General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIt's Not the Economy. It's the Pandemic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/03/covid-grief-trauma-memory-biden-trump/677828/No paywall link
https://archive.li/wlrat
America is in a funk, and no one seems to know why. Unemployment rates are lower than theyve been in half a century and the stock market is sky-high, but poll after poll shows that voters are disgruntled. President Joe Bidens approval rating has been hovering in the high 30s. Americans satisfaction with their personal livesa measure that usually dips in times of economic uncertaintyis at a near-record low, according to Gallup polling. And nearly half of Americans surveyed in January said they were worse off than three years prior.
Experts have struggled to find a convincing explanation for this era of bad feelings. Maybe its the spate of inflation over the past couple of years, the immigration crisis at the border, or the brutal wars in Ukraine and Gaza. But even the people who claim to make sense of the political world acknowledge that these rational factors cant fully account for Americas national malaise. We believe thats because theyre overlooking a crucial factor.
Four years ago, the country was brought to its knees by a world-historic disaster. COVID-19 hospitalized nearly 7 million Americans and killed more than a million; its still killing hundreds each week. It shut down schools and forced people into social isolation. Almost overnight, most of the country was thrown into a state of high anxietythen, soon enough, grief and mourning. But the country has not come together to sufficiently acknowledge the tragedy it endured. As clinical psychiatrists, we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when its not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and angerexactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.
The pressure to simply move on from the horrors of 2020 is strong. Who wouldnt love to awaken from that nightmare and pretend it never happened? Besides, humans have a knack for sanitizing our most painful memories. In a 2009 study, participants did a remarkably poor job of remembering how they felt in the days after the 9/11 attacks, likely because those memories were filtered through their current emotional state. Likewise, a study published in Nature last year found that peoples recall of the severity of the 2020 COVID threat was biased by their attitudes toward vaccines months or years later.
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WhiskeyGrinder
(22,500 posts)Walleye
(31,141 posts)Bernardo de La Paz
(49,064 posts)House of Roberts
(5,196 posts)Trump led us into the pandemic, lied about its severity, then lied about its preventions and treatments, but he did sign the bill getting us relief money to begin with.
Biden led us OUT of the pandemic, his experts told us the TRUTH about how to avoid it, oversaw the vaccine programs that saved countless people who got the shots, and he signed the second round of relief money to keep us going until the economy could recover the jobs on hiatus and then added new jobs later on.
Biophilic
(3,723 posts)Trump was willing to use the Pandemic for his own goals, but was incapable of caring for and leading the nation as a whole. That left many of us feeling pretty much alone with little we could do to help ourselves and our friends and neighbors. It made things much more frightening for a lot of people. I think the Pandemic ripped the seems open on so many things that we didn't know or didn't want to know. Trump used those rips to cause even more destruction. I honestly don't see how we can fix this without really good leadership and time, lots of time.