Disappointment. Frustration. Despair. Rage.
No, I’m not talking about seeing your child’s first graded piece of schoolwork. I’m talking about the different emotions we all feel around the recent national election. I don’t care what your politics are, you are probably feeling badly about something that happened on November 3, 2020.
Lucky for you I am a believer that some good always comes out a bad situation. Greenlights can come out of the redlights and yellowlights of life, or so writes Matthew McConaughey in his surprisingly fun-to-read new book. If we approach these bad situations the right way we can still make things alright, alright, alright.
One way to get to those greenlights is to take your anger and turn it into productive energy. I personally like to think of all the fu@ked up things going on in our beloved USA and focus that energy on those issues.
Here are a few ways I like to turn my political anger into productive action:
- Call Your Health Insurance Provider to Relentlessly Dispute a Bill – You’re in the mood for a fight. Who better to call than your health insurance company? You’ll need your rage to be at an 11 to have the proper amount of energy to go through the 782 steps to actually get the coverage your bloated premiums pay for.
- Don’t Care Too Much About Your Must-Have Pandemic Job Interview – Some people believe the best way to get what you want is to not want it too much. Use how pissed off you are about our broken politics to go into your job interview with 100% determination and zero fear. Don’t give a sh!t if you get the job or not. You’ll probably nail it.
- Construct a Soundproof Booth For Your Kid’s Distance Learning – Go to Home Depot and buy some wood and screws. Build a large box in your basement and surround it with sound proofing. Now you can scroll through Twitter for ballot counting results without hearing your name called 28 times.
- Start Preparing Rebuttals to Your Racist Uncle’s Rants – You’ll never convince your racist Uncle that he’s wrong. The best you can do is win the next argument, and the best way to do that is have statistics from sources like the Pew Research Center and the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. The practice of citing statistics alone makes you an intimidating debater. When you add in sources with long, important-sounding names you put yourself on the glide-path to victory.
- Research a Way to Get Out of Your Student Loan Payments – I’ll be honest…you aren’t going to figure out how to get out of your student loans. It just feels good to think about a way to exact revenge on a predatory financial institution that has been screwing you. Think of it as righteous meditation.
As we move through the rest of this sh!tty, sh!tty year, let’s try to remember to be kind to strangers and patient with our friends and family. Sorry, I mostly thinking of myself there. I picked that up from Donald Trump.
-MG
