I recently wrote about Ariel Leve’s essay in The Guardian in which she said “When facts and truth are being discredited, how is it possible to know what to believe, especially when it comes from someone we expect to embody both ethics and etiquette? To those new to the phenomena,” Leve continues, “the president and the current administration are gaslighting us.”
Underscoring Leve’s view of gaslighting is a strongly worded op-ed on www.teenvogue.com entitled “Donald Trump is Gaslighting America” in which Lauren Duca takes on Trump’s systematic attempts to destabilize the truth and weaken the foundation of American freedom. “At the hands of Trump,” Duca writes, “facts have become interchangeable with opinions, blinding us into arguing amongst ourselves, as our very reality is called into question.”
“To gas light,” Duca writes, “is to psychologically manipulate a person to the point where they question their own sanity, and that’s precisely what Trump is doing to this country. Gas lighting,” Duca continues, “is a buzzy name for a terrifying strategy currently being used to weaken and blind the American electorate.”
Attributing the phrase to the 1944 film “Gas Light,” Duca says that Trump’s rise to power “has awakened a force of bigotry by condoning and encouraging hatred, but also by normalizing deception. Civil rights are now on trial, though before we can fight to reassert the march toward equality, we must regain control of the truth. If that seems melodramatic, I would encourage you to dump a bucket of ice over your head while listening to ‘Duel of the Fates.’ Donald Trump is our President now; it’s time to wake up.”
Leve learned some strategies that helped her survive a childhood in which her reality was constantly denied. She offers some suggestions for a way to stay sane in an insane time:
Remain defiant. When she was about five or six, she wrote a story about running away from home. “When my mother saw that story, she demanded I change it.” Leve writes that her mother said “‘Why would you write this story? It isn’t about me, is it?’ She knew,” Leve says, “it was about her and the chaos at home. I refused to change the story and that defiance was key. Trusting my version of reality. Not allowing it to be altered on demand. Resistance. This anger protected me, because I knew what I knew. It couldn’t be erased. Being defiant does not make you difficult. It makes you resilient.”
Remaining defiant is what the continually growing public protests all across America are about; angry broad-based resistance against the manipulation of American reality and values.
Let go of the wish for things to be different. Leve believes that the wish for things to be different is very powerful and inoculates us to the tumult. “It allows you to continue to believe logic and reason will prevail,” she says. “You want to believe the person will change. You want things to make sense. But they won’t. You want to feel you are on safe ground. You have to let go of this wish. Because things will never make sense. You will never be heard.”
My own thought/wish in this instance is that we, the people, can be heard if we remain defiant in huge numbers. Like the women’s march in Washington the day after election.
Develop healthy detachment. “I became hyper-vigilant about clarity” Leve writes. For her, there was no room for misunderstanding; no margin for error. “I needed certainty in an uncertain world. But we live in an uncertain world, so there has to be a way to find balance. Detaching from the gaslighting does not mean total detachment,” Leve says. “It means distinguishing between the world of the gaslighter and the real world.”
So what can we do to turn our distrust into action? Duca says “…first let’s empower ourselves with information. Insist on fact-checking every Trump statement you read, every headline you share or even relay to a friend over coffee. If you find factual inaccuracies in an article, send an email to the editor, and explain how things should have been clearer. Inform yourself what outlets are trustworthy and which aren’t.”
To that end, communications professor Melissa Zimdars at Merrimack College in North Andover has come up with a list of fake news sites that are shared on Facebook in hopes of helping others stop the spread of disinformation. You can Google “Wikipedia Zimdars” to access this list.
Duca says “refuse to accept information simply because it is fed to you, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. That is now the base level of what is required of all Americans. If facts become a point of debate, the very definition of freedom will be called into question.”
We are living in new, dangerous and uncharted territory. “It is imperative to remember,” Duca concludes, that “across identities and across the aisle, as a country and as individuals, we have nothing without the truth.
John Bos lives in Shelburne Falls. He invites dialogue at john01370@gmail.com.