Doom Syndrome

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

I’ve got this friend. I won’t mention his name but if he reads this, he’ll definitely know I’m talking about him. He’s very, very much freaking out about the upcoming election, and I’m sure he’s not alone.

I mean, if you follow the daily news threads, you’d almost be crazy not to be freaking out, right? Every hour, it seems, there’s some new story out there about how our very way of life hangs in the balance pending the outcome of the Nov. 5 vote for President of the United States. Trump’s a facist, Harris is a communist, there are millions of transgender terrorist illegal immigrants out there trying to get into our country to take all our jobs and eat all our cats. They’re going to take our guns and abort all our babies (even after they’re born). They’re going to raise the taxes… or maybe lower the taxes but only for

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the richest one percent. Trump is going to let Russia have Ukraine. Harris is going to let Hamas have Israel. A loaf of bread is going to cost five dollars. Electric cars are going to be mandatory.

It’s non-stop, especially if you are chronically online. What’s the word on Twitter? How bad does Facebook say it is? Do I even dare go to the online news sites?

If you want bad news, I assure you it’s out there. The term “doom scrolling” came into popular use during the COVID-19 pandemic. People became almost addicted to thumbing through the news on their phones wondering just how bad things could get.

It became such a ubiquitous pastime that I think my friend and many others have develped “Doom Syndrome.”

Look, I won’t pretend that this election isn’t important. We are a very divided nation and no matter who wins the election, that’s not going to change anytime soon. But I don’t really think the fate of our nation “hangs in the balance” as some people think.

If Harris wins, we’ll likely get a lot of the same middle-left policy ideas that we have seen under Joe Biden, with maybe a little more of a progressive slant depending on how the balance of power shakes out in Congress.

If Trump wins, well, we’ve already seen what that looks like, and we all survived those four years. We’ll all have to eat a bog bowl of MAGA/Altright salad, and I’m sure it will be a little more “yuge” and “bigly” than last time, but for all of his blustering, life will largely go unchanged for most Americans.

Yes, there are some important issues being debated this election cycle — well, not “debated” debates because Trump decided that one debate with Harris was enough and he had to get to his shift on the fry-olator at McDonald’s — but no matter what you might have been told, the president doesn’t just get to change the laws on a whim, for better or for worse. Sure, you might get one or two sweeping changes over the next four years, but mostly, we’ll just keep on keeping on until 2028.

This is nothing new. Every time there is an election, there are people who are sure that it will be the end of the world if their guy loses. I guess in the law of averages, someone will eventually be right, but I’m fairly certain it won’t be this time.

It will probably be whichever president decides to have Chat GPT be his running mate…