictures by election day. Since then, it's been a pretty good pity party. The feels posts have been landing all month. It's time to move beyond grief. We've had more than enough of it. The first couple of "it's okay to grieve" posts that came out the week of November 5 were fine. But new ones keep trundling out like sad clowns endlessly extricating themselves from a tiny sad clown car. You keep thinking the final one has emerged, but no, there are still so many more! A sampling of a few:

• I’m going through the five stages of grief over the election — and that’s OK — The News House
• Your Election Grief Is Valid — Here’s How to Navigate It — Pop Sugar
• My 5 Stages of Grief Following Trump’s Victory — a Medium blog
• Election Grief Is Real. Here’s How to Cope — Scientific American
• In Search of Ways to Cope in the Trump Era — NYT letters to the editor
• That Sinking Feeling In Your Stomach? That’s ‘Political Grief (here's how to get through it)’ — Rolling Stone, even
• The five stages of Trump grief, for British people (honourable mention, for my dual-nationalness)

Sociology professor Jim Hannon gives you six stages of political grief, and here's another take that offers seven, similar to Paul Street's post in Counterpunch. Do I hear eight? Eight, anyone? Going... going...

This isn't a post to dunk on feelings. Have them. I took mine out for a pint of suitably room-temperature ale at a murky Southeast London pub on the 6th of this month shortly after dusk. Brooding has its purposes. But let whatever you're going through be grounded in real fears and concerns: for migrants and immigrant families, for LGBTQ+, for women, and for many groups across the race, ethnicity, religion smorgasbord that is supposed to be what really makes America great... or so we were taught in schools once. MAGA is back with more muscle. With bi-partisan support, a House bill that would give a sitting president a lot more powers to target his critics and opponents moved a lot closer to becoming law. Under Trump's orders before he's even in office, it looks like the Press Shield Bill will not make it out of the Senate, ensuring his regime can target the journalists that it deems to be too critical with as much surveillance and intimidation as it wants. Regardless of your issue or concern, the next administration has a cabinet position that will be going after it. It has majorities in both house of Congress and the Supreme Court to do it.

You are allowed a few days of denial and anger. We don't have much space on the gannt chart for bargaining, depression, or acceptance in this time frame. As Patrick Swayze's character Jed instructed his little brother, played by Charlie Sheen, in the 1984 Cold War coming-of-age classic Red Dawn, "Don't cry! Hold it back! Let it turn to something else. Just let it turn - to something else."

The cycle we need for resistance

The key problem with deploying the grief cycle for dealing with dark times in political or social events is that all outcomes lead to acceptance. Not only is it a poor fit, it's a weapon for a regime that means to inflict harm on many of us and our friends. It's been used before.

And now for a segue: Consider France Télécom. In the 2000s, the company later to be rebranded as Orange wanted to slash around 22,000 jobs and get it done in just three years. Ambitious! To achieve this, it coached managers on how to employ a whole suite of gaslighting, workplace bullying and other tactics. People found themselves demoted without reason, being left out of meetings, re-assigned to less interesting roles in cities where they didn't want to be, and so forth. Canning people in France is difficult and costly. The point was to demoralise as many people as possible into resigning. Quite a few killed themselves instead.

Amid all of this, when sad employees went to HR for help, they weren't encouraged to file a complaint or stand up for their rights. They were instead shown a presentation on how to just accept their situation and go through the five stages of grief developed by psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (for dealing with personal loss, not employment hell). The company developed its own diagram based on the five stages, albeit with slightly different language.

The feelings may be real, but the route is a trap. It's time to hack the process. We need to fork the stages of grief. But we're in luck! Whomever made this chart for a telecom giant to psychologically torture its employees has given a starting point at the second stop on their grief line:

I thought about changing the order, but no. Sabotage is the highest art form.