“Beware of getting hooked,” a trusted friend and colleague advised me when I asked her what to watch out for when I was moving to a new position, a new city, a new life. “You have a tendency to get hooked by people who get under your skin because of the pain they live with which they then inflict on others. It is almost as if you have been captured by them. Beware of that.” Wonderful, wise, and loving advice.
Some thirty years later I still have to work overtime to unhook myself from the psychic attachments I have made to people who drive me crazy. These attachments impair my freedom – my freedom to be me – because I have allowed myself to be so wrapped up in the machinations of someone else. My freedom is particularly impaired these days by the endless ways Donald Trump is literally wresting away freedom from people who are alleged “drug terrorists”, or who are convicted – without any due process – of being criminals by virtue of being in this country at all, or by wresting away the foundations of democracy itself.
I am hooked by Donald Trump. So many of us are, which gives him even more power than what he is illegally claiming for himself, because we have allowed our psyches to be wrapped up in his.
Those of us who feel overwhelmed by the lies, viciousness, corruption, chaos, and incompetence of Donald Trump are not alone in being hooked by him. His most ardent supporters are hooked in a very different but nonetheless destructive way. Blind loyalty, which so many of his supporters demonstrate, and which Trump insists upon, is a form of co-dependence. This kind of loyalty involves surrendering freedom to the whims of the one to whom they are loyal. To hold up a poster or wear a hat that says “Trump is right about everything” is a virtual abdication of personal agency.
It is important to expose how so many of us – supporters and opponents of President Trump alike, are being hooked by him, albeit in different ways. It is critical to uncover his extraordinary degree of narcissism, which he has somehow managed to spread across the country and around the world as a kind of psychic virus, and which can render us spiritually, emotionally and even physically immobile. But if exposing and uncovering Trump’s malevolence becomes our endgame, we end up surrendering even more power to him. And can end up being even more hooked.
To be sure, we need to engage in exposing and uncovering the maelstrom of malice. But we also need to find ways to move through it and beyond it. For a long time I thought that I could find a vaccine that would inoculate me from being hooked. I haven’t found one. I don’t think there is one. And it turns out we don’t need one, because the antidote for being hooked is a trait that has been planted in every one of us.
That trait is hope. Hope is not something we need to find outside of ourselves. It is a gift that has been given to us. Hope is mysteriously and wonderfully folded in with love, which is also a gift bestowed on us. We have the innate capacity to hope and to love, both of which call on our faith to retrieve them. While we typically define faith as an allegiance to a religious practice or set of beliefs, which has certainly guided and grounded me over the years, faith doesn’t need to be aligned with a theological viewpoint, whatever that may be. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews puts it well: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1) Love is an ingredient that we can’t see, and yet cannot live without. Hope is another power that we cannot see, but which we urgently need. Hope is a gift that we need to claim. All of us. Hope is in us. Claiming hope and embracing hope assists us in unhooking our being hooked. Claiming hope by engaging in community support: supporting food pantries or volunteering somewhere where there is need. Claiming hope by baking bread or writing poetry, building a garden – small actions that don’t appear at first glance to make a difference but do.
Claiming hope can set us free – free to resist, free to strategize, free to offer pathways and policies that serve justice and protect democracy.
