What the FUCK is going on?

Written By: Nicoli Alexander

For several years I have been waking up in total disbelief about the state of the world I live in.  Does anyone else just wake up everyday and immediately ask themselves, what the FUCK is going on? 

Everything I deeply value as a human being is being challenged in ways I would have never imagined when I was younger.  If you were to take a list of everything I stand for at the very core of my soul, every single thing I value is under attack. I grew up an emotional and compassionate soul, and was naive enough to believe that this was a human trait we all possessed on some level.  The deep layers of hate, fear, anger, greed and intolerance I have seen in my short life are almost unfathomable. Most of us try to pinpoint a singular issue that is the root cause of this.  As with most things in life, I am afraid that there is not one answer to the problem.  The problem looks vastly different depending on what shade of rose colored glasses you happen to have on.

My perspective on the world has always been almost exclusively positive.  Despite a world that was trying to prove to me otherwise, I still was able to wake up everyday and maintain the belief that most people meant well.  I believed that most people knew the difference between right and wrong.  The reality of the world is so much more complicated than this simplistic perspective.  I have worked to make a difference in my personal life and my professional life.  Sometimes feeling as though no one is listening, but I still do my best to have a voice and to speak up.

This all started to shift for me while I was going through an Executive Leadership Program this last year.  I was fortunate enough to spend election night last November with the Presidential Transition Team in Washington D.C.  The experience of watching our government from the inside was a truly life changing experience for me.  It really is nothing like what the media portrays it to be.

At The White House on Election Night 

There are caring, thoughtful, passionate and committed public servants that are running the government.  The moment the election results were announced, and seeing the absolute shock in the eyes of the people who were running that transition team, was a terrifying experience.  I walked into that opportunity on cloud 9, so incredibly proud to be a public servant and of the accomplishments I had made in my short career with the government. I ran out of that opportunity wanting to dismantle my entire professional life and run as far away from my career as possible. At 4 AM after the dust was starting to settle, I left work and wandered around the streets of Washington D.C.  There were people openly crying on the side of the road, protesters in the trees, people climbing up trees to get away from mobs who were trying to attack them.  It looked like a war zone, and I found myself so conflicted about my very existence.  How could I be so wrong about humanity? Was I just so caught up in my own privileged reality, that I had been failing to see the truth of the world we are living in?

I still do not have precise answers to some of these questions I started asking myself.  I can tell you that my perspective of myself, and the country I love so much started to drastically change. Since the election, I have sat back and watched so many things around me shift.  In order to deal with the pain of the relentless media, the mass shootings, the senseless bigotry parading in the streets and the confounding idiocracy that our government has become, I have been forced to completely detach from much of the world around me.  I stopped checking the news, stopped listening to NPR, blocked all political posts on social media, stopped talking about it with any of my friends of family, and took a job that requires me to stay silent on the topic of politics.

While I am limited in what I can post when it comes to politics, I am not limited in my ability to analyze the state of the world we are all living in. I have spent the better part of a year keeping my mouth shut.  Partially because I was required to, and partially because I needed time to take a deeper look at myself to be able to decipher how we got here.  What is my role in all of this confusion?  How can I continue to be the soft and gentle soul that I am, in a world that wants to set itself on fire?

I won't bombard you with anything you have already heard.  Regardless of what side you stand on with your political beliefs, we are all tired of being beat up by the media's constant coverage of negative news.  While there is certainly no shortage of terrible and deplorable things going on in the world, I want to spend some time speaking directly to something I truly believe that most of us have in common - Our shared humanity.  We may not all agree on how to get there, but we all want to provide for our families, make a decent wage, be able to take care of ourselves if we get sick, have the freedom to love who we chose, and the freedom to pursue our own version of happiness.

Our existence as human beings on this planet should not be limited to defining ourselves by man vs woman, black vs white, citizen vs immigrant, gay vs straight or atheist vs religious.  When you strip away all of these boxes we have placed ourselves in, we are all HUMAN. The lines we draw are maps are imaginary, our paper money is pretend, our polarized political structure does not represent a vast majority of our human values, and we are not all as different from one another as we think we are.

I have spent some time really trying to analyze how our politics and our society has ended up in this place.  There are many reasons the world is in turmoil.  There are many more reasons why America has detached itself from the world, and has actively chosen to sit in the corner with her ears plugged while the rest of the world looks at us in disbelief.  I have outlined a few of those reasons below.  I am sure there is much more to this story, and so many places we could take this conversation.  I tried to summarize how I believe we as a human race have lost our way.

#1 Our culture of fear has bred a world of intolerant and angry human beings.  

If we are born wealthy, we fear the poor.  If we are born healthy, we fear the sick. If we are born into a deeply religious family, we fear those that do not believe in God. If we identify as liberal, we fear the conservative.  This list could literally go on for pages.  We are not taking opportunities to see the similarities in one another, we are taking every opportunity to divide ourselves into smaller and smaller factions.  We have become deeply polarized and fear everything we do not immediately understand. 

I believe that people feel they need guns because of this fear.  We are afraid of our government, afraid of our neighbors, we fear going to the movies, going to church, or attending events in large crowds.  For some people, there only sense of security is knowing that if the world ended tomorrow they would be able to protect themselves. 

Not even the mass slaughter of 20 children and 6 adults in Sandy Hook can break through that fear. We remain unfazed when people are murdered watching a movie, shopping at the mall, going to work, going to school, dancing at a night club, or attending a concert.  We have endless amounts of thoughts and prayers for the victims for a few weeks at the most, but then we slowly slip back into our numb and unconscious state of reality.  We want everything to feel normal again, so we forget about these shootings until the next one happens.

These mass shootings are scars on our already bruised and battered souls.  Each time they happen we fall further and further into this fucked up reality we have created.  We are all waiting on the world to change, waiting for our political leaders to do something, waiting on someone else to solve our problems.  We each feel as though we can not make a difference, and as a collective group none of us are doing anything to correct this issue.

#2 We place value in sports, entertainment and technology, and not in children, education, healthcare, communities and compassion.  

The sports and entertainment industries serve as a distraction from any of the important issues that are happening in the world.  Why do you think our society fights so hard against allowing celebrities and musicians to have a voice or an opinion?  Why do you think our country falls apart when our athletes have had enough and choose to silently protest at a sports game?  We do not want to be reminded of what is going on in this world.  We want to remain ignorant, to disconnect, to have ONE thing we can use to detach from reality.

Our healthcare system is great for people who have money and are in good health, and is absolute insanity for people who do not have access to money and are sick.  The purpose of quality health care should be to help the ill, to make it easier to prevent illness and to make it affordable.  We have created a system that values money more than health.  One that values the pharmaceutical industry's profits more than preventing illness, prescription addiction, and overdose.  What the FUCK is going on?

#3 Our toxic culture of hyper masculinity is the root of most of the hate, bigotry. abuse, violence, domestic abuse, gangs, rape and mass shootings. 

Our men are taught from a young age to:

"Man up"

"Grow some balls"

"Stop being a pussy"

"Boys don't cry" 

"Men don't hug" 

"Don't talk about your feelings"

"Women are objects"

"You need to prove your worth"

"You need to show your strength and stop complaining"

"Boys don't wear that color"

Our men for generations have internalized all of this toxic brainwashing about what it means to "be a man."  They repress their emotions, guard their feelings, build up walls, deny themselves affection, and are encouraged by other men to act this way no matter what. These behaviors are reinforced in school, by our parents, in locker rooms, in fraternities, and by our male friends.  This causes men to detach from their feelings and create a space where the only emotion that is accepted by the culture of masculinity is anger.

This anger results in abuse, shootings, violence, suicide, rape and aggression.  When a man feels depressed about his relationship, his career, his family, his sexuality, his personality or when he feels like there is no one in his life who has ever shown him how to open up emotionally, they often act out by committing suicide, hurting their spouse or family, killing other people, or taking their frustrations out sexually on innocent people. 

We need to teach our boys about how to be emotionally intelligent.  How to express their emotions in healthy ways, how to have some internal and external awareness, how and when to open up, how to support one another, how to recognize when they are depressed and what to do about it. Our boys need to understand at a very young age that women are equal, that they deserve your respect, and that they are not objects.

#4 Most human beings will struggle with some type of mental health issue in their lifetime, yet we do not have a healthcare system that supports or encourages  open communication or rehabilitation for adults.

Our doctors over-prescribe medications to put band-aids on depression, anxiety, grief, addiction, sexual abuse, PTSD, and anger.  These are all forms of mental health issues that are normal human emotions that should be talk about openly.  When we hear a friend or family member is struggling with any of these issues, we tell them to "just stop doing that", "grow up", "stop being selfish", "just deal with it", "don't you care about your family", "take your medications, everything will get better."  

We need to create an open dialogue about mental health. One that is taught in schools from a very young age.  How to recognize symptoms, what you can do about it, how to support your friends and family who are dealing with a traumatic situation.  We should not be ashamed to talk about our mental health.  Most people are dealing with some level of emotional baggage, depression, anxiety and trauma.  Start talking about this openly with people you trust.  When people feel more comfortable talking about these issues, we will literally save lives. 

#5 Women are vastly underrepresented in every level of our society.  

We need more women in positions of power.  We need more women to be leaders of our churches, our community organizations, and in our government.  We need women to be treated with respect, to be paid equally, to be encouraged to reach for the top.  Women tend to be more emotionally intelligent, compassionate and thoughtful.  Part of the reason we have not seen any progress in our society is because we are giving all of our power to men.

As men we need to take opportunities to lift our women up, to encourage them, support them in their ambitions, and to step back when necessary to allow women to lead a conversation.  When we leave out half of our society from nearly every collective conversation our society is having, we will never see progress.

I am very sure that most of these issues are too large to ever be completely resolved in our lifetimes. However, they are all issues that each of us has the power to control in our own lives. We may not be able to change the national dialogue about mental health, women's rights, masculinity, education, or fear, but we can affect our friends, family and our communities by changing the dialogue. 

Have those important conversations with your children and with your family and friends.  When someone needs help be the person who encourages them to talk, and create a space for them to open up to you.  When you see a woman being disrespected or a man being bullied, stand up for them.

We are living in very uncertain times. I still don't have all of the answers to the question I have been asking myself every morning for the several years - What the FUCK is going on? But I do think that we can all make a difference, and that we need to stop waiting for everyone else to solve these problems.

Thank you for reading, and for sharing.

Much Love,

Nicoli Alexander